Attempting to convey the feeling of ‘destroyed beauty.’
Fans may be interested to know the visual environments of the game they have come to love held a heavy influence over the sound team’s approach when designing the soundscapes that carpet the landscapes. At GDC’s “Sound Design of Gears of War” panel earlier today, Epic Games audio director Mike Larson explained that the sound team wanted to carry over that same overall concept of “destroyed beauty” you see in the art’s direction. In order to accomplish this, they had to make a few decisions early on in regards to the approach they would take.
Early in the sound development, they tried to “take the literal equivalent of that concept,” said Mike, by adding a lot of distortion and static to the sounds — literally breaking down and degrading the sounds — but this “sounded too wrong” upon implementation. Rather than sounding like beauty destroyed, it merely sounded like there was a problem with the sound playback. In the end, Mike Larson et al. decided to limit the sound palette by compiling a few restrictions. Jamey Scott, the primary sound designer on Gears of War, clarified that they were really trying to “transcend [the] limit of technology and become more stylized.”
And the result? Almost all the sounds in Gears of War are organic and not synthesized. There was a pretty strict “no lasers” policy — one exception being the Hammer of Dawn weapon sound, which contains six layers of synthesized sounds (one of which is the processed sound from the motor of a pencil sharpener). Not only that, but most of the sounds come from live recordings and not sound libraries. The sound team definitely made strides to avoid having any sort of generic sounds (and every single sound file had to be signed off by CliffyB himself).
Believe it or not, the monster sounds — the wretches, the berserker, the drones, etc. — are all human vocalizations. They really wanted unique sounding creatures, so a processed pig squeal wasn’t going to hack it. Finally, Mike Larson really wanted to be sure that the “gritty and heavy feeling” of the characters was retained in the sounds, rather than go with a more “controlled and clean sound.”
With this set of rules in mind, the team set out to create a refined and polished package of sounds for Gears, and their success is pretty apparent. The sheer amount of dedication and obsessive tweaking that went into the sound design of this sound heavy (versus music heavy) game comes across as pretty amazing.
Source: gametab.com