Designing Sound for the Centuries in ‘Civilization VII’ – with the Firaxis Sound Team

Since Sid Meier's Civilization was first released in 1991, it's been the benchmark for turn-based 4X-strategy games. With each new release, the game series continues to keep longtime fans engaged and draw in new ones. The newest release, Civilization VII, showcases stunningly detailed graphics and sound, new narration, a new Ages mechanic, new natural wonders to discover, more intimidating natural disasters to contend with, and more! Here, Firaxis sound team members — Kadet Kuhne, Dmytro Nebesh, Dylan Escalona, Evan Galvanek, Jason Buzzell, Joseph Marcus, Eric Phister, Justin Drust, Geoff Knorr, and Roland Rizzo — and Brendan Wolf and Matt Callahan at Injected Senses Audio talk about taking Civ VII's sound to new heights, utlizing the Dolby Atmos surround format, designing new sounds for biomes, cities, units, wonders, and disasters, composing an incredibly diverse collection of music, working with a new in-game narrator: Gwendoline Christie, developing systems for dynamic prioritization and real-time mixing to create seamless audio transitions on zooms, and much, much more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of Firaxis Games

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The winter months have always been considered ‘gaming season’ in our house. The family plays together in open-world survival games or goes off on their own adventure in their game of choice. For me, that’s a turn-based strategy game, and my go-tos are always Civilization and Crusader Kings — there’s just something irresistible about global domination (muahahaha!).

I’ve been an avid fan ever since Civ III, and getting to interview the sound team on the newest release, Civilization VII, is definitely a career highlight — a ‘pinch me because this can’t be real’ kind of moment. The sound team on Firaxis Games Sid Meier’s Civilization VII have graciously shared their insights on what it took to craft this game’s superb sonic experience. Here, they discuss their approach to honoring the past while embracing the new, utilizing Dolby Atmos to heighten immersion, designing sounds for vibrant and varied biomes, conceptualizing sound for bustling ancient cities, making natural disasters sound intense (and devestating), creating sonic clarity for multiple combat units, composing incredibly diverse music, working with a new in-game narrator: Gwendoline Christie, defining how the mix should respond to zoom levels and developing systems for dynamic prioritization and real-time mixing to create seamless audio transitions on zooms, and much, much more!

Joining the Q&A from Firaxis Games are:

Senior Project Audio Lead Kadet Kuhne, Sound Designers Dmytro Nebesh and Dylan Escalona, Technical Sound Designer Evan Galvanek, Audio Programmers Jason Buzzell, Joseph Marcus, and Eric Phister, Studio Audio Director Justin Drust, and In-Game Music composers Geoff Knorr and Roland Rizzo. We also have Sound Designers Brendan Wolf and Matt Callahan at Injected Senses Audio.

Civilization 7 – Official Reveal Trailer

What sounds did you want to update for Civilization VII? How did you want to honor what’s come before in the beloved Civilization franchise?

Kadet Kuhne

Kadet Kuhne (KK): Sound has always been integral to Civilization, but in Civilization VII we’ve taken it to new heights through honoring the past and embracing the new. The driving force throughout our development process was to make Civilization VII sound historically authentic and dynamically responsive to players’ choices, bringing sound to the forefront of the experience to enhance the gameplay and immerse players in the world of their chosen civilization like never before.

Compared to past Civilization games, we increased the sound design details to make sure each civilization has its own unique identity. Through extensive research this was applied to Unit weapons, ancient architecture, geography of Natural Wonders, distinct cultural expressions, and traditional instrumentation for music. This additional detail gives players a deeper sense of the intricate civilizations they construct and battle within at every turn.

For prominent gameplay UI features, such as Notifications, Abilities and Unit Selects, our sound design team spent countless hours listening to past Civ sounds to determine which branded elements to preserve with a refresh, and which ones to clarify the meanings of through new designs. While staying true to the character of all Civilization games we stripped some of the synthesis and heavy layering, leaning more toward organic, natural source material. As an example, this effort resulted in updating nearly all of our game’s 80+ notifications across 20 key categories, such as Attributes, Crisis, Diplomacy, Religion, Units, Multiplayer, and Victories – which plays an impactful role in clearly communicating key gameplay information.

Dmytro Nebesh

Dmytro Nebesh (DN): Some of the sounds I updated were mostly in the UI realm. There is a famous Civ V Wonder failed sound, and it haunts every player to this day. We thought it was an awesome design so we created a newer version with cleaner samples but still kept the same harmonic language everyone remembers, featuring the iconic horns lowering in pitch with that same iconic drum hit.

The Tech and Civic Unlocked sounds are designed in a similar way to the Civ VI sounds, keeping that sense of reward and acting as a nice popup for the player. Meanwhile, the Unit Death notification should also be pretty familiar to players, as we liked how clear that notification was in Civilization VI but wanted to update the speed of it. Recreating this sound was a lot of fun, especially finding our bell sample that was most likely used in Civilization VI.

Dylan Escalona

One completely new category we added was different Tech Discovered sounds based on what age you’re playing to help support the brand new ages system. The menu for interacting with other leaders was a fun one to design sound for. There was a new Diplomacy system created and the Design team categorized it really easily for us. I thought it would be effective to have a sneaky sound play when you decide to go into espionage. This led to the approach I used to create the rest of this UI sound set, just clear tonalities and language that represents the category of action – whether it is a harp sound playing some classic augmented harmonies or a snare drum to represent treaty diplomacy actions.

Dylan Escalona (DE): One of the requests for Civ VII was to take a more realistic approach than Civ VI. We have a very different perspective than most of the games out there which makes creating a soundscape that feels natural quite challenging. For it to feel “real,” we would probably not hear most of the details, so we went with a hyper reality approach. Sonic details and attenuations were not mixed on a realistic scale, but they are coherent with each other and that gives a kind of realistic impression.

Brendan Wolf

Brendan Wolf (BW): One of our favorite additions to Civ VII was all the new airplane sounds in the Modern age. We had an absolute blast automating engine and flyby pitch to nail the elaborate attack and defend animations on Fighter planes. Fun fact, the Heavy Bomber’s carpet bomb whistles are actually my own whistles pitched up five semitones with Phase Distortion and a narrow bandpassed EQ between 240 – 2150 Hz since I couldn’t find any clean source for the WW2 B-17 Flying Fortress.
 

The game has many repeatable sounds based on player actions – like building improvements, moving units to new tiles, and the UI sounds, such as the Tech and Civic Trees, etc. What went into some of these sounds? Overall, any suggestions or advice on making quick, repetitive sounds like these?

DE: We used a lot of tricks to deal with the repetitiveness through the creation, implementation, and mix phases. When creating sounds for Units, for example, we made a conscious effort to have extra variations when the action can be used a lot. When implementing the audio assets we used instance limiting, prioritization, and attenuations to ensure the player only hears what is important to avoid listening fatigue. For mixing, we used a lot of sidechaining to lower sounds over time so you hear it at full volume when initiating the action, then lowering the volume over time to not be the center of attention while still active.

The idea for the new Tech and Civic select sounds was to break the monotony of the sounds through adding bespoke elements to each one, adding meaning but also variety instead of always triggering the same sound. We started by going for a shared approach, having a few categories of sound that we could group for Tech and Civic. We liked the result but the issue was that some of those categories were used too often and some were only used once. In the end, we designed them in two parts, each with a shared asset at the start, and then a unique layer for storytelling, all with similar timing.

An Antiquity Civic that can be selected in the Civic Tree

Tech was for the most part fairly straightforward as it has familiar concepts: combustion motor sounds, flight plane sounds, agriculture cow, etc. They kind of always start with the process or the research of the technology and then the realisation of the technology. But for Civic it wasn’t as easy as most of the concepts are more abstract and don’t really exist as an object or tool in our world. I like the example of “how does philosophy sound?”

KK: The two key principles that guided our decisions when designing repeatedly triggered sounds were Repetitive Tolerance and Signal Level. For UI, we first looked at gameplay hierarchies and mapped out sound design systems based on questions like: where and how often does the sound get triggered? How often will the sound be heard? How vital is it to gameplay?

These UI/UX systems strategies helped us guide our sound design decisions. For example: for our global confirm “Hero” sound, we wanted to offer a more embellished design than a simple, tactile click that would also complement the gold metal, but it needed to hold up to repetitive playback. To do so, we kept the length short and complex tonal content to a minimum, and instead designed a lower frequency punchy hit with a subtle high frequency layer so it would cut through the mix and be noticeable and rewarding. With this, the “signal” level is higher to convey a confirmation message and feeling, but it’s easy to listen to repeatedly.

We approached all UI sound design with the same approach, defining where we could go with more complex layering and broad frequency or tonal content, and where to stay minimal with tactile, foley-based sounds that match our game’s naturalistic visual style. Also, the same pattern of shared plus bespoke per sound used on the Tech and Civic Trees to break up repetition was applied to many categories of UI, such as Building placements, Narrative Reward Popups, and Town Focus Selects.

Religion UI Panel during the Exploration Age

Frequency content, complexity of designs, length of designs, pitch relationships within sounds and features, and mix levels were all intentionally crafted to indicate gameplay meaning and importance without becoming fatiguing in repetition. How these principles and approaches were applied to repetitive movements with Units also included having a broad frequency spectrum in the designs themselves. Ultimately, this ensures that when the unpredictable blend of the player’s choices lands on the map at once, the weapons, Unit terrain traverses, apparel movements, etc. are enjoyable to listen to over long durations.

Even with randomizing pitches, EQing, sidechaning, and other implementation strategies, it’s important to consider where your frequencies are piling up in your individual assets or across categories before they enter the overall soundscape. The choice behind some of our apparel designs were made to sit in slightly different ranges from the various footstep categories, as a small example — but it all adds up. More prominent examples are the wide range of frequencies and design content of our Unit spawns, engages (contact between Units when melee combat begins), movements, idle selects, and weapon foley — some of which sit very dynamic in the mix. Having a broad palette helps create clarity within complex, dense environments.

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Populated Cities

What went into the sounds for creating improvements and buildings? For creating military units? For scouts? What about movement sounds for the different units?

DE: All the different civilizations have their own Units and buildings, and, of course, historical accuracy was always aimed for but some creative choices and educated guesses are necessary for things like weapons due to a lack of documentation on how they would have sounded throughout history. It’s the same with buildings. For some Mayan, ancient Greece and ancient Rome unique structures, it was pretty difficult to find any information about how those places were used and how they would have sounded.

Units can have up to 12 members, and they all have their own animations, so Unit creation meant balancing how much can we share, how much needs to be custom, and how much detail might be too much. Finding the balance was one of the bigger challenges. Improvements and buildings follow the same logic. Because we can have so many of them on screen, we could not create extremely rich designs for them but they still needed to sound cool, unique, add to the personality of your towns, and be as culturally appropriate as possible. For most of them we primarily used the following structure:

Building Ambience Wwise Structure

There are a few random containers playing some oneshots, usually up to four per building/improvement; they can be hammer hits for the blacksmith, animal sounds for the farms, or nature sounds on gardens. We included one loop if really necessary (such as the arena which has a custom cheering loop), but we tended to avoid them as much as possible for repetitive tolerance and also for performance.

Matt Callahan (MC): For the military Units with many characters, keeping things readable to the player and not overwhelming was a big goal, especially with movement and continuous combat happening often. Instance limiting was a big help there. Also, making Scout Units (which typically only have one or two characters) sound just as important as an entire military squadron was also a challenge.

Evan Galvanek

Evan Galvanek (EG): Concurrent Events was a key feature for developing the sound of Units. Each Unit member can post their representative footstep audio via animation timelines which is a pretty typical implementation. But now multiply this by 10 Unit members navigating across various terrains who can be marching in a synchronized military formation, and multiply it once again for Units of the same type that may be moving simultaneously! The mix can easily become cacophonous and a prioritization challenge. A custom solution was needed to realize the desired design behaviors. That’s where ‘Concurrent Events’ was conceived — a Unit-scoped Wwise Event callback system that relays the number of active events through an RTPC. This value was used to plot initial delay curves within Wwise, effectively staggering the playback so each event can be perceivable. Essentially, audio events queued by concurrency can have their playback delayed via RTPC curves.

DN: All of these categories involved some pretty cool, detailed sounds. For improvements and buildings, we made ambiences for each one of them, which involved a lot of research, such as what sounds would we expect to hear in a claypit or an altar. We wanted it to breathe ambient life into the world so you could slowly feel your civilization getting more populated, even if certain sounds would only be heard as if you were inside the building. Getting that definition and readability was vital for our ambient system. There are a lot of cool little sound nuggets hidden all over the ambiences that players are slowly finding, like the Emile Bell being struck if you zoom in and just listen to it.

Scouts involved some fun sound designing. I started work on the Scout Dog a while back and shared it with the wider team, and a member from the Unit’s team, Erika Ward, asked if we could record her dog. Her dog Kaiya Bear Gilchrist was trained to bark on command, so we got her in our foley room and proceeded with a pretty fun recording session. In the game credits, we made sure to include Kaiya’s excellent voice acting work!

Remember to pet your Scout Dog in Civilization VII

Military Units had some pretty interesting things to handle, like all the different movement systems. Footsteps quickly got crowded, so we built the Event Staggering System (the Concurrent Events setup mentioned above) to create natural sounding footsteps, while also having them tied perfectly to smaller Units like the Scouts. Footstep sounds vary across our usual terrains such as dirt, grass, and sand, and change if it is hilly, vegetated, or wet. Once we nailed the footsteps, we added a shared foley system with short and very short samples of different apparels attached to each individual Unit member. This system became super useful when we decided to add foley to Unit idles. Once we nailed the feel of the Unit moving with foley and footsteps combined, we went a step further and added weapon movement foley based on the type and material — for example, wooden creaks for early rifles, heavier metallic sounds for WWII-era weapons. So essentially, all of our bipedal Units could have up to three sounds playing during their movement cycle, and along with our custom Event Staggering System we were able to successfully avoid a cacophony of sounds.

Our audio engineers introduced continuous triggers which ended up helping us on more than just Unit movement sounds

Movement sounds were also tricky for our vehicles. A situation we wanted to avoid was orphaned loops, which was an audio bug we had at the start of the project. Essentially, if you started a looping movement sound on let’s say a tank, moved your camera out of the way where you couldn’t see the tank and then went back to the tank, you wouldn’t get the stop loop trigger and the sound would loop indefinitely. Our audio engineers introduced continuous triggers which ended up helping us on more than just Unit movement sounds. For example, death animations on vehicles can last a decent amount of time, especially sinking ships. Continuous triggers allow us to move the camera away from the Unit really fast, come back to the animation, and hear the rest of the SFX. They are also super helpful for our machine guns; providing the ability to have one animation trigger handle the start and stop of an audio loop for guns is a huge time saver.

BW: Building improvements and ambiences were achieved by a combination of looped walla (non-culturally specific) and a random container of geographic-specific fauna sounds. There’s 3-5 one shot variations and randomized playback delay times to avoid ear fatigue on the gameplay ambiences, human/animal vocalized expressions, and foley sounds.

For military bipedal Units, we focused on the small foley details specific to their weapons or accessories – like the Soldederas’ revolvers have hammercocks and gun shakes that I got by recording from my Colt single action 45 nickel pellet pistol revolver airgun I just happened to have in my closet (never thought I’d get a chance to put that into a game)!

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Continuous Combat

What went into the sounds for combat?

KK: One of the most exciting features in Civ VII is the revamped combat system, making battles feel more alive and rewarding. From the clashing of swords to the roar of gunfire, combat engages at a noticeably responsive pace, and the sound reacts accordingly, creating a more visceral experience for players. One of our core priorities in Civ VII was enhancing the tangible sense of progress and satisfaction you experience through your actions in the game.

Jason Buzzell

Jason Buzzell (JB): There are a lot of different types of combat in Civ VII, but one of the new forms is Continuous Combat, where the Units continue fighting until the next turn. This results in a lot of complications for audio, such as dealing with every member of the two Units making a ton of sound on a portion of the viewable map.

This also introduces a new feature, the Continuous Trigger, which helps keep audio tied to animations in-line while the player is navigating the world map. In order to save computational resources, we stop animations when they aren’t in sight anymore, and do the same with audio (instead of just ducking it). When the Unit is brought back on screen, the continuous trigger starts the audio back up again, seeking to the time the animation has jumped to.

DE: Combat for Civ VII was quite a challenge. Going from a few seconds of action in Civ VI to our full turn Continuous Combat system is a really nice system for visuals, but quite complicated for audio at the creation and mix levels. It took a lot of iteration and tweaks to get to a system we were happy with:

1. We started with just creating sound for the animation and put them in game (it sounded okay but was really tiring).

2. We added an “engage” sound when the combat started. It did help a lot to give more dynamics to the mix at the start of combat, but we were still not happy with the continuous part because we wanted it at the same level at the start but lower later.

3. Engineering gave us an RTPC that let us control the volume of the continuous part over time after the start of the combat, and we landed on lowering that part by 10 dB over 24 seconds.

4. To that you need to add the same system to the projectiles, the hit reaction (damage reaction), exertion, foley… everything related to the Unit.

5. On top of that, most actions that a player can make lower the continuous part by sidechaining, so the combat starts as the focal point ends up blending into the overall game soundscape.

An Exploration Age Siege Unit

DN: Countless hours were spent setting up multiple Units to attack each other, then going through a regular turn to see if we got annoyed by the time we hit the end turn button. For ranged weapons we got a nice break since those sounds are not continuous, which let us design more in a traditional Civ combat cinematic way. The siege Units had loads of fun animations to attach to, and were some of the team’s favorites to work on, such as creating awesome explosions or working on complex wooden contraptions such as the Catapult, Trebuchet, and the amazing looking Bombard from the Exploration Age.

Speaking of explosions, we had a super helpful shared impact system made in collaboration with the VFX team. Different impacts based on size and terrain was a joy to work on. This is the same system we used for smaller impacts such as arrows, which were very tricky to nail sonically since most of the time the impacts would happen simultaneously. We ended up borrowing our concurrent event system that we used for Unit movement, and attached it to arrow impacts so we could get it to stagger when needed. This was such a rewarding system to design and really helped our ranged combat feel more impactful. Also, we made buckets of variations for weapons to avoid phasing issues which guaranteed sounds to play nicely with each other when in combat, for example with gunshots and Ballistas.

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Different Biomes

What went into creating the ‘zoomed-in’ sound for different land areas, from cities to pastures to deserts to water, and so on?

DN: It was difficult to try and think of what civilizations may have sounded like before civilization actually began. Creating environments pre-industrialization without all the modern noises was very tricky. Initially we tried making our environments with only wind, which sounded really lifeless so we implemented tons of wildlife to the soundscape. Animals and subtle bush movement recordings (used for tree rustlings) and other subtle plant movements were vital for keeping the ambience lively. Once we had a bunch of different sound assets, we chopped them up into blend containers so we could have random oneshots coming from the environment combined with a consistent 4.0 ambience bed. Usually the game is played with music on, but we needed to make sure the environmental ambience could stand on its own without music.

‘Civ’s’ Altitude Wind recordings captured in desert near Las Vegas

The high altitude layer took a long time to get just right. I remember the feedback on my first pass being “it sounds a little too cold.” It sounded abandoned, lifeless, and like it came from a library recording of a mountain (which, it did). So I set out to get more subtle large wind movements rather than designing the usual fast wind passing by at a high pitch. This really helped to create an experience of being far away from the map without actually hitting players with annoying high-pitched white noise. Careful filtering was done on these SFX to make sure they sat just right and were able to blend in with everything else going on in game.

Matt Callahan

One of my favorite biomes to design for was the desert, as it relied on a lot of cool cicada sounds and occasional coyote barks. But my favorite moment was getting that main wind loop. I was going to Vegas for a party and I thought it would be cool to go hiking with a friend to try and capture some natural desert ambience. We got there around 5:30PM and were warned that once nightfall came it would be freezing and difficult to get a ride back to the city.

We ended up stranded in the desert while trying to get a phone signal. It was freezing but eventually I got service. Valuable lessons were learned, but it was worth getting some high quality wind recordings with no car noises.

MC: The zoomed-in sounds were so much fun to do because it allowed us to actually imagine what you would hear in that place, like an 18th-century pastoral meadow, or a bustling Roman city. The goal was to keep things distinct while not contributing to the large amount of sounds in the game that could be happening simultaneously at any given time.

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Angkor Wat Wonder

What went into the sounds for the animations when a player creates a World Wonder?

DE: The sound for World Wonders is more complex than you may think. To get them to work as intended we had to rely on multiple systems. On the creation side we designed the ambience for the actual Wonder itself. For every culturally important feature of our game we tried our best to represent it as accurately as possible. Most of the Antiquity Wonders don’t have a lot of literature for how they would have sounded or been used in those eras, but we always tried to respect the civilization that built them.

Nalanda Wonder model, Maghadan Antiquity age

Once we have the ambience for the Wonders, we have the reveal animation. Most of those sounds are shared and reused. The low impact progression for each step – the iconic stacking sound of the Wonder reveals – were created by one of our composers, Roland Rizzo, as well as most of the different celebration VFX sounds (fireworks, lanterns, flower pedals, etc.). A short music piece is composed for each Wonder along with unique narrator quotes, giving them more personality and making them as culturally appropriate as possible.

Oracle Wonder model, Greek Antiquity age

Once the reveal is complete we keep the unique Wonder ambience playing until the player chooses to move on. Those animations gave us an opportunity to showcase the sound design, which we had to create some interesting mix systems to really emphasize it. We created a Wonder state system that gave us full control of the game mix to lower or mute every unwanted sound to predominantly hear the Wonder we completed during the reveal.

MC: The goal here was to inspire that sense of grandeur when a Wonder is completed. We designed it to make things sound larger than life and to accompany the wonderful VFX and narration. This design direction allowed players to feel accomplished with what their civilization had constructed.

Civilization VII – Natural Disaster: Thunderstorm

What went into the sound of the natural disasters?

DN: The natural disaster sounds gave us the opportunity to show off our tech along with some cool design ideas. My favorite design to work on was the thunderstorm, having different sounds playing depending on zoom level along with adding some delay to the timed thunderstrike was loads of fun to design. We also put in some more abstract sounds for some of the natural disasters like the blizzard. You might hear some classic reverse bell sounds in there to help exaggerate the frozen power of a blizzard.

Civilization VII – Natural Disaster: Blizzard

JB: The sounds for the various natural disasters, such as blizzards or tornadoes, also have a new system to support it. The audio now directly hooks up to the VFX, instead of an animation that controls both the SFX and VFX, which allows for non-linear playback. Through this system, audio designers can now make sounds for the exact element they want, such as timing lightning sounds right when the lightning bolt strikes. They also have the correct game location to emit the sound from, so you can hear the lightning strikes on a singular tile to your right or left, or with a Dolby Atmos setup, striking down from above.

Civilization 7 – Official Narrator Reveal Trailer (ft. Gwendoline Christie)

The new in-game narrator is Gwendoline Christie! Can you talk about your collaboration with her, and creating new narration content, such as for the Tech and Civic discoveries, Natural Wonders discoveries, and World wonders?

Justin Drust

Justin Drust (JD): It was an absolute privilege to work with Gwendoline Christie as the narrator for Civilization VII. We knew we needed a strong voice to follow in the footsteps of past Civ narrators, and Gwendoline was the perfect choice. She brought not just her incredible voice, with that perfect blend of gravitas, warmth, and mystery, but also a deep passion for history! Gwendoline would frequently ask our historians to provide more context around the written lines, genuinely wanting to understand the stories behind each, while also ensuring that she understood the intent, and shaped her performance to match. It was incredible to watch her work! Her reads are full of personality – sometimes serious, sometimes playful, always emotionally grounded.

Early on we considered using different narrators for each Age, but her range and presence made it clear she could carry the whole journey through the Ages. I believe Gwendoline elevated the narration for everything from Tech and Civic quotes to the awe of discovering Natural and World Wonders. Whether it’s the Grand Canyon or the Hagia Sophia, Gwendoline makes you feel like you’ve uncovered something truly monumental. Gwendoline didn’t just read the lines, she brought them to life, and helped turn those moments into something truly special. Not to mention she played a huge role in the live action narrator reveal trailer.

Grand Canyon Natural Wonder

Our approach to representing our Leaders through voice was focused on bringing their personalities and histories to life as authentically as possible, while still striking a balance between history and historically-informed creativity. We worked closely with our partners at Formosa & 2K to cast voice actors who could not only reflect the culture and time period of each leader, but who could also embody their unique voice and speak via their spoken language, where appropriate.

It’s not only about sounding authentic, it’s about capturing the character’s worldview and making every line feel intentional

The process was highly collaborative. We worked closely with various actors, subject matter experts, and historians to fine-tune scripts, pronunciation, tone, and delivery. It’s not only about sounding authentic, it’s about capturing the character’s worldview and making every line feel intentional. These performances help shape how players connect with our various Leaders, and give each civilization its own distinct identity on the world stage.

Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the Age Select screen

For a more in-depth look into our Leader Voice Over process for Civilization VII – our developers hosted a wonderful talk at GDC 2025 which can be found via the GDC Vault.

FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague recording in Dvořák Hall, Rudolfinum in Prague, Czech Republic

What went into composing the music for Civ VII?

Geoff Knorr

Geoff Knorr (GK): The soundtrack for Civ VII was a massive team effort that incorporates musicians, instruments, and musical styles/traditions from each of the civilizations in the game. It’s an incredibly diverse collection of music that serves as an introduction to the various musical traditions throughout the world and history. We’ve arranged existing songs or melodies for each of the Civ themes when musical material from the civilization still exists. The process of selecting and arranging these existing songs required an extensive amount of research and listening. In cases where there is no surviving musical material, we composed original themes that are inspired from instruments and musical styles in the surrounding regions or civilizations that came from the region later in history. Sometimes, the musicians we recorded were also able to offer fitting suggestions that tie into the historical civilization.

We had to be flexible and adjust our approach when working with each of the performers featured on the soundtrack. Some of the musicians work purely by ear while others read staff music notation. Others, such as the koto player, Masayo Ishigure, translated the staff notation to an alternate Japanese music notation that she was more comfortable reading during the session.

many musical traditions do not use a 12-tone equal temperament tuning system like what we are used to with Western classical music and most popular music

Also, many musical traditions do not use a 12-tone equal temperament tuning system like what we are used to with Western classical music and most popular music, so figuring out how to incorporate those alternate tuning systems when possible was a challenge. Sometimes it involved adjusting the arrangement to make sure certain unisons are avoided, and sometimes it required some fine-tuning and minor pitch shifting during the final music edit and mix stage to make sure everything matched well in the final mix.

But before any of those challenges came up, simply finding the performers and scheduling all of the recording sessions was a monumental task in itself! The soundtrack features over 300 musicians recorded all over the world, from a Mongolian ensemble halfway around the world in Ulannbaatar, Mongolia, to colonial style rope snare drummers right here in Maryland. Finding and recording the right musicians for each of the unique styles was essential in making sure each theme stands on its own amongst the other themes, and that each theme accurately gives a sense of the actual musical tradition from its real-world counterpart.

Recording members of the State Morin Khuur Ensemble at White Arch Studios, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

Of course, another essential element of the soundtrack is the main theme. We were very happy to be able to work with Christopher Tin again for the opening cinematic underscore and main menu theme.

Ensemble I Fedeli recording at Martinskirche Müllheim, Germany

The music carries the player through different ages and stages (building and combat) of the game. Anything to mention about the music system for the game?

Roland Rizzo

Roland Rizzo (RR): The music in the game is written specifically for the three different Age modules: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Whenever possible, traditional or folk tunes were used to help keep the player immersed in the culture. Instruments and performers from different cultures were recorded to make the music as authentic as possible. The Antiquity age is the beginning of civilization, and the music is the oldest sounding. It’s not really primitive or simple, but uses the oldest wind, string, and percussion sounds possible. The Exploration period is mostly the Renaissance era and uses instruments of that period (viols, lutes, recorders, early oboes, bassoons, valveless trumpets, and trombones). The music was recorded by an early music ensemble using period instruments. The Modern era is all orchestral pieces with culturally specific instruments mixed in, where appropriate. These pieces were recorded in Prague by the excellent FILMharmonic Orchestra experienced in game and movie soundtracks.

GK: To set the general tone for the world in the game, alongside the themes for each of the civilizations there is also ambient music for each of the three ages that corresponds to a state of peace or war. These ambient themes use instrumentation that generally comes from the corresponding time periods, from lyres and flutes in the age of antiquity, the renaissance ensemble I Fedeli in the exploration age, and the FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague in the modern age.

What were some of your creative challenges in terms of sound for Civ VII?

DN: There were many creative challenges in Civilization VII. The aesthetic of Civilization VII went for a more readable realism aesthetic compared to Civilization VI, so we tried to see what other 4X games have done in terms of sound aesthetics. We noticed most 4X games were inspired by the sound of Civilization VI, which presented a massive challenge. We had to push the sound aesthetics of not just the Civilization franchise, but of strategy games. We started to look at other genres of games, including a lot of historical battle simulators and historical documentaries to see if we could create these very punchy, realistic sounds.

I leaned more into tight transients with mechanical snap sounds instead of designing a beefy gun sound with a kick drum layer

When I first started designing the Flinlock SFX, I was focused on making what I thought would match a Civilization VI sound. I remember someone telling me on the team that we had to be better than Civilization VI and that’s when I started to search videos of people firing flintlock weapons — the process of loading it, and what types of sounds would make sense with that weapon. I leaned more into tight transients with mechanical snap sounds instead of designing a beefy gun sound with a kick drum layer. I also leaned more into sand to create a gunfire layer. The goal was creating a snappy, punchy and historically accurate rifle for players. These kinds of changes help us stand out sonically from Civilization VI.

We also recognized how much effort goes into making sure the Unit models are authentic and were compelled to do the same for our audio assets. One of those Units was the Katyusha, nicknamed “Stalin’s Organ,” because of its harrowing sound. It was hard to find any examples of the sound in high quality, so I spent time listening to rockets being fired on the internet. I first tried to capture the screech the rockets made by having our audio engineer, Jason Buzzell, scream into a microphone along with Carter Deken, our Audio QA. It was close but it still needed to sound like it was launching those screams, so I slowed down a bunch of elephant sounds, distorted more screams and shoved in some firework tails. That ended up making a pretty good iconic tail for the Katyusha.

I remember when working on animals being shocked by how many make terrifying noises, like the elk and fox

A huge challenge that came up often throughout the project is historical accuracy versus audience expectation. There have been decades of media centered around history, and that media ends up creating an expectation for the audience. Those expectations are in our own design mind, and it doesn’t usually sound the same in the real world. I remember when working on animals being shocked by how many make terrifying noises, like the elk and fox. If you live in Maryland, chances are you know about the scary fox scream. I remember asking my colleagues if we should have those sounds or not. In the end, we did put them in the game, just at a low probability rate. Animals often make some surprisingly creepy weird noises compared to how cute they can look.

That being said, expectations in ambiences are still important to represent. You can easily decide what any of the buildings in Civilization should sound like based on your own expectations. Sometimes it is a good idea to just think of generic school house sounds to match players’ expectations. But for more Civ specific opinions, I would reach out to our historian Andrew Johnson. I would have one idea of a sound in my head and although I had one idea of a sound in my head, I was told that there are other things happening in that building that I should consider. As an example, for the Casa De Contratación, Andrew helped me think about the papers being signed, the money being transferred and what business might be happening in the building. It helped me get to the correct ambience faster when I spent the time asking the Narrative team questions about these historical buildings.

Xunleichong Unit weapon

BW: Having the privilege of honoring historical weapons was an incredibly fun challenge. The Xunleichong Unit was my favorite as it used a brutal weapon from the 16th century that combines a detachable spear, a five-barreled rotating musket, and a gun rest that’ a double-sided axe all held together with a removable shield. It really blew my mind that this is a historically accurate weapon actually used in warfare! I made sure to give kudos to the animators who came up with fantastic animations showing off the various ways it could be used in combat. With no real-life replica, I had a blank canvas to run wild creatively and I really loved the entire process.

KK: Central to Civilization VII games is a complex UI design system that was designed to pay homage to Civ VI, but look more naturalistic and tactile – with visual references to old academia, museums, and board games played for centuries. A huge creative challenge was designing an entirely new palette of sounds for the “physical” UI buttons that aligned with those references as well as the new minimal and elegant visual style.

Trojan War chess set recorded for UI button source (bought in Turkey, near Troy!)

Overall, with the quality of the source materials (e.g. bespoke sound recordings of a metal and marble chess set as source), and the intentionality behind the UI sound design language/meaning, our aim was to complement the elegant visual style guide that features precious materials such as wood, metal, and leather, to create a warm, naturalistic, and contemporary Civilization VII look and feel.

Another creative challenge was guiding the historically grounded sound design to be inclusive and representative of all members of our civilizations. One aspect involved sourcing vocal content for character expressions to represent cultural variation within our game; sound effect libraries wouldn’t suffice. After working with our historians and studying linguistic variation in vocal expressions (e.g. exertions and hit reacts), we hired a diverse pool of talent fluent in key world languages (e.g. Farsi, Hindi, Mandarin) to capture these distinctions and bring the civilizations further to life. We recorded combat exertions, yells, hit reactions, screams, and death reactions, etc. – and went even further, recording gibberish in various languages to create a sort of “Civlish” for many character idle animations.

Since including walla for every civilization would have been a massive (nearly impossible) undertaking, we utilized the gibberish recordings to design walla for city centers

Since including walla for every civilization would have been a massive (nearly impossible) undertaking, we utilized the gibberish recordings to design walla for city centers. For each new Palace or City Hall, we custom-designed what we call our “Cultural Walla” using beds of linguistically varied gibberish, then processed them with granular synthesis to generate different crowd sizes and further avoid recognizability. We then layered in some SFX library walla from various languages to create light, medium, and large crowd loops. This became not only an efficient way to respond to the population growth of each city center with an internationally inclusive design, it also saved significant time and resources for implementation, optimization, and ultimately performance – which is key when shipping across multiple platforms. Some unique buildings do have walla that match the civilization’s language, but only when we’re confident the words are indecipherable and contextually appropriate.

In addition to cultural linguistic diversity, it was important to include gender diversity. As an audio specialist with a couple decades in games and film, I’ve long noticed how libraries skew masculine, especially for combat and action. Fortunately, alongside our linguistic efforts, we were able to gather a large amount of material from our diversely gendered voice talent. Using this source and some library recordings, we successfully represented gender variation across the game – on the battlefield (combat exertions, hit reacts, yells, screams, death reacts), in buildings, ships, taverns, win/lose screens, wonders, and even in notifications (Religion Created, District Attacked, Crisis Revolt, Plague Outbreak), or when clicking on UI elements (Civic Tree: Society, Social Question, Democracy). It was worth the extra effort so that all players hear their civs with this vocal range, and also hear themselves in our game.

GK: For the music, making sure each of the civilization themes accurately gives a sense of the underlying musical traditions was a massive challenge. It involved a lot of listening, research, studying, and working directly with musicians who are experts in each of the styles. Sometimes we ended up with a number of possibilities on what to arrange for a given civ theme, and the challenge was narrowing it down to what will work best in the game.
 

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Challenges of Scale

What were some of your technical challenges in terms of sound for Civ VII?

Joe Marcus

Joe Marcus (JM): The biggest technical challenge in delivering the sound for Civ VII was the problem of scale. The goal of the sound designers was to make the audio as rich and immersive as the new artwork. This meant a very large number of audio emitters to cover all of the different models and animations in the game.

Most traditional video games have levels and/or large sections of maps where unique assets can be streamed in and out at obvious times. In a game of Civ, you can have a map that contains the entire game’s worth of assets at one time, and they can all be seen and heard in quick succession. Processing all of these sound assets at once put a strain on the CPU, so we needed a strategy to keep the audio system’s CPU usage low.

To limit CPU, we started with a simple fact: the fewer sounds that are playing at once, the fewer CPU cycles are going to be spent processing audio. Our first attempt was to use Wwise’s virtual voice system to stop and start audio emitters based on distance to the listener. Unfortunately, given the huge number of sounds, CPU usage didn’t drop enough even with Wwise’s lightest virtualization settings. This led us to the actual solution of making a system on the engine side to preempt Wwise’s calculations for virtualization altogether.

given the huge number of sounds, CPU usage didn’t drop enough even with Wwise’s lightest virtualization settings

Our engine side system wound up being a priority system for the 3D ambient sounds in the game. These are the sounds attached to Buildings, Resources, and other features that hang out on the map and continuously loop. Assets to which these sounds are attached are given an initial priority, and that priority number is then periodically updated as a function of the distance to the listener. The assets are then sorted in priority order, and a specified number of top assets will have their play requests sent to Wwise. The number of top assets differs by platform, with higher performance platforms allowing for more sound. Any assets that don’t make the cut will have their sounds stopped, and then started again if they ever get close enough. By handling all of this on the engine side, we are able to avoid Wwise’s heavier calculations for virtualization.

Audio priority levels of 3D ambient sounds on a crowded map

One other interesting challenge involved the concept of map wrapping. In a game of Civ, when the player moves the camera to the easternmost or westernmost point on the map, it will wind up on the opposite side. This is similar to a game of Pac Man – when he exits one side of the maze, he reappears on the other. The problem that this causes in Civ is if the camera is close to the border where the map wraps, assets that are just on the other side of the border will report far away positions even though they are visible. This would mean they either wouldn’t play, or would be panned to the wrong side.

We introduced a secondary listener that lives exactly one map length away from the primary one

There are many ways to solve this problem, but the solution we came up with was fun. We introduced a secondary listener that lives exactly one map length away from the primary one. As the primary listener moves toward the east edge from the west, for example, the secondary listener will move from outside of the map toward the west edge from the east. It will now be able to pick up objects that are emitting from just over the map wrapping border from the primary listener. When the primary listener crosses the midpoint of the map, we jump the secondary listener from one side to the other, so it is always moving toward the correct border from the correct direction.

JB: Early on, Audio Engineering moved forward with setting up EBP (Event-Based Packaging) for Civ VII. One of the major reasons this was done was because of the indeterminate variety of Units and buildings that could be loaded in by the player at any point, often without rhyme or reason, which made separating sounds into individual soundbanks very difficult. Therefore, with a lot of elbow grease, we put together a system that loads in almost all sounds “on-demand,” and only using the exact amount of memory we need at a given time. Of course, there are drawbacks from this process. Large changelists full of small files, a lot of head-scratching when interfacing with Wwise and performing all of these custom commands, on and on. But I think the system works intuitively well with how other assets get loaded into the game, so I have no qualms at all.

Eric Phister

Eric Phister (EP): One technical challenge in Civ VII audio was ironing out the bank generation pipeline. It took a lot of work and several rewrites to get the pipeline in shape for shipping the Base game while simultaneously setting us up for future DLC content. Earlier on, we studied the existing pipeline and saw that it was putting every media file into its own bank. Over time this choice would become increasingly more difficult to manage, so we decided to build our banks 1-to-1 with each of the Wwise Events in the project so that any given event is self-contained in the corresponding bank. We had to weigh this choice against the benefits of building banks by media, because event-based banks will end up with some amount of media duplication.

When we needed to add localization support, generating localized banks was straightforward, but we had to adjust our WAAPI (Wwise Authoring API) queries to account for languages too. Then when DLC started to be added, the pipeline got a whole lot more complex. For starters, we aren’t done with the banks once Wwise outputs them, we also need to cook, package, and then load the banks at runtime too. This took a bit of time to sort out, because, out of the box, Wwise did not allow for multiple output paths when generating banks. We wanted each DLC “module” of content to be wholly separated into distinct folders, so the approach was to generate each module and change the output path between each stage. Using the CLI (Command-Line Interface), however, did give us the option to specify the output path. So with another half-rewrite, we modified the pipeline to generate build scripts that use the CLI that we’d then run to encode the banks.

Since we attached audio on the smallest individual Unit level as opposed to the group, the challenge was designing them to sound like one cohesive larger Unit

MC: Many of the non-vehicular Units in Civ VII are made up of several smaller individual Units, each with their own animations and animation blending. The engine allowed us to attach audio to them individually, almost on a micro scale. Since we attached audio on the smallest individual Unit level as opposed to the group, the challenge was designing them to sound like one cohesive larger Unit even though we did not have control over the Unit as a whole. For example, a Rifleman Unit in the game can sometimes consist of over ten individual Units, occasionally performing separate animations. These varying animations presented a challenge in design, blending and mixing when evaluating the Unit as a whole.

BW: The audio engineering team cooked up a modular foley switch system for apparel as many of the Units shared animations but would have vastly different armor or gear. This was a great strategy to reduce memory budget and minimize voice count at runtime by virtualizing voices based on priority. It worked so well that in the DLC, we used this same system on the Leader foley instead of baking in the armor and accessory movements. This helped immensely if animation timings shifted, or VFX was added after we implemented and completed the task. It also greatly helped Dylan and Kadet while mixing the game to be able to tweak categories on buses in Wwise in a more granular way rather than ask the Sound Designer to re-render the entire baked .wav assets.

Firaxis studios: Dylan and Kadet in an onsite mixing session

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Naval Battle

What was your approach to mixing the game? (The overall sound is so smooth and pleasing, it just sucks you into the game in the best way possible!)

KK: Our main goal was to craft a mix that makes each session feel both authentic and alive, without becoming sonically overwhelming. With all of our magnificent details constructing the sound experience of Civ VII, the greatest final challenge as an audio dev team was to maintain clarity within a dense and adaptive mix that could have easily become chaos! With thousands of potential audio events triggered in real time, we developed systems for dynamic prioritization and real-time mixing, ensuring that the soundscape remains coherent, expressive, and deeply tied to player choice.

Our core Mix Philosophies were a tremendous help to me when leading the team on the countless small or complex decisions along the way, up to and through the final mix:

1. Gameplay Focus

2. Engagement is Dynamic & Seamless

3. Tolerance over Time

4. Immersion is Key

5. Prioritization Top of Mind

As we neared the final mix, we then analyzed and documented the LUFS levels across all categories, per age

The overall mix approach was incredibly collaborative. One of the first steps in setting up our mixing plan was truing up all assets to a LUFS standardization, which was arduous but worthwhile. As we neared the final mix, we then analyzed and documented the LUFS levels across all categories, per age. Once we had this data in a chart we could not only see which layers to balance across Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern, but also had a snapshot of which sounds were taking priority, intentional or not, as a jumping off point for making a final mix plan.

As we continued to define our implementation systems, setting ourselves up for success using our mix-as-you-go approach was top of mind. Dialing in our many audio systems for the mix, such as Audio Object Culling, State Mixing (for main menu/in-game/UI/music, etc), Event Staggering, Camera Zoom, all ensured we could progressively establish flexible, controllable, and impactful mixing systems!

one of the most complex challenges we faced as an audio team was defining how the mix should respond to zoom levels

In the final mix stage, one of the most complex challenges we faced as an audio team was defining how the mix should respond to zoom levels, especially in a strategy game like Civ VII where the board is sprawling, layered, and constantly evolving. With so many potential concurrent sound sources — Biomes, Ambiences, Resources, Buildings, Units, and Discoveries — clarity and intentionality were key. Metrics showed that a large portion of players spend hours fully zoomed out, so we couldn’t treat the mix like a traditional aerial perspective, where sounds emanating from below would be quiet. Instead, we had to prioritize gameplay feedback.

Through extensive discussions, making categorical lists in spreadsheets, and of course playtesting, we developed a priority system that shaped which sounds should remain audible based on three main zoom levels. With our number one guiding mix philosophy, Gameplay Focus, it was important that at full zoom-out, many layers of the mix recede into the background, letting key strategic feedback cut through. We emphasized what is core to player choice, such as engages, hits, deaths, and even subtle cues like weapon reloads while reducing the presence of lower-priority layers like vocal expressions, idle foley for apparel, and improvements.

At full zoom-in, players are rewarded with rich, full-frequency detail

At full zoom-in, players are rewarded with rich, full-frequency detail: the rustle of leaves, the creak of wooden carts, the whittling of sticks, or the flap of sails. All the sonic life we breathed into your civ is revealed in detail waiting to be discovered.

These decisions were not made lightly; it took many revisions to get the filtering, attenuations, and levels just right as players progress through the ages to ensure the game feels rewarding and dynamic, yet also meets our mix philosophy: Tolerance over Time.

A Sound Effect Interview – Civilization VII – Planes Atmos Mix

In the last phase of mixing we leveraged one of the biggest technical upgrades in Civ VII which is the move to Dolby Atmos sound for an immersive, 3D experience across map heights. Whether flying into the eye of a hurricane, or traversing your scout as planes soar above, you’ll hear the world around you with greater immersion and presence.

EG: The camera zoom (RTPC) allowed us to imagine the playfield as three blended strata we could mix around or above the player in 7.1.4: the high altitude wind featuring a quad loop and positionally automated gusts, the mid environmental wind, and the close biomes.

When they make the decision to zoom back in, the mid strata will be sent to the height channels while the close strata is positioned in the center

One example of how we imagined these ambiences to effectively interrelate is the mid and close biome strata that get panned down to the listener’s plane when zoomed out to the furthest extent. This hopefully attracts the player back into the world they’re shaping. When they make the decision to zoom back in, the mid strata will be sent to the height channels while the close strata is positioned in the center. This mix partitioning of two biome textures creates a rich and dynamic sonic landscape; especially for audiophiles who have 7.1.4 setups or those who play with spatial sound virtualization!

Deciding which environmental ambience to play for a close biome is driven by a system maintaining visible tile populations. The two most abundant biome tiles will have their representative audio events played.

Unit Bus hierarchy

DE: It took us a lot of iterating to get to the point where we are today. One of the first challenges we encountered was the Wwise listener, the point from where the sound is heard in game. It was on the camera which is fairly common but it presented two issues: first, the attenuation was affected by the zoom level, so if we wanted to hear an object or action from the sky, the attenuation would need to be really wide, which would cause issues if we wanted to have a smaller attenuation when zoomed in (i.e players hearing too many buildings that are off screen). Second, because of the angle of the camera, the sounds coming from the map under the camera (and not always visible) were louder than the sounds coming from the focal center of the screen, and it sounded wrong.

The solution to those issues was to move the listener to the center of the screen. This fixed the attenuation while moving across the map but the zoom-in and zoom-out didn’t work anymore. Engineering gave us an RTPC for the camera zoom that let us control what the camera zoom affects and how, and at that point we had a decently working system.

With this system, we started out with having a global volume and filtering profile in function of the zoom, but we quickly realized it didn’t sound the way we were expecting. We then created around 200 buses to be able to use unique volume and filtering settings for different categories.
This is how the Camera zoom affect the Units busses when fully zoomed out:

• Combat: slight filtering and volume decrease
• Deaths: slight volume decrease
• Foley: heavily filtered and intense volume decrease (not action based)
• Navigation: almost no filtering and a slight volume decrease
• Vocal Expressions: heavily filtered and intense volume decrease
• Impacts: slight filtering and volume decrease
• Misc Feedback: almost no filtering based on camera zoom (abilities, Unit selects, spawn, etc.)

Each category behaving differently in function of the zoom level gave us the best result we could achieve, but it is a complicated system with a lot of moving pieces. All categories, buildings, improvements, resources, weather, etc. have different zoom profiles to make it feel as natural and smooth as possible.

Unit Attenuations example

On the technical side of the mix, we used those buses, with priorities, RTPCs and a lot of side chaining; almost every sound influences or is influenced by some game parameters and is always dynamically changing in function of what the player is doing.

The listener position was the most challenging part of the process because every time we changed it we thought it would be the last and we could finalize the mix, but every time we changed it we had to redo all of the attenuations for the game, and rework all of the camera zoom volumes and filtering. We have approximately 70 different attenuation profiles to make sure we give the player what they need at the right moment and at the right distance. We have 28 different attenuation profiles just for the Units. Near the end of the project we noticed that we had to change the listener orientation again because it was causing issues with our Atmos mix; the listener was following the camera orientation and the camera in pointing down, so the sound that should be playing in the high speaker front was playing on the high speaker rear, which was not acceptable. If I remember correctly we went through at least 5 interactions of listener placement.

Finally, Civ is a game where the music is part of the experience. It may sound weird but in a lot of cases instead of lowering the music when something important happens we did go the opposite. We bumped the volume of the important elements when the music was playing so we wouldn’t lose too much of the music. Some examples of sounds we are boosting when the music is playing: most of the UI sounds, unit movement sounds, and some combat sounds.

What have you learned from your experience of creating the sound of Civ VII? What knowledge will you carry forward into your next projects?

BW: I learned a great deal about how games effectively use a highly modular system for efficient design. The proprietary engine was tricky to learn at first, but it became apparent the genius of the shared nature of all the Characters, Units, and Animations that fit together perfectly like a puzzle the more tasks you completed. Early on, I worked on a Cavalry Unit, the Cuirassier, and had to design and implement all the horse vocalizations, armor foley, and footsteps in addition to the Flintlock pistol sounds covering various Unit states, adding in 3-5 variations per animation. It took a tremendous amount of time for one task! However, by laying this foundation for future horse-based Units, these sounds ended up being reused and propagated on countless other Units over the next couple years of development. It was really neat how it all came together towards the end in which new Unit tasks were largely completed, allowing us to really get into the details that we wanted to focus on like how the new culturally specific element would sound rather than having to recreate everything from the ground up each time.

DE: I have worked on a lot of projects and I always learn a lot from them. Civilization VII is definitely the most complex game I have ever mixed. For example, the ability to zoom in and out at all times made me change my vision of attenuation. In most games you have one main character that you follow and you mix it from their point of view, but in Civ you play an entire civilization and your focal point shifts as you select a Unit, or a city and sometimes you don’t even have anything selected.

the ability to zoom in and out at all times made me change my vision of attenuation

Civ is also deceptively busy. It’s turn-based so you expect to not have a lot of sound playing at the same time but as soon as you press the end turn button, all AI Units move at the same time, and it’s a nightmare to manage. I don’t think I used many new practices or techniques but it did push me way further on the understanding of interconnected mix systems and how to use those techniques more efficiently. I kind of already knew that the placement of the listener is important, but for a game like Civ I feel like it is even more true than for most games.

representing civilizations is a responsibility I take seriously, and I’m looking forward to diving further into that effort

KK: Working with the entire team at Firaxis on Civilization VII was an adventure for the ages! Every game I have worked on has had a unique way of approaching creative and technical challenges, and the process of finding solutions is what is most exciting about being in game development. I learned so much working on our complex, immersive, and historically-grounded strategy game with our incredible audio team, cross-team members, and partners. For future projects we embark on, I am excited to bring lessons learned from working on our game that constantly evolves from various map and aerial zoom perspectives, and to further dial in our systems to be even more optimized for continued development. Also, representing civilizations is a responsibility I take seriously, and I’m looking forward to diving further into that effort.

DN: There are definitely tons of ideas to take away from our time on Civilization VII. Knowing how to handle continuous combat and crafting great combat sounds that work in a modular system is important knowledge to have. Also just having a general understanding of the gameplay experience is something that took us a while to learn. We really nailed a nice audio flow in the end and everything made sense once the game was ready to ship. It took a lot of work to just get all the content in and then equally as much work to hear how the content is working in the game. We still make updates to Civilization audio today, as we listen to player feedback, add in new sounds, and just keep working towards making Civilization VII the greatest strategy game ever. It is nice that after launch we still have the opportunity to add in new audio features and polish existing assets, and it’s an awesome experience to carry new knowledge and implement it immediately into Civilization VII.

A big thanks to Kadet Kuhne, Dmytro Nebesh, Dylan Escalona, Evan Galvanek, Jason Buzzell, Joseph Marcus, Eric Phister, Justin Drust, Geoff Knorr, Roland Rizzo, Matt Callahan, and Brendan Wolf for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Civilization VII and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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