Returnal game audio - how the sound was created Asbjoern Andersen


PS5 exclusive Returnal showcases just how cool (and helpful) its 3D audio engine is. Here to talk about their design, implementation, mixing, and haptics work on the sci-fi shooter Returnal are members of PlayStation Studios Creative Arts' London-based sound team: Loic Couthier, Simon Gumbleton, Ash Read, Peter Hanson, Lewis Everest, and Harvey Scott.
Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment, Housemarque
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In Sony PS5’s Returnal, a player takes on the persona of Selene, an Astra scout who crash lands on an alien planet in search of the mysterious white shadow signal. The thing is, Selene is trapped in a time loop. So each time she dies, she returns to the crash site at the start. Except, it’s a different version of the start. The planet changes with each new do-over but Selene isn’t totally starting from scratch. She does retain some gear and story-related items scavenged from her previous run.

With an ever-changing alien world, creatures and sci-fi future tech, there’s so much potential for sound. And Returnal takes full advantage of the PS5’s new 3D audio engine (Tempest) so the sonic landscape has widened exponentially. More sonic real estate means more sounds are needed to fill it up.

At PlayStation Studios Creative Arts in London, supervising sound designer Loic Couthier, principle technical sound designer Simon Gumbleton, senior sound designer Ash Read, senior sound designer Peter Hanson, sound designer Lewis Everest, and senior sound designer Harvey Scott take some time out to talk about their work on the game — defining the dark electronic tone, tackling an ever-changing world, designing unique weapons and making rapid-fire shooting rates, building systems to handle ambience beds, reverb zones, and to manage and filter combat sounds, controlling chaotic combat in the mix, offering accessibility and audio options to tailor the mix to each end-user, handling haptics, and so much more!



Returnal - Gameplay Trailer | PS5


Returnal – Gameplay Trailer | PS5

Returnal has a definite electronic sound that’s dark, haunting, and bleak. Even the high-frequency elements have a dissonant edge. What helped you to define this game’s overall sound?

Loic Couthier (LC): Quite obviously, I suppose, the audio direction is closely related to the game and art direction.

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Loic Couthier, supervising sound designer

When I joined the project, played the game, discovered Selene, Atropos, and all the artwork, a lot of inspiration came from the mood and atmosphere. Harry Krueger and Gregory Louden (respectfully Game and Narrative Directors at Housemarque) had already written some audio direction documents too, which helped a lot to understand their taste, creative references and expectations. There was already some prototype sound and music in the game, but the overall style hadn’t matured yet.

The overall direction for the game was to craft an unconventional and unsettling atmosphere, as well as rewarding and satisfying core gameplay with lots of meaningful feedback, to help the players make sense of the challenging combat situations.

There was already some prototype sound and music in the game, but the overall style hadn’t matured yet.

‘Unconventional’ meant an exploration of creative ways to express the soundscape of Atropos and its creatures, avoiding any comfortable sound design stereotypes, while still guaranteeing believability of the world and matching the compelling visuals. It was a collaboration between the sound team and the Housemarque directors, who pushed us to go well beyond the ‘safe’ zone!

The believability and physicality of the world are expressed through detailed sonic textures that can make the game feel very tactile, ‘crunchy’ or even ‘wet’, through the creation of ASMR source material and the combination of sound with haptic feedback. It all comes together as a nuanced and tactile experience, which blends and compliments well with the abstract nature of the atmosphere, music, and overall narrative.

The audio also carries sonic DNA that will slowly make sense to the players as they progress through the game (or will remain a secret). Some DNA from the end is distributed to the beginning, in a way that can only be recognized once the game ending is experienced. There are a few easter eggs yet to be discovered by the players! :)

Knowing what doesn’t work is as important as knowing what does.

When I start on a new project, my first step is usually to design a “previs.” Essentially, it’s a representative game capture for which I design the entire audio from scratch. This is reviewed by game directors and the audio team, and iterated upon until we agree it represents the title’s identity. I also write direction documents but find it very important to have an audio form to listen to and share.

When making the previs, I go through a lot of fast-iterated experimentation. I explore a lot of alternative routes and would fail until I find something that naturally feels like it’s the tone for the title. It is an exercise of defining what works, what doesn’t, and what textures and sources resonate with the visuals. Knowing what doesn’t work is as important as knowing what does.

I also gather a collection of media that I consider to be benchmarks and references for the style and goals we are targeting. It can be movies, games, tv shows, sound libraries, internet clips — anything really.

For me, as a lead, the process of going through this work is helpful for what is next: providing direction to the audio team, defining what we need to achieve and our priorities.

 

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Audio team at PlayStation Creative Arts in London

You were working with a massive 30-member sound design team, scattered across the world — UK, US, Canada, and Finland (simultaneously). How were you able to help them create sounds that fit the Returnal palette?

LC: Once the overall direction is established, the “previs” creative process carries on throughout the project, via the sound designers.

I believe the key to having the game sounding “together” is a strong and consistent review process of all the creative work.

There was some documentation for each “new starter,” with the previs and some media examples of reference material. which goes a long way in conditioning the creative space towards a clear direction. But review and iteration are key.

I believe the key to having the game sounding “together” is a strong and consistent review process of all the creative work.

So, even though the work was coming from so many people at their homes all around the world, I would review each iteration of the audio assets, and ensure every sound had the Returnal signature to it, guiding designers to reach that style. It is a lot of work but I have found it really worth it. It meant I could not make much content myself (I had no time at all!), but it was the necessary sacrifice on a personal level to make sure the content was going to come together nicely.
 

Tonebenders Podcast – 175 – Returnal With Loic Couthier & Toivo Kallio

Episode outline: ‘Guest host Mark Kilborn sits down with Loic Couthier & Toivo Kallio, to talk about their sound work on the new PS5 game, Returnal. The Game is a sci-fi third person shooter, based on time loops happening within a shape shifting planet. The game really takes advantage of the new sound capabilities on latest playstation console, especially 3d audio.’

Hear the episode:


 

A lot of those audio concepts and iterations were also reviewed by Housemarque directors, to ensure it was fitting their creative expectations. Many elements in the game have a background story and deep meaning; we wanted to make sure this was conveyed by audio (the sonic DNA I mentioned previously), on top of the “primary requirement” of sounding exciting and fitting the sonic style of the game.

Worth noting, it was only at a short peak of the production that we had 30 simultaneous sound designers (this includes outsourcing), and yes it was crazy haha!

For the most part of our 2-year audio development on Returnal, we had around 10 people between Housemarque and Sony CSG. The reason for expanding so much was the sheer amount of varied content to produce under tight deadlines. It was too much, but we had to!

 

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Processors/plugins can impart a particular ‘flavor’ to sound. Were there any specific plugins that helped to add that right flavor to your source sounds for this game?

LC: When it comes to plugins, each sound designer has their favorite tools. There isn’t one tool that contributed a lot more than others; the game is so rich and varied that we probably used everything we had in our arsenal, depending on what we needed to achieve.

There were some general sound design codes or “recipes” for each family of sound (in terms of source material and layers composition). Those were relatively strict for consistency reasons, but everyone was free to use whatever they wanted for the creation — no preferred tool other than the one they know or love, it was all about the end result.

We love the Fabfilter and Soundtoys suites as our core mixing and design tools. We used PlayStation RnD tools to work in Reaper with 3D audio, as well as the IEM plugin suite (which is free and open-source) to work in ambisonics at very high orders (7th).

…Sonarworks SoundID Reference was a key helper for me to trust what I was listening to.

As we were all working from home, Sonarworks SoundID Reference was a key helper for me to trust what I was listening to. I was pleasantly surprised how well what I heard and reviewed at home translated in the studio.

The team has been using a lot of short delay effects in order to add “lush” and sci-fi detail touch to many sounds (Soundtoys Crystalliser, Fabfilter Timeless). Zynaptiq Morph helped to create some familiar/tangible feeling sounds that are not recognizable from the real-life source.


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Zynaptiq Morph helped to create some familiar/tangible feeling sounds that are not recognizable from the real-life source.

We have a fair amount of resonant filtering on creatures (Soundtoys FilterFreak, NI Driver, Audio Ease Speakerphone). Resonance gives a vocal chord or chest quality, plus you get a tasty dangerous edge when you start driving the filters. Those plugins can also print a common tone to varied sources and glue them together. Xfer OTT was used on creatures too, as an exciter for high frequencies (not an exciter per say but does a good job at this).

Xfer Serum, Kilohearts Phase Plant, Vital, and NI Massive X were used to add tonal sweeteners to UI, and synthetic textures to creatures and devices.

Massive X has got a nice range of presets with a noisy vintage vibe that matched very well with the score of the game. This helped blend some of the more hi-tech UI pop-ups with the music.

Resonance gives a vocal chord or chest quality, plus you get a tasty dangerous edge when you start driving the filters.

For the shoulder robot, Kontakt in combination with Soundtoys AlterBoy, iZotope VocalSynth and GRM Tools Shift were key to get that android sound.

We used a fair bit of granular effects too. Output Portal was used to add movement and an organic feel. Fracture Sound Granulate was used quite a lot to make something crazy out of anything. It’s a very creative tool that generates a lot of cool, unexpected results.

This list could go on forever, haha!

 

Returnal_sound-04

In the Returnal intro, it says, ‘Each new cycle presents new challenges, rewards and changes to the world.’ What did that mean for you in terms of sound?

LC: Creatively, that meant for me that the core gameplay needed to sound really strong, characterful, and consistent.

Even though the world is big and ever-changing, Returnal does gravitate around growing your “Selene build” and the narrative progression/discovery. It was crucial to me that this “critical path” was strong enough to carry the sonic identity of the game.

So, even though the player can go anywhere and equip anything, there is an unmistakable signature carried through each of the cycles.

It’s easy to underestimate but in a game like this, it can be difficult to identify what is the critical path.

The key was to identify the fundamentals that hold everything together.

At first contact, the game’s content feels a bit like an unfathomable galaxy, with a lot of varied elements everywhere. It overwhelms your ability to visualize the big picture. The key was to identify the fundamentals that hold everything together. In a way, find out what is generating the gravitational pull of that galaxy of content.

More on the sound for Returnal:

If you want to know more about the sound for Returnal, check out Audio Podcast Alliance member The Sound Architect‘s excellent interview with Loic Couthier below. They deep-dive into the complex systems under the hood, the challenges of mixing (with potentially 700 projectiles fired at once!), haptics, exploring the potential of the Playstation 5, their use of 3D audio and so much more:

…it was absolutely critical to prioritize the work, and this is only possible once you visualize that big picture.

Once you figure this out, you get that “critical path” and start to have a structured mental picture of the game content, from the essential foundations to the depths of details. Then you are able to give priorities to the team.

The above probably reads “funny” but it was absolutely critical to prioritize the work, and this is only possible once you visualize that big picture. In non-linear games that can be tough, especially when the game is in development and it all slightly buoys and evolves. I had to adapt my understanding of this a couple of times throughout the course of the project. Housemarque was key in helping on that.

Simon Gumbleton (SG): From the technical side, the “ever-changing” nature of the game presented some exciting challenges for us. Firstly, the world is different each cycle. The level layout is generated on-the-fly from smaller modules we called “rooms.” Because there is no fixed level, we had to build systems to automatically handle the ambience beds and reverb zones as well as stitching them all together with portals to allow for propagation between rooms. This allows the player to move seamlessly through any combination of spaces in a level and always be enveloped by the right ambience and reverb.

…we had to build systems to automatically handle the ambience beds and reverb zones as well as stitching them all together with portals to allow for propagation between rooms.

Another aspect is the dynamic pacing of the gameplay. Combat and exploration flow organically into each other at any time, so we needed to find a good way to balance having rich, detailed environments and intense, chaotic combat at any time.

Of course, the mix itself does a massive amount of work to prioritize things, but we also built systems into our environmental sounds that helped us manage the voices. We leveraged the attenuation radius of an ambient event to automatically manage the playback, so we only play ambient voices within hearing range. When combat gets intense, the more distant ambient spots switch off to free up voices and DSP for the enemies and weapons.

We leveraged the attenuation radius of an ambient event to automatically manage the playback, so we only play ambient voices within hearing range.

In combat, Selene can face all kinds of combinations of enemies, with a vast range of attacks and abilities, so we also had to build systems to help manage and filter all of that action dynamically. For example, with projectiles, originally every bullet was posting an event, which quickly became unmanageable. Instead, projectiles are filtered and prioritized based on proximity and velocity, and the most important bullets are dynamically assigned voices.

Similarly, for effects and impacts, we built a system to manage event requests with both time and location parameters.

Similarly, for effects and impacts, we built a system to manage event requests with both time and location parameters. This means an impact happening at one location might block subsequent requests near it for some time, but an event at a different location would be allowed to play. This is a good example of how 3D audio demands a higher level of implementation: simple global limits can be too crude when you can so easily hear a sound happening at two different locations.

 

Returnal_sound-05

Loic, you came up with this great idea for motivational biweekly “Sound Design Challenges.” Can you talk about what this was and ultimately what came out of it?

LC: Oh yeah! So this was initially an idea to have fun as a team doing some “sound design brainstorming sessions,” and for everyone to have a go at varied types of content.

In terms of team structure, I like to have area owners (for example ‘weapon,’ and ‘creature’ owners). This allows designers to go “deep” into the areas (i.e., people become experts). However, it can be creatively exhausting to be in the same area for months, or even years. Also, in our sound design day-to-day, we are isolated in headphones or studios most of the time. Obviously, even more so at home!

So, those “Sound Design Challenges” bring us all together in a fun way, and it’s useful for the project too:

Everyone receives the same video (which I secretly captured) and they have two hours max in which to make the sound of the feature. Then we all render our work in a common network location with anonymous names, and discuss each one of them in a video call, with some likes/votes so we can see which ones are the most popular by the end of the session.

There is no pressure regarding “failing” because it’s pretty much impossible to make something finished in two hours.

There is no pressure regarding “failing” because it’s pretty much impossible to make something finished in two hours. So people don’t have to feel bad if they are unhappy about their stuff. We all are! The anonymous aspect makes the discussions a bit less biased and more open than if you know who made it from the beginning. It also becomes fun to try to guess who that was at the end. After a couple of sessions, you become better at that, haha!

The subject was always a feature that was a challenge to design for the game. So it was useful to have 10 or more approaches of the same feature from various designers; it would show what works and what doesn’t.

Because time is not always equal to gain, and when you only have two hours you can’t polish, so it’s all about the core elements.

Some of those resulted in almost final assets! Because time is not always equal to gain, and when you only have two hours you can’t polish, so it’s all about the core elements. Sometimes it’s terrible too, haha, and a good example of where NOT to go! But it’s always fun!

It’s a practice we definitely want to keep doing. When the team is crazy busy we can’t afford the time to do it, but during normal production time, it is possible. And it’s good for the team, which needs creative fuel too!

 

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Can you talk about the weapons’ sound design and implementation in Returnal?

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Peter Hanson, Senior Sound Designer

Peter Hanson (PH): The weapons on Returnal were a really interesting challenge. The audio team came onto the project with a lot of relevant experience from Blood and Truth (a VR shooter) which helped define a lot of the systems and tech to manage weapons in a 3D environment.

Unlike Blood and Truth though, the sound design for Returnal guns required a departure from traditional weapon thinking for two main reasons: all but one of the guns are not of Earth origin so traditional sounds were not very helpful, and a big part of the gameplay is the changeability of the weapon performance.

Because these guns don’t exist, there’s no real reference to what they should sound like; they could almost be anything. Having an open brief like this can be very difficult to navigate as the possibilities are almost unlimited. We needed to dig deeper into the visual concepts to see what could help dictate the sounds.

We needed to dig deeper into the visual concepts to see what could help dictate the sounds.

To help define what an Alien gun should sound like, we studied the three main categories of weapon-type as defined by Housemarque: Electromechanic, Biomechanic, and Cosmic.

We decided that the Electromech arsenal would draw heavily from synth and electricity sources (we were keen to steer away from laser ‘pew pew’ sounds). The Biomech wanted some organic content to bring the weapon to life (they are literally alive) while the Cosmic category needed to sound unlike any traditional gun but still very powerful (‘air ripping thunder’ was a frequent reference).

Having these categories in mind when designing was extremely helpful. It still meant you could be very creative but it helped to know what we didn’t want from a given gun (e.g. the Bionic Shotgun did not want synths in it).

…the design had to be presented in layers in Wwise so that each element could be tweaked in different circumstances.

When concepting sounds for each gun, we captured the weapon in its default firing mode and tried all sorts of things to get a cool sounding firing noise. However, the guns are extremely flexible — even the pistol can behave in very non-pistol ways when certain traits are unlocked: a machine gun in burst mode, a high-caliber charge-up shot, missile adds, exploding shrapnel projectiles, etc.

This often led to a two-level review process. The first being to define the general character of the gun and the second being to check that this idea worked across all the various traits.

It also meant that the design had to be presented in layers in Wwise so that each element could be tweaked in different circumstances. This made it impossible to rely on any kind of master bus processing in the DAW for the weapon and it made the mixing process much longer. To give an idea of scale, there are 10 main weapons but over 9000 different variations!

 

Returnal_sound-06

The weapons’ rate of fire is as fast as your finger can make that happen. What challenges did this pose in terms of sound design, and what was your solution?

SG: For the weapons, we knew there would be a huge variety of variants, traits, and fire rates, which could be changing dynamically, so it was important that the system for weapons could have solid timing and be flexible. We decided to use MIDI triggering to keep the weapon timing rock-solid without needing complex nested structures with delays and repeat times, etc.

We decided to use MIDI triggering to keep the weapon timing rock-solid without needing complex nested structures with delays and repeat times, etc.

Using MIDI also meant we could easily change the fire rate in response to slow motion, or any trait, because it’s all driven by the internal music system. So individual MIDI pulses are mapped to containers for each bullet, first shot, etc. and the sequence is all driven from the music system in Wwise.

 

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The gun projectiles aren’t always traveling in a direct line. For instance, the Homing Missiles have these long trails as they fly around. How did you accommodate that with sound?

PH: There is a lot going on in combat, especially with the projectiles. It is a bit of a zero-sum game with lots of things competing for attention, so consideration had to be made on what we actually wanted to hear from weaponry.

The homing missiles were an interesting asset to design, I wanted to give them an interesting sound that wasn’t going to distract or conflict from the main gun. I knew it didn’t want to have a punchy fire transient (tempting though it was), as that would clash with the main gun and I also knew that the missiles could travel for quite a long time so it had to stay interesting over the full distance.

Working with objects comes with some drawbacks but does gives better 3D localization of a sound…

The assets themselves are various synth sounds run through TONSTRUM Traveler. There’s lots of nice movement you add into the sound with that plugin; it has the usual pitch/dampening and attenuation but also access to LFOs which can modulate tremolators and all sorts, so the asset itself has a lot of ‘travel’ built into it. These are then played back in Wwise through a ‘projectile doppler object’ bus. Working with objects comes with some drawbacks but does gives better 3D localization of a sound which had the nice upshot of helping the player to hear where the enemies were in the world by listening to where the missiles went to.

 

Returnal_sound-08

Let’s look at the alien fauna, including the parasites. What was your approach to their sounds? (I really like their throaty, breathy, growly vocal range of sounds. How did you create those?)

AR (Ash Read): For the alien fauna vocals, we wanted to use organic elements that reflected their mass and the kind of materials that make up their physical structure.

The first four-legged creatures you come across have large, almost bird-like skulls, so along with using bird call source material for their shrieks and screams we used resonance to give the sound a more hollow and flavored tone to match how the sound could emit from their jaws.

For most non-humanoid creatures, resonance played an important part in making their vocal tones not only flavourful but believable.

For most non-humanoid creatures, resonance played an important part in making their vocal tones not only flavourful but believable. The massive bipedal monstrosity that claimed many players on their first encounter consists of numerous deep breaths, hisses, and gurgly inhales (mostly blowing air into yoghurt through plastic tubing). The plastic tube breaths were great to convey the creature’s potentially massive and messy airways, while we used a mixture of sub-harmonics plugins and resonance effects on other source material to match that tube flavor.

If you want a large creatures’ breaths and hisses to sound like they’re coming from a huge cavity, resonate the low mids and then the high mids for more ‘air’. If you want to add character to smaller creatures just resonate higher registers — even apply small convolution while automating the resonating frequencies and you’ll get very interesting results from the simplest of source material.

If you want a large creatures’ breaths and hisses to sound like they’re coming from a huge cavity, resonate the low mids and then the high mids for more ‘air’.

For louder vocals in the higher register, like the bipedal giants’ screams, less resonance can be used as you want the character of the designed screams to cut through and let the game’s reverb do the rest of the work.

On the flip side, resonance was used very heavily for the source design aspect in the Crimson wastes creatures. The giant squid vocals were generated from underwater mammal vocals being very stretched, pitched down, and then sharp resonating frequency sweeps moved slowly through the source while being heavily driven to create abstract vocal howls.

PH: The humanoid creatures I did all had their identity defined by the source; the majority of the time on the design was spent finding the right voices to use.

Being human, we automatically detected a huge amount of information from voice recordings: age, sex, levels of distress, etc. We’re all very discerning with human voices so the audio needed to match perfectly with the visual and design concepts.

Through a lot of experimentation and feedback from Harry and Greg, we were able to build up a palette of sounds for each creature, largely consisting of home-recorded and library vocals.

…loud projected screams are difficult to capture in an untreated home and with no acting training we often trashed our voices

The bespoke home-recorded audio was mostly useful for setting the tone and bringing the creature to life; being able to record to picture makes the performance much more compelling and, by simple experimentation, can produce a lot of variation.

Water gargling, popping candy, fingers/fist in the mouth all dramatically change the sound of a voice. And while the pandemic drastically limited access to actors, it did afford the privacy to try all sorts of strange performance ideas and some creative microphone techniques to make the best of them. (I worked with the Sanken CO-100K, Sennheiser MKH40, Shure SM57). Necessity being the mother of invention.

The bespoke recording got us much of the way, but loud projected screams are difficult to capture in an untreated home and with no acting training we often trashed our voices after only a few minutes of recording. This is where the library material was able to help us out. Many of the longer, louder assets are female library recordings dove-tailed by home recordings.

Then the challenge became: how do we make this sound like one cohesive entity?

Blending the layers together starts with editing. Making sure all the layers could be physically performed at the same time by resolving conflicting in/exhales and retiming performances to a more realistic breathing rate helped a lot. Pitching each layer to match one another and automating the global playback rate made all the layers ‘move’ in a convincing way. To further meld the sounds together, we reached for a world of VSTs: firstly some gentle EQ (FabFilter ProQ) was applied just to help match the different sources, often a particular layer had to be made to sound worse in order to make it believable, then a little global pitch/amplitude modulation (MondoMod/Soundtoys Tremolator) really helped tie things together and finally, some global distortion and convolution (iZotope Trash2) rounded things off.

 

 

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Part of the fauna attack is shooting projectiles — like a wave of glowing/firey orbs or showers of sparks. How was the sound department able to help communicate their threat to the player? (There’s so much happening in the ‘boss’ fights. How did sound help to clarify the threats to the player and at the same time, make it feel chaotic and stressful?)

Lewis Everest (LE): When approaching the design for the projectiles it was very important to ensure that the different types of projectiles in the game had their own unique sonic texture whilst also conveying the same message, this being “danger.”

Additionally, the PS5’s Tempest 3D Audio engine allows the player to pick out each individual projectile around them, therefore our designs had to take full advantage of this.

The projectiles were broken down into their rough visual elements, such as Fire, Energy, and Water. These base elements were utilized as source for designing the “base layer” of each projectile and provided the core sonic characteristics.

The threat layers featured a focused frequency range of 4kHz – 6kHz to take advantage of the natural peak in the human auditory range.

On top of this, each projectile had an additional ‘threat’ layer which would be audible at closer proximities. The threat layers featured a focused frequency range of 4kHz – 6kHz to take advantage of the natural peak in the human auditory range. Additionally, these layers feature non-linear harmonics aimed at exploiting the natural human response to high-stress sounds.

These two priorities combined allowed the projectiles to each have their own particular sonic flavor whilst effectively being able to cut through the mix and communicate the danger element.

Some of the key creative processes that worked well for these threat layers included taking both adult and child screams, stretching and granulating them, and then introducing artificial harmonies to stress the non-linear elements.

 

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Since the game was created exclusively for PS5, how were you able to take advantage of the PS5’s proprietary 3D audio engine (Tempest)? How was it beneficial for this game? Can you talk about the challenges you faced or the creative opportunities it offered?

LC: The advantage of being a PS5 exclusive title is that it gives us a license to go “all in” with the platform features. 3D Audio, from the beginning of our involvement, was our target and we were aiming at doing the maximum we could to provide the best possible audio for Tempest (and haptics).

The advantage of being a PS5 exclusive title is that it gives us a license to go “all in” with the platform features.

At CSG, we have years of expertise designing, implementing, and mixing 3D Audio, as we have been making PSVR titles since the launch. Returnal has been our first title applying this expertise to the PS5 with a non-VR title.

SG: I think a good point to make is that it’s really about “designing for 3D” across the whole game. The obvious advantage for this game is the situational awareness in combat (hearing an enemy at the right location can literally save your life) and this shines with the variety of enemies in the game, and the great use of verticality in the level design.

But beyond the combat advantage, 3D audio allows us to build totally new experiences for the player. A good example is the mural particles, where we can surround and immerse the player in a dynamic and reactive “cloud” of sound, something that was simply not possible before.

Going beyond these showpiece moments, and extending the philosophy of “designing for 3D” to everything in the game, we have been able to craft rich, detailed, and enveloping environments for the player to explore and truly feel immersed in the world of Atropos.

It also has an impact on the implementation, as we need to use more game objects, and play more voices

As for challenges, certainly designing for 3D requires more content. There is much more space for audio to surround the player; we need to consider the location and size of objects more carefully at the design stage. It also has an impact on the implementation, as we need to use more game objects, and play more voices (e.g. a single ambient bed on its own is 16 channels!).

 

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Because this 3D space requires more sound content. (And there are loads of sounds in this game!!) What did that mean in terms of the mix? How did you keep the mix from getting out of control?

LC: In terms of “content bandwidth” (i.e., how much we can play at a time), it’s important to acknowledge that our brains are the real bottleneck, especially with this generation where we can play as many sounds as we want (technically).

While the technology can play hundreds of sounds in 3D, less than 5 are enough to saturate our ability to understand what is going on. We do have more available “space” to cover with positional sounds, and more CPU to generate them, but we don’t have “more brain” to understand the soundscape! And this is obviously where the mix comes in :)

The 3D mix ends up delivered in two channels of binaural stereo. That is a lot more information to print on the “same old” two waveforms. Having more “playback space” doesn’t make the mix easier, on the contrary, there is a lot more content fighting for our brain’s attention.

Having more “playback space” doesn’t make the mix easier, on the contrary, there is a lot more content fighting for our brain’s attention.

It took some time for me to understand how to handle the mix in Returnal (conceptually) and a lot more time to manually set it up in Wwise haha..

I started in the wrong direction of treating the game like a blockbuster shooter and realized that the powerful player gun approach, as satisfying as it felt, was not right. You need to hear everything around you when you play, otherwise you’re dead, haha! People would get really frustrated if they were dying because of the mix.

Let’s skip the exploration part of the gameplay and focus on the combat, where the real difficulty lies with the high number of enemies that relentlessly spam you with varied attacks and dozens of projectiles.

After the weapon-centric approach failed, I spent a lot of time observing crazy situations I was creating with debug tools, with all the enemies of a biome attacking you non-stop (and loads of them simultaneously). It was a bit like observing wild nature, haha!

Then I drafted a list of the most important actions/attacks that, as a player, you want/need to know are happening — the ones that can deal more damage, the ones you must avoid as a priority, the ones that could feel unfair if the sound wasn’t helping.

Much of mixing the game was to define what sound needed what priority in what context, and how it should affect the rest.

It led to creating a priority-based system, where all enemy sounds were assigned a priority level (this includes everything, footsteps, etc.). The higher priority sounds are given the right to affect the lower, usually by ducking them as they play. Much of mixing the game was to define what sound needed what priority in what context, and how it should affect the rest. And also making sure no exception or manual mistake could ruin it all, haha…

At the base, it’s a simple process, but you have so many various simultaneous sounds to deal with that it becomes complicated. The influence of every type of sound against the other needs a lot of nuance, and there are always some rogue sounds that like to break your rules! It needs to sound clear but also to feel nice, so it’s not always about surgically removing sounds; it still needs to feel like you’re in danger.

Obviously, while those enemies are attacking, you also have Selene firing, moving, potentially talking, the music blasting, and the UI punctuating all of this. There’s a good average of 70 projectiles around you when it’s busy — all that for the mixer to digest :)

…there are always some rogue sounds that like to break your rules!

There is a lot of voice limiting in Wwise, and pre-Wwise culling systems too, in order to further remove content we don’t need to hear. At each step, it becomes cleaner and clearer.

Housemarque has been polishing the gameplay too, balancing attacks and timings, and I could hear some improvements in the mix. But it was not me at all; it was the gameplay balancing and pacing getting nicer and nicer. There is only so much you can do with audio processing only. The mix is the result of every discipline’s work coming together in the form of sound. A lot of the mix work is done through your relationships with the dev team!

The mix is the result of every discipline’s work coming together in the form of sound.

The mix of a 3D title is complex due to the hybrid nature of the content and formats you are summing together.

In Returnal, we have a mix of 5th Order Ambisonics, 3D Objects, 7.1 Passthrough, as well as stereo haptics and controller speaker. This is the norm for a title that supports all the PS5 audio features.

Each of these bus structures have very specific requirements as to how they can actually be manipulated (for example, objects cannot benefit from bus processing), how expensive that is (ambisonics is 4-times more demanding than 7.1), and how they behave when they are downmixed.

The mixer in ‘Returnal’ is 540 busses wide, with another 260 aux busses.

The gain structure takes time and experimentation to get under control. The mixer in Returnal is 540 busses wide, with another 260 aux busses. While this really isn’t a quality factor, it shows the complexity of the systems you have to deal with as a mixer, and the time it takes to assign tens of thousands of sounds to that mixer, with the correct rules.

Let’s say you’re a genius and know all the mix rules from the start, it would still take weeks to manually set it up. That is a part of the mix work that can very easily be underestimated.

 

[tweet_box]Creating Returnal’s Dark Electronic Sound for PS5’s 3D Audio Environment[/tweet_box]

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In terms of options and accessibility, can you share some details on the advanced options in the game (Dynamic Range, Speaker Tuning, VO Focus) and the reasoning behind them?

LC: The Dynamic Range section tries to address an issue I felt we had in past titles. We offer all these modes and it just feels too appealing to go for the most dynamic one. Louder, larger, more dynamic… if you don’t know about dynamic range, it certainly feels like you should choose this as the “best sounding” mode.

Whereas in reality, for the majority of players it is very unlikely that they are in the conditions to enjoy a game with the highest dynamic range. It requires an expensive setup, dedicated room, and to play at loud volume.

So, I was trying to see how we could better support and inform the players regarding this.

…if you don’t know about dynamic range, it certainly feels like you should choose this as the “best sounding” mode.

The whole dynamic range section is here to advise more than doing any processing. It uses player-entered information such as the device they are using, how loud they are listening to the game, and how loud the background noise is. This information is used to make an educated guess as to the most appropriate dynamic range for the situation. And comments are given to inform why each mode is recommended. So they can see the reasoning, and hopefully learn from it.

I hope to get some feedback on this, in order to further tailor the audio experience to each player’s conditions.

The Speaker Tuning section is here to adapt the “neutral response” mix to the tone of the player’s room or headphones/speakers.

It is impossible to provide an EQ curve that would work for every case and every device of the same category. So I felt that it had to be on the user end, where the sound is playing.

It is impossible to provide an EQ curve that would work for every case and every device of the same category.

The ideal solution would be to automatically compensate for the playback device and the acoustics, which is not yet possible on the consumer side (without investing in dedicated tools). Also, most people actually don’t enjoy a totally neutral response, so you don’t want to surgically remove it all. Some people bought their colored headphones because they like them like that. Taste is involved.

The option offers some EQ macros that will help with the most frequent issues: having too much or not enough bass/highs, reducing harshness/muddiness, improving overall intelligibility.
If someone has overly boomy or tinny headphones, which are common issues with consumer gear, they can use this option to help with that.

I guess the key was to have something super simple, so the UI has very few values, each of them being a significant enough step towards the “extreme” maximum parameter value.

The VO Focus option is here to help with the intelligibility of dialogue, and make it easier to hear dialogue in any situation. I have read reports from our accessibility teams at PlayStation and the #1 issue is understanding dialogue in default mixes.

I wanted to provide exactly what they need: a controlled mix where dialogue can’t be missed.

Instead of forcing people to turn everything down except dialogue, in a static way, resulting in a non-supported mix that is not loudness-standard compliant, I wanted to provide exactly what they need: a controlled mix where dialogue can’t be missed. A ratio of dialogue to noise that is as strong as they want it to be.

There is only one slider that controls how much extra priority you want dialogue to have. At the maximum level, dialogue would duck everything else in a “non-negotiating” way. Every value in between is there if you want more subtlety for that treatment.

So, this was the breakdown of the intentions and ideas behind our advanced audio options. :)

I hope they are useful for players. We care a lot about the user-end; we want to be sure we deliver the most bespoke experience for players to enjoy the maximum of all the hard work we put into the audio!

It is not straightforward as there are an infinity of situations, but I believe it’s worth pushing the exploration in that area.

 

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Can you talk about your use of haptics in Returnal?

Harvey Scott (HS): The advent of haptics on PS5 was another novel concept for the audio team to get to grips with and the approach for using it in Returnal took some time to figure out. The strengths and weaknesses of haptics took some getting used to and what might seem obvious now was an unknown ruleset at the start of development.

Initially, attempts were made to utilize the haptics signal path as a secondary set of speakers (or a third set if you count the controller speaker) in order to invoke the same kind of response you would expect from hearing sound effects. That was the natural instinct because, up to that point, our day-to-day tasks were about designing sound content for your ears and consequently designing for the brain that interprets that content, deciphers what that content means informationally, what that content is related to visually, what emotion is consequently generated from that content, and so on.

Initially, attempts were made to utilize the haptics signal path as a secondary set of speakers…

The initial assumption was that perhaps the haptics were capable of delivering the same kind of response — delivering information to the brain (via the hands) that would interpret it in the same way as sound.

Through experimentation, we learned that the perception of haptics content is almost always swayed by the other senses. For example, trying to design haptics content that suggests any kind of emotion is next to impossible without the context provided by the audio and visuals.

It might seem obvious in hindsight but we experimented with trying to narrate the main character’s emotions through certain cutscenes via the controller haptics. But without the correct audio and visual cues, the intention was lost and the haptics became confusing at best.

But without the correct audio and visual cues, the intention was lost and the haptics became confusing at best.

Similarly, the exact same haptic content can be perceived differently depending on the visual and audio context. For example, the same haptic pulses used for landing on solid ground after jumping will be perceived as feeling different if landing in mud (despite the content being the same). The brain makes the connection between what is happening on-screen and informs the hands what they are feeling.

So, with that knowledge behind us we established a general rule for what worked best: haptic content works best when all senses are in agreement. If the eyes see rain, the ears hear rain (better yet, they hear rain in 3D Audio) and the hands feel a sensation like rain. So the brain can be totally convinced by all the data it is receiving that it is indeed raining. This is where haptics can really shine, adding new physicality which aids the depth of immersion.

This is where haptics can really shine, adding new physicality which aids the depth of immersion.

Asides from making sure the haptics had the necessary context to work, the aesthetics of that content came from a variety of sources. We designed a lot of content from scratch, procedurally using synthesis in some cases. In other cases, we used standard sound library content to provide interesting broadband textures.

The nature of each feature in-game would dictate what approach would work best for the haptic content; many of the haptic sensations in-game are actually synths being processed at runtime, which allows the most flexibility when designing the feel of the haptics in context, actually playing the game and feeling the haptics react.

Traditionally, for the vast majority of sound effects, the workflow would be to design in DAW, test and review in-game, and then back to the DAW for iteration and improvements. Because of the change in perception that the full gameplay experience can create, haptics tends to be a very difficult thing to predict or design efficiently offline. The way haptics reacts in real-time to the player inputting commands into the controller and generally playing the game, heavily alters the perception of the way haptics feel.

Because of the change in perception that the full gameplay experience can create, haptics tends to be a very difficult thing to predict or design efficiently offline.

Designing the haptics content using a runtime synth not only allows us to tweak and design the feel of the haptics in real-time whilst playing the game, but it also affords the opportunity to modulate the parameters of the synth using game-driven data. Conversely, cinematics were a use case of haptics where the process was more traditional, track-laying the haptics in DAW like you would with sound, which makes more sense given the linear nature of that content.

On the aesthetics front, we found that granular textures generated procedurally have a particularly pleasing result and really differentiate themselves when it comes to what is now possible with the current generation of hardware. Small grains of simple short-attack pulses can be particularly interesting when arranged in a rhythmic or patterned sequence; modulating the rate at which that pattern is played back using real-time data from the game can be key to creating a link between what is happening in-game and what you are feeling.

Similarly, the same grains sequenced in a random sporadic fashion can create textures like sand or rain; modulating each grain’s pitch and amplitude can help create a feeling of natural variation.

In some scenarios, it was appropriate to simply send the sound effect itself to the haptics output, which would provide an instant accompanying haptic sensation that matched the envelope of the accompanying sound.

Some haptics are as simple as just a kick drum-like pulse being played at the resonant frequency of the controller, for maximum controller shaking effect. In some scenarios, it was appropriate to simply send the sound effect itself to the haptics output, which would provide an instant accompanying haptic sensation that matched the envelope of the accompanying sound.

Haptics are an exciting part of being a sound designer now and I encourage anyone who is yet to do so to plug in their DualSense controller and try designing some content in a DAW yourselves!

 

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What was the most unique aspect of the sound creation and implementation process for Returnal?

LC: There are many aspects of the development of Returnal that were unique to us. There has been many “firsts” coming with this project.

Returnal is the most ambitious title ever made by Housemarque. The concept, the art, the creatures are all amazingly weird and original. It was a unique challenge as a game to develop, technically and creatively, on the top of being released on a new generation of hardware with many expectations regarding audio.

…it was the first time we made a game from home; we did not think it was possible until we were all forced to!

Making our first PS5 title, exploring and pushing the boundaries in order to tastefully showcase the new audio features to the world was a unique adventure.

It was the first time we ever designed haptics, the first time we designed non-VR 3D audio with Tempest, the first time we collaborated with Housemarque. Also, it was the first time we made a game from home; we did not think it was possible until we were all forced to!

 

A big thanks to Loic Couthier, Simon Gumbleton, Ash Read, Peter Hanson, and Lewis Everest for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of Returnal and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

 

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