Difference between revisions of "Diablo 3 music"

Revision as of 23:46, 2 January 2010

The sound effects and music in a computer game might not be as important as the visuals, but they are a major factor in the player's enjoyment and immersion in the experience, especially when done right. The Diablo series is well known for its excellent music and sound effects, much of those courtesy of the hard work by Blizzard North's Matt Uelmen.

The team working on the sound for Diablo 3 did not work on previous titles in the series, but they are skilled industry professionals and they've got years of experience producing past Blizzard titles including World of Warcraft. Also, reports from players who have gotten their hands and ears on the game have been quite positive.

Sound Integration

The D3 Team haven't talked much about the sound or music of the game, but a few comments have been made. Community Manager Bashiok shared his feelings on the importance of the issue in a forum post from July 2009: [1]

I would love! to have a dedicated feature just to the sound engineering that goes into the game. It’s truly amazing how much of an abilities power and feeling comes from the audio.

Jay had an anecdote at ... the last BlizzCon I think, where he talked about Seismic Slam. It was one of if not the first Barbarian abilities created, actually first in the game entirely, and they were working on it and working on it, and just never really happy with it, and then one day the sound came back for it and they got it all working in game, and finally it all came together. It became this stunningly powerful feeling ability. I think that speaks volumes (nyuk nyuk) about how important sound is to the feeling of a game.

That same lesson is true through the development of the game. A new skills goes in and it seems awesome, it looks cool, but until you get the sound attached it just seems incomplete.

Just because a lot of the sounds are early renditions though, as amazing as they are, we’d need to make sure the audio engineers are far enough along where they’d want to showcase them. They’re perfectionists. So hopefully a sound feature is something we can do, but if I had to guess it won’t be for a while yet.

Sound Effects

Elsewhere, Bashiok confirmed that the sound effects were still being created in-house, in the state of the art sound studios in Blizzard's headquarters in Irvine, California: [2]

As far as I know we do all of our own foley work, and while we do have professional voice actors we have some employees that regularly lend their voices to the games.