Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1436283
62 I m ps e . o rg way, when designers have all these things at their disposal to make things efficient, to get rid of memory off screen, to load in other things. We have to find ways of doing that elegantly. This was rampant. It wasn't just the vehicles. It was doorways that exploded. It was that ice bridge. It was all these things that they would find new ways, literally on a frame, swapping it to another actor that had completely different joints and different names. So you'd have to redo stuff and spend three hours trying to find out what exactly happened to these things. EM: After finishing The Last of Us, you all began working on Uncharted 4: A Thief 's End on PS4, which is still one of the most impressive, beautiful, immersive games on any platform. As you transitioned to that game on PlayStation 4, what went into building that audio experience, and what was different in creating that title compared to your previous games? BS: I worked on it in preproduction, some early tech and maybe a third of production on it. I had this concept of "micro Foley." We'd realized with Foley that all sound would instantly stop when you stop moving, and when you started with instant start. So the idea would be to have these little events that would play around that. So that you never just inevitably stopped the minute you stop pushing the controller. I also developed a concept of a "melee zone" for punches and kicks in terms of the orientation of the players. That's when I transitioned out of Naughty Dog. PK: Yeah, those things absolutely lived. One of the biggest points that we wanted to make was how the next-gen Drake at that time interacted with the world, and how it was much more fluid. We took a lot of your principles, Bruce, and wanted to make sure that all his traversal Foley and everything made sense. It always felt like he was constantly shifting, moving, something was happening. The world is pushing back on Drake when we're doing this. There were a lot of improvements. We were all really sad by Bruce's departure. Bruce was very significant in a lot of things. And this is across the studio because there's a lot of people who loved Bruce—he was a freaking silverback gorilla who would make sure people listened to us. RK: This was also an important transition period because Derrick Espino, who had been the glue of Naughty Dog audio from Uncharted 1, all the way through being the architect of the sound of The Last of Us. He did the sound of the Clickers, and was a major voice at the studio. This was also a transition point when he was leaving the studio as well. BS: Not enough has been said about Derrick. His contribution to all those games is immeasurable. His style, his aesthetic, everything about it was really at the core of a lot of it. From a design perspective, Derrick's contribution was enormous. PK: Also, as late as Uncharted 3, we were trying to figure out the process for dialogue, how it should sound better, how it should live in the world, be more effective, and more complementary to everything in the game. Even at that point in time, Bruce was fighting for getting a full-time dialogue presence within the studio. Evan was like, "Can't we just bring somebody in to master dialogue in the last few weeks?" And Bruce was like, "No!" We just couldn't do that. And that's where Leilani Ramirez came in and worked with that. We proved a case you had been fighting for, Bruce, for almost a year, to bring in somebody who BS: Rob was huge on Uncharted 3. Game designers, their focus is to make something happen on the screen, some look or behavior, in usually the simplest and quickest way. So they employ a lot of shortcuts to make things more efficient for them. When you had an object in the game, it could be a vehicle or any kind of thing. The first thing a sound designer would do would be to attach the sound to a joint or multiple joints on the object. And it travels through the world and the sound will go with it. But that's not how any of this stuff worked. Every sequence was made of multiple proxies for the same object. There was not one truck. So if you had a continuous sound like an engine playing on this thing, they would boot it and you couldn't tell by looking at it. Your sound would disappear with that proxy. So you had to do all kinds of crazy stuff. You put it on a spline and hopefully when it caught up to the real object, you can somehow merge them. There's usually a problem with the concept of sound persistence. This story is a little silly but this is true. One of the designers was in the kitchen and we were a couple of stories up in Santa Monica. I go, "Hey dude, come here." And we walk out onto the balcony and we're looking down at Colorado Boulevard, and I'm like, "So what do you see and hear from the street?" He goes, "I see cars and people, and I hear cars and voices." I said, "Cool, now turn around and face the building. What do you see from the street?" And he goes, "Nothing." I go, "What do you hear?" PK: I still tell the story to this day. RK: I still tell this story, it is a good story. PK: It's an amazing story. This is persistence. Sound and persistence is something that goes hand in hand. Sound persists. And how to do that elegantly, in some sort of