Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524736
38 FA L L 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y more entertaining for many more hours," said Wu. "Hence, we have to have a lot more different sounds for everything—for the weapons firing, the footsteps, the ambience—and that's the difference." As technology advances, video game sound designs grow more complicated and extensive. Wu recalls working on Rigs, the virtual reality battle sports game, as a sound designer and having to perform a variety of edits to get the sound they recorded cleaner. "It was one of the first VR games on the PlayStation. We had to edit the sounds so they would play well for the first-person point of view (POV) when you put goggles on and immerse in the world. It had to sound like it was coming from your POV instead of the third-person POV. Rigs was quite difficult to organize and capture the sounds. It took months to micro-edit out all the sounds we didn't want." One of the most important parts of the sound design starts before it even heads to the sound stages; capturing clean, accurate effects from the correct point of view. "Assassin's Creed was quite difficult," Wu recalls. "I was tasked to record cannon fire. I had to organize and bring teams of owners of these items—[typically] people who are reenacting actors for revolutionary, civil wars—together. I had to organize them all on the same day, same location—and these things are thousands of pounds. You have four guys per cannon to make it work with the [necessary safety]. We didn't know that some of the cannon fire would cause faraway peacocks to react, for instance. I can laugh now, but I was pretty mad at the time. How could we get these peacocks to stop? Move them?" Sometimes, perfection can't be achieved, and editors have to clean up the less-than-ideal wild sound effects. "Rigs, which is a battle sports game, needed crowd sounds—cheers, boos, general Walla," said Wu. "They wanted those without distinctive words, so I was tasked to go to various college football games and record stadium crowd sounds at different times. [I then] took those sounds and painstakingly edited out all the PA sound, the announcer sound, the music, the drunks … edit that down so I'm giving a general, non-distinctive crowd sound." Once the sound is captured, editors use various software like Reaper, Pro Tools, and Wwise to program the sounds. The software reads the information and triggers the appropriate noise according to the scenario fitting the characters' actions. "You can program 10 different sounds however you design into the system. You can tell the setting to [trigger], so whatever you do in the circumstances, the system is going to choose what sounds and what you are going to do," detailed Wu. "Take walking into a cave. You might have a smaller, tighter cave versus a massive cave. Depending on where you turn in the cave, it'll change and adapt to that. Do you have water dripping? Do you have smaller drips? Larger drips? You can put all those in the software. The program of the game can put that part into the game so it syncs with what you are looking at." As it all comes together, incredible soundscapes come to life on the monitor, creating hours of enjoyment for some of the best Armorer Mike Berkey operates a rare Japanese Type 96 light machine gun for a World War 2 video game.