Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
94 M PS E . O R G smoother and more consistent across different distances, plus fade out into the noise floor more gradually. The point being is what worked for our previous games just didn't cut it here. One other point that I think worked well was connecting some of the ambient one-shot sounds to the players' movement. It's common to play randomized spawned sounds within a space, like wood creaking inside an old hut. However, this felt too disconnected from the players' actions. I wanted to create a feeling of call and response, where the players' movement had consequences. So, we set up random ambient 'traps' in key locations that trigger these subtle ambient details. RR: Speaking of that 3D space, Alan Wake 2 is built for a new generation of consoles with advanced 3D audio capabilities. How did you leverage technologies like PlayStation 5's Tempest 3D AudioTech and Xbox Series X's Spatial Audio to enhance the game's soundscape? RL: This was the first game at Remedy where we went all in on spatial audio, so the whole experience was a journey of discovery. From the start, our primary mixing skew was Dolby Atmos, which can then be translated into PS5 Tempest 3D or DTS:X. The game audio needed to work across multiple platforms with multiple end-point requirements, and using multiple different audio codecs, we got tripped up a few times along the way. We started off looking into using ambisonics but quickly dropped the idea. The problem was twofold. Firstly, to get the desired spatial fidelity, we'd wanted to use 3rd order ambisonics and above. But doing any interesting dynamic multi-layering of sound files meant the channel count would skyrocket, which wasn't good for performance. The second problem was that even though we could lock the rotation to the world geometry, the perception of depth was lacking. This wasn't an issue if the listener was stationary, but when the listener moved through the world, it felt wrong if there were any positional sounds in the ambient bed. It felt like the ambience was moving with Attenuation in Wwise