Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
94 M PS E . O R G more about creating a subconscious feeling. You should not really hear the processing, but you should feel that the character is believable in the world. The goal was always to support the story, not distract from it. We also wanted an adaptive sound to the design. A lot of it was built on the foundation of the first game. When a character is in a network connected area, or Chiral Network, the fidelity of the voice is cleaner on radios or holograms. If they are in an area that is not connected, the voice becomes more distorted and degraded. We achieved this through RTPCs, but we also pushed it further in this game by tying that behavior to different vehicles, such as the DHV Magellan, the large ship the player uses throughout the game. During a specific boss battle, the player's allies are inside the ship and communicate with the player over radio. If the ship takes damage, we wanted that to affect the radio connection as well. So we tied the radio quality to the health of the ship, which helped reinforce the story theme of connection and loss of connection. It also added urgency, because the player could hear that their companions were in danger. For dialogue editorial, this game has many linear cutscenes to consider. My background before SIE was in film and TV post production, and dialogue editing can be a little different across each medium. But for certain scenes in the game, we wanted to approach it more like a film-style editorial process. That meant cutting with room tone beds and having them fade in and out for each microphone. We found that approach was very successful for certain intimate scenes, especially when characters were whispering or speaking very softly. It helped us handle the signal-to-noise ratio so recording hiss is less noticeable. By blending the room tones and the background noise, the scenes felt more seamless. Since DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH is such a cinematic, film-style game, it made sense to approach the dialogue editorial that way as well. EM: Andrew, what did the breakout of the music team look like on this game, and what was the review process like for music tracks? AB: We had an interesting setup on this project. While both teams collaborated throughout, early on in the ideation stage, we came to the agreement with KJP that the SIE music team would work with Ludvig on his portion of the score, and KJP's music and audio team would work with Woodkid on his portion of the score. Given the amount of score we were talking about producing, I think that was a good choice. Woodkid had already been working at the KJP offices at that point, so he had the relationship established. We had an existing creative relationship with Ludvig. That delineation of work between the teams worked out well in the end. As far as the review process, a lot of that was done directly between Ludvig and Mr. Kojima. We would plan out the cue list, come up with the ideas of what should be written, assign those to Ludvig, but then all of the review of the composition was done pretty much directly between him and Mr. Kojima, and we'd get the assets to work on as a result. When it came to editing and integration, KJP gave us a lot of freedom. It was super freeing as far as our workflow goes. Once music was in the game, KJP and the team listened to it and gave feedback on things. We had to make adjustments along the way, of course. We've got our first ideas of how we think this should sound in game, but at the end of the day, it's their game that we're working on. If they've got thoughts and feedback, we try to address that as best we can. All in all, it was a good delineation of work across the project. EM: When did the rest of you receive final music in the game to be able to fully understand how your work would play in context? DE: For the sound design team, so much design had been done on the big moments. A lot of times we weren't working to music, not even temp music for some of the scenes, so there would be a lot of adjustment on our side when the final music finally did come in. I know in one scene in particular with the giant Amelie, which was Sam's dream, sound designer David Goll had to rework the SFX to fit the music once it came on. You would think a game with such emphasis on music and musical pieces might favor that over sound design, but it wasn't the case. It was very equal. AP: You had to have an innate understanding of what was a music moment, and what could have been more fluid, right? There's a lot of moments in the game that are very obviously meant to be music moments. When music was active, depending on what kind of song it was, we'd give the music more space than normal depending on the situation. Like Derrick mentioned, there's a portion near the end of the game where there's a very music-driven moment, where Woodkid's score is playing, and the DHV Magellan is there, which is equipped with the ship's musical horn. It's like a chime, and it's very iconic. When these two were playing at the same time, it was a semitone off or so, and it was very dissonant in a situation where you didn't want that emotional dissonance. So we ended up tuning the horn in real time to match the music. Once that happened, it became this accidental, complementary thing. We didn't realize that problem until the music went in, that we would have to change it. It was just being conscious of music's role in the gameplay moment to see how we could reshape it. A lot of times, if you just work in silos