Interviewee: Brad Derrick (Audio Director, Mythic Entertainment)

Developer: EA Mythic
Publisher: EA
Game Title: Warhammer^® Online: Age of Reckoning™

I'm the audio director here at Mythic Entertainment, and as such I'm responsible for the audio design for the game. Additionally, I wrote all the music and produced many of the sound effects.

Well, that's the key - "massive". Without some sort of style guide, for both music and sound effects, we'd run the risk of getting completely lost along the way. So, yes...in the early stages of development some ground rules were laid out to keep all audio in line with the Warhammer IP. I suppose the overarching theme (which extends beyond just audio) is one of gleeful and pervasive WAR, with a pinch of black comedy. So the music and sound effects can be very dark and intense, but always tempered with a shot of levity and wink-winking at the player, to keep things fun.

Most definitely. There are six distinct races in the game and each has its own highly unique and tightly defined style. Every aspect of the music - orchestration choices, melodic content & pitch sets, rhythmic & metric considerations, etc. - all get mapped to the races in slightly different ways. So at one end of the spectrum you'll have a race with lilting, string-based, diatonic, etheral music...and at the other extreme you'll have a race whose music is nothing but smashing and scraping bits of metal over pounding drums, disembodied voice effects, and an orchestra sounding like cats being drawn-and-quartered. I took great care to make sure that any given piece of music would be easily identified with the race it was composed for.

The sound design, and just the sheer visceral nature of films like Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, and a whole slew of modern-day hyperkinetic zombie & horror movies hits home with me. I try and get that sort of grimace-inducing audio into the game where appropriate. But of course - keeping in line with the above - all that is colored by the likes of Monty Python, the Evil Dead series, and your basic repertoire of fart jokes. As far as games go, I've always wanted our MMO to sound more like a shooter - since I was the guy playing Half Life when my friends were playing Everquest. And as for books go, I never touch the stuff.

The music of Chaos has to be my favorite, since it is the most abrasive, out-there kind of stuff - the type of music I would write if left to my own devices anyway, but I somehow managed to convince folks to let me put it in the game. And the "Hellcannon", the Artillery of Chaos that fires the souls of the dead in a spew of firey goo...that's a good one.

We've got a really powerful system for "painting" the world with sound - a tightly-knit and constantly evolving mix of music, ambient sound, and the sounds of the objects and events around you. As a player moves through the world, they will encounter an infinite variety of situational environments, defined by things like: what races are present (i.e. Dwarfs and/or greenskins), what is taking place (i.e. combat, farming), terrain type (i.e. haunted forest, bustling hamlet), what time of day it is, etc. All this data intersects to define what exactly the player will be hearing while standing at that one spot. So the audio really evolves as the player goes from one place to the next. "Immersive" is the word, I believe.

3D audio of course helps you locate threats / enemies / friends / objects / whatever. Additionally, as part of the system described above, you can hear the distant sounds of things unseen - a battle raging over that far hill to the west, or a tower bell tolling from the south, for example. Those sorts of sounds aren't canned, just played to create a mood; if you follow the sound you will indeed find its source, with the sound changing over time as you approach. It's sort of the audio equivalent of LOD swapping - when you're far away from something that's bloody huge, you'll hear the "very far away" version of that sound. And as you draw nearer, you'll hear the "little bit closer now" version of the sound. We've found in some cases this is more effective and realistic sounding than depending on real-time filtering / echoing / attenuation for distance...though we do that too of course.

We're using EAX to help define our interior spaces, to give them a unique sense of place. I guess that's just a fancy way of saying location-based usage of "reverb" and "delay". Additionally we're using a variety of distance and occlusion based filters to help vary the timbre of a sound as the player and / or the sound source move through the world.