Trion had their 22nd May 2015 Friday Livestream where they talked about Sound and Voice Acting in RIFT.

Click here for a replay of the 22nd May 2015 Livestream video on twitch.tv.

Legend:
Black/Normal Text = Livestream Summary.
[Dark Blue Text] = My own comments. i.e. May not be indicative of actual content.

Trion had their 22nd May 2015 Friday Livestream with Community Manager Eric “Ocho” Cleaver, Senior Game Designer Nicholas “Captain Cursor” McDowell, Sound Designer Jason Clark and Environment Artist Anthony Reis.

Table of Contents:

• Sounds and Voice Acting
• Player Questions
• New Warfront Announcers
• Livestream Giveaways

As always, everything can be subject to change prior to the content hitting Live.

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Sounds and Voice Acting

Sound Designer Jason Clark went over a bit of how sound is produced in RIFT.

Jason Clark attended sound/recording school, interned at Lucas Arts and has also worked at other companies like Activision. He has been with Trion Worlds since 2010. His tools of the trade include Sound Forge and Audiokinetic Wwise.

Sounds in Games

Games are a non-linear experience. As such, sounds need to be dynamic. The same NPC needs to have multiple lines and even their sound effects (such as combat sounds) need to vary. Thus, different techniques are used to vary the sounds so that you experience different sounds each time you interact with an NPC.

• In order to do so, they incorporate the random silence so that when you’ve got 20 invasions on you, you aren’t drowned in shouts and combat sounds.
• There are also sound adjustments for the scale of mobs so larger mobs sound more powerful, but very small mobs don’t sound like they’re squeaking.

Specific Sounds

Jason went over a few specific sounds and how they came about:

Vaiyuu Mount Sound

The Vaiyuu mount’s sounds (known internally as “Gargazelle”) is actually made up of two different mounts’ sounds:

• The ‘head’ (or start) of every sound comes from Tartagon mounts (known internally as “Doopah”).
• The ‘tail’ (or end) of every sound comes from Yarnosaur mounts.

The technique used for the Vaiyuu mounts involves splitting each sound into ‘heads’ and ‘tails’, combining them at random to create the Vaiyuu’s sound.

Yrlwalach Sounds

• Jason wanted to make the sounds he makes ‘multi-dimensional’. The idea was to make it so that you would hear him from behind you, in front of you and all around you. Unfortunately didn’t pan out.

Iron Maiden Sounds

• Jason used guitar pedals to create the Iron Maiden’s ‘metal cage skirt-twisting’ sound.

Nightmare Rift Sounds

• A lot of Trion staff were asked to produce laughs, screams and whispers for the Nightmare Rift. Can you spot CM Ocho’s laughter?
• Lines from Robert Frost’s poem “The Fear” were read out in a scary voice by various staff, then cut up into pieces and tweaked to produce the muffled speech that you can sometimes here in the distance.
• Sometimes the sounds are happening in front of you, behind you or even coming right behind your head.
• Jason tried adding a death metal guitar roar in there, but it turned out to be too loud. Instead, replaced with a broken, low “aaaaa” throaty sound of various tones.

Samples of the sounds can be heard at 39min 20secs into the livestream video.

Tarken Glacier Sounds

• Tarken Glacier is supposed to be the opposite of Iron Pine Peak. IPP was kind of like a ‘Winter Wonderland’ since although there was snow, it still had trees, woodland creatures/etc. It was very much alive.
• Tarken Glacier is mostly dead and desolate. There’s no birds. You will occasionally hear a far-off roar and the sound of wind is a lot harsher, and colder.
• In Frysfall Trench, you can hear the cold wind blowing overhead above the trench.

Bottomtown Disco Sounds

• “Shake your Soul” chorus used with various staff members helping out.
• Most sounds are created by the staff, although some (like ‘blizzard’ sound) is bought from sound libraries.
• Most music comes from an external source, although the Bottomtown Disco music was internally generated.

Allthea Sounds

• Allthea is the mermaid that sings the Sirens’ Songs.
• Voiced by Rebecca Schweitzer.

At 27min 55sec into the livestream video, you can hear Rebecca singing with piano-only, without any synthesizers or other effects.

Lady Glasya Sounds

• Lady Glasya is a daughter of the Lord of Fire.
• Trion wanted to make her sound demonic and powerful.
• Originally she only had 5-10 lines, but ended up with 50+ lines. Originally she was only meant to be voiced for the zone event “Bloodfire Army”, but ended up having her story expanded in Goboro Reef and further in her own dungeon, Gyel Fortress.
• Voiced by Cissy Jones.
• Voice was processed in two different ways, reversed, recombined and processed some more.

At 30min 50sec into the livestream video, you can hear the raw audio of Lady Glasya’s lines. Trion then compares this to Lady Glasya’s lines after it has been synthesized.

Revelation Imp Sounds

• The Revelation Imps read out the Revelations of Ananke verses.
• Voiced by Eric Newson (sp?)
• ~130 verses that he had to read.
• Captain Cursor calls these types of sounds ‘loudspeaker’ lines, and you’ll see a few of them quoting lines in-game as you walk past them.

At 32min 36sec into the livestream video, his raw audio is played.

Revelations of Akylios Sounds

• The Revelations of Akylios sounds can be heard from an achievement reward for killing all the special ‘Echoes’ mobs twice in Moonshade Highlands.
• Mike Hansen’s idea.

Sound file sample at 33min 45sec.

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New Warfront Announcers

Some new Warfront Announcers are coming! The following were mentioned:

• Lady Glasya
• Finric
• Cosmologist Mann
• Atrophinius

Cosmologist Mann will talk about the futility of war whilst you are in your warfront. Rather than use a standard script (i.e. “invincible”, “first blood”), Trion decided to play around with Cosmologist Mann. He’ll end up ranting as you do stuff in warfronts.

They also adopted this approach with Finric, which is why you’ll hear her say “You Mammal’ed it!” and “Skelfaluyah!”

Atrophinius will be the next warfront announcer being worked on once Captain Cursor has time to voice his warfront announcements.

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Player questions

Will Players Get a Voice?

They tried it initially, but it was very distracting and took away the idea that the character was themselves. Plus, you’d need multiple voices because players will settle on a voice that they didn’t really like, but was better than the others.

Is Music Made In-House?

Some of it. i.e. Bottomdown Disco music. Most is made by Inon Zur. Inon Zur has produced music for Dragon Age: Inquisition, Everquest, Dragon’s Dogma, Prince of Persia, Lineage II, TERA and Dragon Age II to name a few.

Trion sends Inon Zur samples of what they want and concept art for inspiration and Inon Zur sends them pieces. This is done off-site.

How Did Finric Get His/Her Pitch Sliding?

You’ll notice that Finric has a strange way of speaking where his/her voice goes up and down seemingly randomly.

Captain Cursor has stated that they wanted Finric to be unique. They did research on fish and a variety of other stuff and had multiple auditions of the character from various people. They tried a French accent, Russian accent, a girl reading in a male voice/etc.

In the end, after much experimentation, Finric is how he/she is today.

Finric’s voice actor is Andrew Chaikin. He just knew where/when the voice needed to ‘drop’.

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Livestream Giveaways

Livestream Channel Giveaways

During the Livestream, a handful of livestream chat channel viewers received:

• 1x 4th Anniversary Arclight Rider Mount to 5 livestream viewers.
• 1x Ultimate Nightmare Edition Pack to 1 lucky livestream viewer!

Congratulations to all the winners!

(From Left to Right: Ocho, Captain Cursor, Jason Clark and Anthony Reis)

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Some interesting information about how the sound and voice acting is produced for RIFT! Also, look forward to possible Lady Glasya, Finric, Cosmologist Mann and Atrophinius Warfront Announcers in the future!

Past Livestream Summaries can be accessed here.