Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the fourth episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. Im Elizabeth Tobey, and today, Michael Curran, Audio Lead, and Geoff Knorr, Composer and Orchestrator, sit down with me to talk about the sounds and music of Civilization V and how they make the world feel living, breathing, and believable.
Michael Curran: You know when you talk about believability, it's, it's believable rather than realistic because of game play and just the kind of odd scale and things that the player needs to hear. But um, we, in previous iterations of Civ, we really only had a world ambiance for the tile that you're selected on. And it was an audio soundscape. You know, if you were centered on a forest, you got a little breeze, and leaves, and birds, and things like that little forest noises. And it was, you know, very, you know, believable forest ambiance. However as a player if you're looking at the screen you see all this other stuff around. You know we were kind of limited by what we could do and so in Civ Rev, you know, sort of wanted to help that along a little. And we did manage to put ocean waves on objects that were near the coast. So it kinda gave it a little bit more, you know, a little bit more realistic feel to it, but we were limited by the objects. So if there were no fish or there was a die resource near the coast if those weren't around, we didn't get the ocean. So in Civ V, you know, really very early on planned to try to get everything. You know, everything you could see we wanted to be able to hear it in a very realistic way. And uh, and we achieved that. So I think um, you know, it's a much more believable scene when you're looking at it.
ET: Michael talks about ambient noise the games soundscape which is something gamers may not immediately notice and appreciate when playing the game. Ambient noise, after all, is supposed to blend into the background. The way Civilization V handles these natural sounds of the world around your units, however, brings forward the sounds of the forest, the splashing of whales along the coast, the chirping of birds
And really boosts the impact of moving from tundra to icy terrain. But the realistic sounds dont stop with just nature. Battle is something that cannot be avoided in Civilization V, and having a realistic battle necessitates realistic battle sounds.
MK: Well the same sort of believable vs. real exists there too, you know? We, you know, came to Civ V with the ability to put um, individual sounds attached to the animations so that, you know, when a character in a unit puts his foot down you hear a footstep and so on. As much detail as we wanted to put into it. With Civ IV and Civ Rev, you know, if you have three units down three characters down at once doing things it's a lot of sounds firing off, OK? And it sounds pretty good, I mean I like the result of it but with Civ V we knew we were gonna have well originally we didn't really know. We knew it was gonna be a lot more um um and so we did some mockups of combat with groups of characters in a unit fighting each other. And, you know, immediately it, you know, we knew we didn't, we weren't interested in putting feet down for, you know, we just needed, you know, an overall ambiance of movement. You know, so we did these group mixes that sounded very believable for a large group fighting. And so then it was just a question of how are we gonna implement this, because as your characters die off in the unit, you might be left with two, or three, or one. And so we still needed the basic marker system. We still needed to be able to call a foot where a foot hit and you know, a gun smacking an arm. You know, all those little details still needed to be there. So um, so what we're, what we ended up with is a system that uses those all the unit characters have lots of detail synced little sounds that go with the animations but as the group has more than three characters, let's say, you know, four to ten, we drop out some of those markers and play a group sound. And then there's another group sound for a larger group. So it kinda uses a combination of both. We still need the specific sound on queue for things like gunfire or people falling and things like that. So it's a mix of both and uh, yeah I think it's a pretty good system and calls a lot less sounds.
ET: Beyond soundscapes and battle cries, there is no lack of music in Civilization V. Each empire has its own distinct musical score with many variations depending on the situation at hand. The team put an enormous amount of work into making those sounds work perfectly which each individual civilization.
MK: OK, well, you know, there are a couple things we wanted to do when we set out to, you know, come up with a good audio design for Civ V. And one thing that I've always wanted to do since I've worked on Civ games is to try to bring in more and this goes for just sound in general, the speech, rather, along with music is to really represent all the cultures, all the civs that we have in the game more equitably. Civ IV sound track was entirely western based and by error. So we want that Asian music, we want to have middle eastern and so on. And so we knew we wanted to have a much broader range of music. And in addition to that, um, you know we wanted to um, we wanted to also evoke that culture with speech. So all the leaders, we decided, would speak their own language. And so there's a real different feel for the game depending on who you play as. And so, and Jeff feel free to chime in! You give a good deal to music. Jeff and I both composed most of the music in the game that we did here in house. But anyway, getting back to the sound track design. So we have four regions in the world and that's reflected in the art too. So for each region, we have two playlists: war and peace. So when you're at peace with everybody you get the peace playlist. And when you start to be at war with another civ, it goes to the war sound track playlist. And most of that is licensed music that we've selected.
Geoff Knorr: Yeah um, well for the leaders, what Michael and I have done and well we've done most the leaders and Roland and Ian have done I think one or two. But we made these leader pieces to kind of represent the leader when they're at peace and when they're at war. And we wanted to take an actual melody from that leaders culture and make it into this kind of combine it with the western orchestra and make this really awesome representative piece of that culture. So usually the first step was just searching, trying to find what that melody is that when someone from that culture listens they'll pick it out and they'll be, yeah, that's my country. And so we wanted that sense of national pride to be there in the melodies we chose. We tried as hard as we could sometimes we end up with, you know, with ancient Rome, we end up with just little fragments that we found of stuff. So once we find something then it's just a matter of sketching things out and trying out different ethnic instruments and combining those with the symphony orchestra instruments and I think in most of my pieces the melody is more obvious in the peace when you're at peace with a leader. And then in the war piece, I'll do different things with it like invert it, or do it backwards, and do all these kind of like compositional things which maybe people will catch up when they listen, we'll see.
MK: As a player your experience is much more specific to that culture that you're playing as than it ever has been before. So when you start a game, the player will first hear their own leader's peace music and that starts the game sound track. And then when that's through, it goes through the peace playlist of that region. So if you're, you know, if you're playing as Napoleon you'll get Napoleon's peace theme, and then it'll go through a Europe peace sound track playlist, until you go to war. One of the neat things that we did with leader music here that's different from the other Civs is that it really is integrated with the sound track completely. I mean you hear the leader music in the world, you hear it in the leader screens, and, you know, hopefully it all meshes together very well. I think it does, but... But if you go to a leader screen and you might declare war and when that happens you get the leader's war music and then that would continue until it was through and then you would go through a war playlist of your region.
ET: Beyond sounds, beyond music, there was one last auditory aspect of Civilization V I wanted to know more about: The languages of the leaders. For the first time ever, when you meet a head of state, you hear them speak in their own language even if that language is a dead language by modern standards.
MK: We knew of a studio that was very good at finding just about any language you could come up with, including dead languages. And so we knew where to go to find actors for this. And so all the speech was recorded. We directed it basically Dorian N. was very involved in that and he had a good sense of the character so he did most of the directing of that. And then the artists are lip syncing the animations to it and so our involvement has not been real all that much really. Just sort of coordinating it all so it happens and then the artists are really doing everything with that.
JN: Sometimes it's really exciting to hear the different languages like I remember when we did Ramses I think it was you just listen to this guy, and he just sounds terrifying.
ET: Im sure the guys have properly illustrated how much music and sound is in Civilization V and how they are trying to push the believable world into new and different realms by immersing senses beyond sight into the game. And, if youve seen the first Civilization V trailer (which Im sure all of you have) you have already heard a slice of the game already. The music in that trailer is a slice of Elizabeths war music. So you might want to go and give the video another watch (and listen) to see how that changes things for you.
Well be back next time with the fifth episode of our podcast series, focusing on the games engine.
I usually turn those off.
