14 DAY TRIAL // Mass Effect 3 is set to launch, in about a week, one of the most expected titles of the year, and the development team working on the science-fiction-powered action and role-playing mix says that all aspects of the game have been carefully calibrated to satisfy the fan base and attract new players.
Speaking to VG247, Robyn Théberge, the associate product manager in charge of audio, user interface and visual effects for Mass Effect 3, said, “I think that audio in video games is definitely something that’s under-appreciated.
“You notice if the audio’s bad because it’s almost intrusive to your experience, but if it’s a good audio, it’s often under-appreciated because you don’t notice it because you’re too immersed in the story and the emotion of it all.”
The developer added the she could not provide an accurate estimate of how many hours the team spent recording and setting up the audio for the game, but it likely ran into the thousand space.
She further mentioed, “The score, the sound effects, it really is what sells a lot of things, especially early on. The development team will request to get sounds in early so they can tell how it’s going to work with that creature reveal, things like that, weapons and powers – you don’t know how it’s going to be in the actual experience until the audio makes it in the game.”
Robyn Théberge added that players might not realize it but a lot of the alien voices they hear in the Mass Effect series are actually those of the engineers working on the audio side of the game, with a layer of sound manipulation on top to make them sound foreign and weird.
It seems that even animals, like cats and dogs, are recorded and their samples then manipulated to come back in the game as the out-of-this-world sound of the fearsome thresher maws that players found in the second Mass Effect game.
Mass Effect 3 launches on March 6 on the PC, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 in North America and three days later in Europe.