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BlizzCon 2026 | World of Sound Design | Full Panel
Blizzard Entertainment
Overview
This panel explores the multifaceted world of sound design in video games, moving beyond music to encompass the creation of immersive environments, impactful character abilities, and monstrous creatures. Sound designers from World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch share their creative processes, demonstrating how they record, process, and implement sounds. The discussion highlights techniques ranging from modular synthesis for ambient wind to using everyday objects like shammis and trampolines for unique sound effects. It emphasizes the importance of sound in conveying a game's atmosphere, enhancing gameplay, and bringing characters to life, showcasing how abstract concepts are translated into tangible auditory experiences.
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Chapters
- Sound design in games is often an overlooked art form; its success lies in its subtlety, making players believe what they hear matches what they see.
- The panel aims to demystify sound design by explaining recording techniques, sound selection, processing methods, and creative problem-solving.
- The panel features sound designers from World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch, offering diverse perspectives.
Understanding the core principles of sound design helps appreciate the depth and complexity involved in creating immersive game worlds.
- Ambient sound design for World of Warcraft has evolved from simple stereo files in Classic WoW to sophisticated 3D positional audio in modern titles.
- WoW Forever aims to blend classic WoW's sound philosophy with modern immersion techniques, adding positional audio without overwhelming the original feel.
- Designing ambience for a new zone like the Drowned City involves defining the narrative (hostile, mysterious, eerie) and the desired player emotion.
This chapter illustrates how game audio evolves with technology and design philosophy, directly impacting player immersion and emotional response to game environments.
The Drowned City ambience is built using three categories: base wind tones, periodic ominous layers, and game object sounds tied to specific in-game elements.
- Creating realistic wind sounds is challenging due to uncontrollable environmental factors, leading designers to synthesize them using modular synthesizers.
- Modular synths allow for creative manipulation of white noise through parameters like pitch, filtering, and reverb to mimic natural wind characteristics.
- Ominous layers for a dungeon like the Drowned City can be created using unique instruments like a daxophone, processed with reverb to enhance its eerie quality.
This section demonstrates how abstract concepts like 'wind' or 'ominous' are translated into sound through technical synthesis and creative processing, often using unconventional tools.
Josh uses a modular synthesizer, manipulating white noise with a joystick to control pitch and filter position, then adding stereo reverb to create a believable wind sound.
- Specific environmental details, like a large ship in the Drowned City, require dedicated sound design to maintain immersion.
- Custom tools, like the 'rope creaker,' are built to generate specific sounds like wood and rope stress, even if they are prone to breaking.
- Sound design must accommodate gameplay, ensuring that crucial elements like player and boss abilities are not drowned out during combat.
This highlights the importance of granular detail in sound design and the practical consideration of balancing immersive soundscapes with clear gameplay audio cues.
A custom-built 'rope creaker' tool is used to generate the sounds of a large ship, though it famously breaks during the demonstration.
- Sound designers often find unique sonic potential in unexpected objects and environments, such as a trampoline in a Foley room.
- Scraping various objects across a trampoline surface can yield interesting sci-fi-like whooshes and textures, useful for vehicles or mechanical sounds.
- These 'found sounds' can have a long lifespan, being reused across multiple projects and IPs over many years.
This showcases the creative resourcefulness of sound designers, demonstrating how everyday items can become valuable assets in a sound library through experimentation.
Recording sounds made by scraping various objects across a trampoline yielded useful sci-fi 'whoosh' sounds that have been used in multiple Blizzard games, including Overwatch.
- A character's sound design is crucial for establishing their identity, drawing from qualities like charisma, agility, and aggression.
- Real-world recordings, like those of fire dancers, are processed extensively to create unique ability sounds, layered with other textures like distorted cloth flaps.
- Synthesized sounds, including screechy white noise and high-end sizzles, are often layered with naturalistic recordings to achieve a distinct character sound profile.
This illustrates how sound design contributes directly to character personality and gameplay feedback, blending organic and synthetic elements to create memorable audio signatures.
En'gals flame effects combine processed recordings of actual fire dancers, distorted cloth flaps, and synthesized screeching and white noise.
- Sound designers often 'hoard' sounds, saving recordings for potential future use, which can be a valuable long-term practice.
- Personal recordings, like those of a pet cat, can hold deep meaning and find unexpected applications in game audio.
- Processed cat purrs can form the basis of unique engine sounds, demonstrating how intimate recordings can be transformed into functional game elements.
This emphasizes the long-term value of sound libraries and how personal connections to recordings can lead to deeply meaningful and innovative sound design.
The sound designer used recordings of his deceased cat, Milo, processed to create the idling and movement sounds for the Jetpack Cat character in Overwatch.
- Monster sound design in Diablo involves creating texture, motion, and impact sounds to convey a sense of gore and power.
- Everyday items, like a dirty shammy (chamois cloth), can be used to create disgusting, wet, and impactful monster sounds.
- Techniques like granular synthesis and Doppler effects are used to transform basic recordings into complex, evolving, and dynamic monster audio.
This chapter reveals the creative process behind designing terrifying monster sounds, showing how simple household items and advanced audio processing combine to create visceral horror.
A dirty shammy is used to create wet, squelching textures and impactful sounds for a Diablo monster, processed through granular synthesis and Doppler effects.
Key takeaways
- Effective sound design is often imperceptible, seamlessly integrating with visuals to enhance immersion.
- The evolution of game audio technology allows for increasingly sophisticated spatialization and environmental soundscapes.
- Creative sound design often involves repurposing everyday objects and unconventional recording methods.
- Synthesizers and digital processing are powerful tools for creating unique sounds that cannot be captured through recording alone.
- The 'gore factor' in games like Diablo is achieved through meticulous layering of textures, motion, and impact sounds.
- Sound libraries are valuable assets, with recordings often finding new life in projects years after their initial creation.
- Sound design is a non-linear process involving constant iteration, experimentation, and re-evaluation.
- The goal of sound design is to evoke specific emotions and provide clear gameplay feedback to the player.
Key terms
Sound DesignAmbienceFoleyModular SynthesizerGranular SynthesisDoppler EffectWhite NoiseReverbPositional AudioGame EngineAudio EngineTransient Designer
Test your understanding
- How has the approach to ambient sound design in World of Warcraft changed over time, and what are the key differences between classic and modern implementations?
- Describe the process of creating a believable wind sound using a modular synthesizer, including the key parameters and effects involved.
- What are the three main categories used to break down the creation of ambient sound for a game zone, and how do they contribute to the overall atmosphere?
- Explain how unconventional sound sources, like trampolines or pet recordings, can be utilized and processed to create unique and useful game audio assets.
- How do sound designers approach creating the 'gore factor' for monsters in games like Diablo, and what techniques are employed to achieve these visceral sounds?