Wwise Tour 2016 - Blizzard Overwatch (5 of 7) - Gameplay Information
Game: Overwatch
Wwise Tour 2016 - Audio in Overwatch by Blizzard Entertainment. Filmed in Montreal on June 20th 2016 at Centre Phi. Presented by Scott Lawlor, Project Audio Director at Blizzard Entertainment and Tomas Neumann, Senior Software Engineer 2 at Blizzard Entertainment. Wwise by Audiokinetic. https://www.audiokinetic.com/
Conveying gameplay information via the game's audio was a very important objective in this project.
The first step was to create unique sounds related to each character. The goal was to help the player identify characters through their representative sounds. A great clip is shown in this part of the presentation which demonstrates how characters can truly be recognized by their footsteps alone.
But the core essense of this portion of the presentation exposes how they used DataFlow (their game engine system broadcasting all sorts of information such as life health, progression, time left, and how high a character is in the map) to attach game information to properties in Wwise using RTPCs, States, and sound selection, or to drive State changes for music transitions and more.
They also demonstrate how gameplay cues were all driven by RTPCs and were automatically adapting anytime a game designer would modify their timings. Having the audio designed in Wwise be completely adaptive to game information saved their sound team from having to recreate baked audio everytime the gameplay was tuned by the game designers.
In the same spirit, they showcase a series of Blend Containers in Wwise with many layers and describe the benefits of keeping them in Wwise for easy remixing and fine tuning, while remaining connected with the game.