Wwise Tour 2016 - Blizzard Overwatch (4 of 7) - Pinpoint Accuracy

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/

While the previous video, A Clear Mix, focused on showcasing how they helped the player identify "what" and "who" their threats were, here, the challenge evolves to integrate into the equation a way for the player to easily locate "where" their threat was coming from.

To achieve this, the following concepts were used:

· Obstruction and occlusion

· Distance and space

· 3D audio

The Blizzard Entertainment audio team also made use of raycast and path diversion techniques to drive the occlusion factors that were applied per game object using RTPC curves for volume, LPF, HPF, Aux Sends, and so on.

Many sets of RTPC curves are shown in Wwise in this part of the presentation, followed by in-game examples of the system in action.

For distance and space, they made use of:

· Layered sounds

· Indoor vs outdoor variations for certain sounds

· Distance filtering

· Focus and spread

· Reverb and quad delay

And, finally, they end this portion of their presentation by talking about how they added support for Dolby Atmos for Headphones late in production, again to elevate gameplay and help players compete!