Making the Sounds of Star Wars™ Battlefront™ II

“Sound is 50 percent of the movie-going experience.”

This principle is epitomized by one of the richest and most recognizable audio libraries in entertainment history – that of Star Wars™. It’s not only the iconic scores, it’s just as much the sounds of a firing blaster, an igniting lightsaber, and a roaring TIE fighter that are firmly embedded in pop-culture’s collective hive-mind.

Honoring this legacy in Star Wars™ Battlefront™ II was key for the game’s release, and has been an ongoing effort throughout the two-plus years of content updates.

Adopting existing sounds from the Lucasfilm archives is, of course, at the foundation, but there are many creative methods an audio designer needs to utilize in transferring the soundscape of Star Wars into a video game. Often, to meet the unique additions and requirements of the interactive environments presented, the audio team needs to create – or recreate – a sound from scratch.

Using the recent release of Battlefront II’s The Rise of Skywalker content and the earlier addition of the Clone Wars era planet Felucia as examples, we’re aiming to give you an idea of this underlying creation process.

Creating Weapon Sounds for The Rise of Skywalker Update

A callback to methods of old brought life to some of our most recent additions for our The Rise of Skywalker Update.

Back in the seventies, the sound designers of the original films recorded the blaster sounds used in Star Wars by hitting the wires securing a radio transmission tower. Last summer, true to tradition, the DICE audio team recorded similar sounds when coming across an electricity pole during a hike in a Stockholm nature reserve.

The idea was to expand our own game’s Star Wars vocabulary, all while staying true to the source. Here are some examples from the recording:

The sounds were later used for the secondary firing modes of the new Sith trooper and First Order jet trooper blasters:

Another reinforcement inspired by the final installment of the Skywalker saga is the Ovissian Gunner. Since this is not a reinforcement character in the film, DICE had to create most of the audio, surrounding this character, on the battlefront because there was no battle audio to pull from for this unit.

In discussion with the game designers on how the character should feel, the audio team gave the gunner’s sentry a worn quality. Creating a spinning sound with a lot of friction gave the impression that something isn’t sitting quite right in the barrel.

This was achieved by recording a chatter ring – a metal ring with smaller beads on it that are spun around. The recording was pitched down and instantly created a great base for the sturdy Ovissian’s weapon of choice.

Here’s how the initial recording sounded:    

The pitched down version:    

The final version found in-game:

Laying the Foundation of Felucia’s Environment Soundscape

Jumping from one era to the other, creating the sounds of the strange and hostile world of Felucia – as introduced to Star Wars Battlefront II in September last year – presented another unique challenge.

This planet made a brief appearance in Star Wars™: Revenge of the Sith™ and was explored further in the Clone Wars series. But with its arrival in Star Wars Battlefront II, its hazardous, fungal-covered surface was comprehensively explorable for the first time in high definition.

The audio team had to create something that was believable yet alien, while maintaining a Star Wars feel to it, and without an expansive sound library to extract from.

For starters, the larger four-channel audio bed areas are at the basis of Felucia’s audio landscape. They were crafted by twisting real nature sounds into Felucian variants, again following Star Wars traditions and proven methods used for other locations in Star Wars Battlefront II.

These underlying layers include recordings of established biomes with anything sticking out – like a constant cicada tone – removed. The sounds were also taken down in pitch by an octave or so, making them damper and fitting for a moist and humid environment. This provides an impression of extending the reverb and space, adding another layer of mystery to the location.

The Felucian spore plants – the clock-like flora dotted around the surface – are embedded in this layer, too. Their sounds derive from the characteristic clicking call of a toucan – edited of course – processed with a pitched down (to increase the plants’ perceived size) vacuum cleaner tube IR reverb! The result sounded as if the alien plants are calling out. To each other? To attract prey? For mating? Who knows!    

Another prominent species in the Felucian flora are the giant tentacle-like plants scattered across the fungus forest. They are translucent, and always swinging seemingly on their own accord. In the sound design, the DICE audio team wanted to convey some sort of organic process going on in these plants – they might have eaten something, growing their spores inside, or digesting whatever they suck up from the ground. Using a squishy, gel-filled toy and some slime, this is roughly what they came up with:

The Guttural Ambiance of the Felucian Sarlacc Pit

The dead sarlacc as seen on Felucia was massive enough to get its own ambiance. A vile creature to start with, being slowly digested in its own gut flora doesn’t make it much more pleasant. This particular decomposition process is conveyed through coats of rotting and bubbling muds, some further processed bits from an existing sarlacc sound set, plus a variety of stomach, digestion, and hunger pang type sounds – all finished off with sublayers of sea lion groans and flappy guttural grunts.

Yuck!

Exploring the Sounds of Felucian Animals, Plants, and More

To add nuance and character to the quad layers, positioned sounds of wildlife, plants, and other things flourishing on Felucia were needed. Here, the audio team utilized a variety of approaches.

One was to take the sounds you’d expect in a comparable real-life environment and re-create them with other sources – like using the human voice, or a cello bow – to achieve something familiar-yet-different.

Another method was to delve into the world of unusual or in other ways interesting animals – bird chirps proved to be particularly useful.

Then, a large chunk was developed through pure experimentation, where an interesting bit would be stretched, shortened, bent, or applied with vocoder effects.

The below examples are all performed by members of the DICE sound design team with their voices. Here are some sounds that the audio team likes to refer to as “party tricks”, ranging from squawks to high-pitched vocalizations and pops:

And here is the final, in-game sound, representing the selected parts of the Felucian wildlife:

Here’s a whistle, best described as resembling a low and slow bird trill:

It resulted in this final bit in-game, representing an unknown alien bird:

Another method was to excite everyday items – like a metal coat hanger and various reeds used to support plants – with a cello bow. This turned out to have many qualities of an insect with some metallic connotations:

Playing it at double speed and adding a ring modulator made it sound like an alien bug, wings in full swing. Here’s the final in-game sound:

As mentioned, the cicada tone was removed from the soundscape’s base layer. But the audio team couldn’t help creating their own version of it – with a squeaky toy! Here’s how it sounds in its raw form:

This was pitched up a lot, but it still sounded too earthlike. The unique thing with this particular squeaky toy, however, was that depending on how it was shaken, it would almost sound like words or melodies. This conveyed a more intelligent form of life than a cicada, while still reminiscent of its inspiration:

Putting It All Together

In the end, all the individual sounds – some of which are exemplified above – come together to create a coherent albeit weird and interesting soundscape, where each area is made distinctive through the use of sound (video captured from the PC version of the game):

If your appetite for knowledge on how Star Wars Battlefront II is made still isn’t quelled, we have a few more articles ready for you to digest:

How AI Has Evolved Star Wars Battlefront II
Animating Anakin Skywalker
The Concept Art of Star Wars Battlefront II
Living World and the Battle Beyond
The Making of Geonosis
The Making of a Hero
The Creation of Ewok Hunt
Visual Effects in Star Wars Battlefront II

This article was written with the input and insight from Martin Wöhrer, Simon Lindskog, and Ben Minto, all members of the DICE audio team who created the sounds of The Rise of Skywalker Update and Felucia in Star Wars Battlefront II.

–Daniel Steinholtz (Follow Daniel on Twitter @dsteinholtz)

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