Best Sound Design and Audio in Video Games (Not Soundtracks)

[JZStudios]

10 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Well, it's not impressive, but it is very useful

And yeah, rocksmith was a great idea.  I think they missed the mark in some ways though.  Every other song seems to be slightly out of standard tuning, and rather than just adjusting the song to match A440, they make you detune your guitar to match the song.  Colossal inconvenience, totally kills the experience.  That and song selection (library size) will be a perpetual problem for any game like that.

You could sort songs by tuning, but it was kind of annoying how many were slightly different, but that's probably how the actual tuning is, so I can see why they did it. Or maybe they used a capo or something. Thought the song list was decent sized, and there's metric shit tons of DLC song packs, which are still being released which kind of confuses me. Wish at the very least they'd let you use your own cheaper, higher quality cable.

9 hours ago, kilgore_T said:

valve games...all of them

 

alien isolation

 

doom 2016

 

chuchel

 

5 hours ago, Raskolnikov said:

Age of Empires 1 & 2.

Total Annihilation.

You guys kind of missed my whole point about "What do you like about it, and why do you think it's the best sound design?" rather than just posting random games.

5 hours ago, Chevy_Monsenhor said:

The OG Quake with the Trent Reznor soundtrack, just amazing, everything fits in that game, the theme, the enemies (and the sounds they make), the guns, just everything. Its even better in engine source ports like GLQuake and Quakespasm.

 

Also, Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga, although not an amazing game to be played, it was more of a tech demo for the Amiga, with artwork by Roger Dean and music composed by David Whittaker.

 

Despite the obvious compression artifacts, the Quake sound design is actually pretty decent. You can kind of tell what the sounds are really supposed to actually sound like, and it's better than Call of Duty.

That Amiga game soundtrack is certainly interesting, but I don't really think it fits the bill for best audio and sound design. Otherwise I still pretty much adore the theme from The Last of Us, but the rest of the sound design in that game isn't anything amazing.

2 hours ago, AlexTheGreatish said:

I'm going to chime in again and say Hollow Knight, mostly because the soundtrack is awesome (it's my writing a video music most days)

 

 

Another soundtrack!

As much as it infuriated me and I gave up on it, Ori and the Blind forest has some pretty great music too. Unfortunately I guess I suck at platformers, but that game seems to be expecting perfection in precision when the game really just isn't that precise...

2 hours ago, Volbet said:

I don't really care for emulators. I like the actual console experience. 

Although, Eternal Darkness seems like the kind of game that would see a Virtual Console release at some point, so I might meet it half-way if that's the case. 

 

I can assure you that the Sanity system is better than the crunching leafs in Amnesia. That system is but a pale imitation:

 

Yeah, I checked that last night. Some interesting ideas, but not sure it would work today. Most TVs now don't have that big blocky green font.  Kind of surprising how many of them there are too, but I guess it wouldn't really take that long to implement all of them.

[Drak3]

Can't beat Pong.

[Bramimond]

The way to impress me is through overcoming limitations with ingeniousness. That's why I initially thought my answer to this question would be something from GameBoy. There's a decade worth of games and some of the soundtracks really make you wonder how they could be accomplished given the limitations.

 

Surprisingly, though, nothing really came to mind. At all. Nothing but a single piece of music from a kind of niche 2007 game. It's a piece that unlike most video game music, you can listen to without the game and just concentrate on the music and not do anything else and come out with a richer experience than during playing the game. It really manages to resonate with me for some reason.

 

Try it out for yourself, if you care to.

[Zando_]

On 9/13/2018 at 4:21 PM, AlexTheGreatish said:

One of my favorites is Dirt Rally, however they recorded the engine sounds was awesome.  

^^^ Dirt Rally sounds great. Rise of the Tomb Raider, the 2013 Tomb Raider (haven't played Shadow so IDK if that's as good but I assume it is), and most DICE games also have really good sound design. 

 

EDIT: as for reasons why I like them:

 

Dirt Rally: Like Alex said, the engine sounds are just so damn good. 

 

Tomb Raider and ROTTR: The sound design works near perfectly with the graphics and animations most of the time, be it crunching through snow, jogging through grass and brush, swimming, etc. You just seem to hear what you're doing, and it has a pretty darn good set of ambient sounds, be that the multiple animals running around, wind, NPCs talking, and all that. Plus the music when you enter tombs is pretty awesome. 

 

DICE Games: I've played Battlefield 4's campaign, and the BF1 one and some multiplayer, as well as both of the Battlefront reboots. Weapon sounds are pretty darn good, they've got your gear jingling around and all that, and just like in Tomb Raider it (especially in the newer games) works perfectly with the animations and what your character and those in the background are doing. 

 

 

[EPENEX]

Battlefield 3 and 4, don't know about the newer ones, haven't played them- they're trash gameplay wise. Little Big Planet 3 also had some good music and sound design, such as this level where the music kinda muffles when you're in water

 

 

and this one just has good music

 

 

[JZStudios]

4 hours ago, Bramimond said:

The way to impress me is through overcoming limitations with ingeniousness. That's why I initially thought my answer to this question would be something from GameBoy. There's a decade worth of games and some of the soundtracks really make you wonder how they could be accomplished given the limitations.

 

Surprisingly, though, nothing really came to mind. At all. Nothing but a single piece of music from a kind of niche 2007 game. It's a piece that unlike most video game music, you can listen to without the game and just concentrate on the music and not do anything else and come out with a richer experience than during playing the game. It really manages to resonate with me for some reason.

 

Try it out for yourself, if you care to.

You can really do a lot with 8 bit bleeps and tones if you know what you're doing.

 

Granted, I don't know how "true" that is to actual 8-bit, but you get the point. Even if it's buzzy you can still get the same notes.

The piano soundtrack you linked is pretty darn decent too. Still straying away from my initial concept of game audio, not game soundtracks.  Kind of a different thing entirely.

4 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

^^^ Dirt Rally sounds great. Rise of the Tomb Raider, the 2013 Tomb Raider (haven't played Shadow so IDK if that's as good but I assume it is), and most DICE games also have really good sound design. 

 

EDIT: as for reasons why I like them:

 

Dirt Rally: Like Alex said, the engine sounds are just so damn good. 

 

Tomb Raider and ROTTR: The sound design works near perfectly with the graphics and animations most of the time, be it crunching through snow, jogging through grass and brush, swimming, etc. You just seem to hear what you're doing, and it has a pretty darn good set of ambient sounds, be that the multiple animals running around, wind, NPCs talking, and all that. Plus the music when you enter tombs is pretty awesome. 

 

DICE Games: I've played Battlefield 4's campaign, and the BF1 one and some multiplayer, as well as both of the Battlefront reboots. Weapon sounds are pretty darn good, they've got your gear jingling around and all that, and just like in Tomb Raider it (especially in the newer games) works perfectly with the animations and what your character and those in the background are doing. 

 

 

Haven't tried the Tomb Raider series, not quite sure it's my cuppa tea. Think the game just doesn't look distinct enough from other games like Uncharted or even Far Cry to an extent. But it seems like more and more AAA games are starting to back into trying to get better audio into their games via ambiance and little background sounds.

 

DICE games still sadden me, because I agree that their sound design in terms of recording and audio reproduction is pretty top notch but their stereo mixing and spatialization is frankly well below par. It works... okay on headphones but on an actual surround system it falls pretty short. They add an occlusion to sound sources behind you on stereo and headphones which helps you understand in that scenario, but if you just listen in the quiet to an audio source moving behind you, you can hear the occlusion just sort of "flip" on. It's also completely unnecessary on 5.1 or 7.1 systems. Not that that matters since the game only uses 4.0 anyways...

3 hours ago, EPENEX said:

Battlefield 3 and 4, don't know about the newer ones, haven't played them- they're trash gameplay wise. Little Big Planet 3 also had some good music and sound design, such as this level where the music kinda muffles when you're in water

 

 

and this one just has good music

 

 

All of that audio sounds quite muffled and compressed... The underwater just sounds more muffled. Probably mostly the video though.

[EPENEX]

2 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

All of that audio sounds quite muffled and compressed... The underwater just sounds more muffled. Probably mostly the video though.

It's definitely just the video.

[JZStudios]

Guess I'll also mention that I've been playing Dying Light and Yakuza 0 lately.

 

Dying Light has some decent sounds, and the guns are actually nice and punchy, if not extremely realistic. The sounds they make mixed with the sub thump is rather satisfying. The surround mix is basic, and effective enough, but what really grinds my gears is the ambiance soundtrack. And it's just that, a soundtrack. There's a sort of constantly looping audio track with some random noises and zombie groans, and there's some pretty loud groans that come out of the right speaker that make me constantly think there's a zombie on my right but there's never anything there. I've now trained myself to recognize that looping sound and ignore it. Another sort of annoyance is sometimes you enter mission specific buildings that are completely void of zombies, being either empty or having human enemies, but it still plays zombie moans/screams in the ambiance. I don't know why but it bothers me, there's nothing in there making that sound, so why's that sound being played?

There's also runner zombies that play the same exact sound file EVERY TIME they spawn, a loud, annoying stereo only recording of loud screaming and banging on a door before breaking through. It has no relevance to where or how they spawn, or how far away. Crawling through a window, out of a sewer pipe, spawning in mid air, etc... all play the same sound file, and in some areas they just spawn like crazy so the sound file just keeps looping.

The biggest issue with the audio in this game is a pretty severe lack of samples There's only 1 or 2 samples for a LOT of the things going on in the game. Another issue is that a lot of the samples aren't mono, their stereo, so using speakers or headphones always produces the same sounds regardless of position in the world. It's kind of amplified in surround sound with none of the ambiance being spread around, and noticeably static when you look around.

 

Yakuza 0 is nothing... particularly amazing, but overall it's quite good. The city has lots of ambiance placed in world, it has proper surround support, and all the recordings are high quality. It's mostly people talking though, so nothing really amazing or superb really stands out.

[Okjoek]

Pokemon Emerald

 

Far more recently, I really love what they did to the World of Tanks soundtracks

Though I admit I miss the old Polyushka Polye theme

 

[JZStudios]

1 minute ago, Okjoek said:

Pokemon Emerald

 

Far more recently, I really love what they did to the World of Tanks soundtracks

 

Think I'm gonna edit the title to No Soundtracks.

I'm looking for in game sound design, not soundtracks.