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Richie Nieto
I finally had a chance to play some games again this weekend and was reminded of a topic that I wanted to blog about for a while.
The ability of an audio engine to attach audio files to an NPC and move them in the stereo/surround field accordingly is fantastic. It lets us know where enemies, threats and friendlies are, and it makes the experience much more realistic.
But when we get to a cinematic, that same feature actually detracts from the experience. Either in a cinematic controlled by the engine in real time or a Quicktime event playing a file previously mixed by a human, some rules that have been established by many decades of audiovisual entertainment are being broken, and not to good effect, in my opinion.
There is a practice in games to pan dialogue to each character's mouth on the screen, so in a shot with two characters having a conversation, their lines are slightly or drastically panned left and right, respective to the position of each character. This attracts attention to the sound instead of the content, and it breaks the flow of the story.
If you listen to any film by, say, Pixar or any other major studio, you'll notice that all story-relevant dialogue (not walla or incidental lines) is dead centre in the stereo/surround field, except sometimes when a character is off-screen. It doesn't matter if the characters are on the left and right side respectively, the dialogue plays in the centre. That way we the audience completely focus on what it's being said, not where it's coming from.
Some may say, "well, games are not movies", but when there is narrative happening and we can't control our character, they do become movies. Once gameplay kicks back in, the rules change again.
The solution for Quicktime events is obvious -- just mix the relevant dialogue dead centre. For engine-mixed audio, I would imagine that a snapshot that constrains divergence parameters for the relevant audio files would do the trick. I'm no expert in audio middleware, but I would be very surprised if that functionality didn't exist or couldn't be created in the popular software apps out there.
Cheers!