The Game Audio Tutorial

3

Making it Sound Real

Many game environments are imitations or at least hyper-real versions of environments that might be found in the real world. Therefore, a player will have pretty clear expectations of what they will sound like, having experienced these environments in some form before. Even if the game is set in a fantasy world, the player will still have expectations about the way sound will behave that has been developed through a lifetime of experience in the physical world. Although we shouldn’t always necessarily focus on realism (see Chapter 6), the way things sound needs to be consistent and believable if the player is going to become immersed in the game world.

For a long time, game audio has sought to accurately represent real-world ...