the sound team for Diablo IV needed to determine what a Treasure Beast might sound like. In the fiction, it's a massive, taurus-headed behemoth—complete with rows of yellowed porpoise-like teeth and a cudgel the size of a small town. It looks like something Jabba the Hutt might keep as a pet, or one of those elite mobs roaming the wilderness that you know, in the depths of your soul, cannot, and should not, be soloed. How do you honor the Treasure Beast's majesty? How do you make it sound huge and menacing, something not to be taken lightly? By delicately fondling an iron chain in front of a microphone.
You can see the action in the clip below. That's principal sound designer David Stowater sitting on his knees in front of a dense, comprehensive record collection. The mic is uniquely sensitive and designed to absorb a sweeping range of sound waves—most of which are well beyond the range our feeble human ears can perceive.
Yes, the harvested audio will be imported onto a computer and deepened, sculpted, flayed, and spliced until it fits the unforgiving grim-dark horrors of Sanctuary, but Blizzard still takes a distinctly classical approach to the aural aesthetics of Diablo IV, one that resembles the practical Hollywood filmmaking of the 1950s and '60s. The marauding demons are programmed with dangling bike chains, molten candle wax, and crushed fruits and vegetables, all of which is captured tangibly, without resorting to the freeware clips bobbing around the internet. It adds insult to injury. Not only did you wipe on the Treasure Beast, he crushed your head like a melon—literally.
“When we're recording, the last thing we want to do is break out into laughter. But it is super fun, especially when we're playing with food. We have plenty of moments where we're squeezing a fruit and it splashes and hits us in the face. We have to hold for a second, because we want to get that sound, that perfect take,” says Kris Giampa, audio director for Diablo IV. “It's a blast, and I'd never change my career.”
Giampa has worked in video game sound design for over two decades, which has given him an acutely tuned ear for artificial gore. On an average day during Diablo IV's production cycle, Giampa and the rest of the team would roll through a grocery store on the lookout for any produce that seemed like it might make an evocative noise when maimed by a knife or a hammer or a blowtorch. (Blizzard tends not to work with meat, adds Giampa, for health reasons.)
Afterwards, it's off to the hardware store for the tools of destruction. “We're looking for pipes and tubes and plungers, anything you can manipulate food with,” he says. In the booth, they'll prod and smash their aural salad, with hopes of identifying a few moments of expressive bludgeoning and disemboweling that could meld with the aesthetics of a darkened, sword-and-sorcery action RPG. They record for hours on end, even though only 10 percent of the material might make the final cut. The joy, says Giampa, is in the discovery.
“You never know what you're going to get,” he continues. “With high-frequency microphones, we retain a lot of the detail when you pitch it down really low. You get a really clean, gross, disgusting, slimy quality.”
One of Giampa's favorite discoveries came in the form of a tub of peeled tomatoes. He'd grab the skinless fruit and drop them back into the sauce, resulting in a “sloppy, smacky, gut-type” sound. In other words, it was a perfect fit for Diablo.
But Sanctuary contains more than steel broadswords and eviscerated demonic husks. People do live here too, and may God have mercy on their souls. Blizzard's casting director needs to fill out the whole expanse of this accursed realm—well beyond the soliloquies of Tyrael or the loose banter of side-quest dispensers. For instance, how does one articulate the ambient wails of unspeakable agony as your hero explores the razed villages and labyrinthine dungeons teeming with the shattered peasantry? That is what Andrea Toyias, who has been casting and directing actors at Blizzard since 2008, needed to figure out.
Sure, it's distressing to come upon a pile of twitching corpses expelling a long, tortured death rattle within the context of a fantasy RPG, but seeing performers of flesh and blood unleash that misery in a recording booth summons up its own special type of uncanny woe. Everyone in the cast needed to briefly inhabit the phantasmagoric misery of Sanctuary; to nobody's surprise, it's not a very nice place to be.
“It's one thing to say, ‘OK, make the sound of a disembodied torso attached to a pole,’ because who knows what that sounds like. So as a director, I use the words as if. Let's do it as if you just found out your entire family was murdered. Moan and sob like you're grieving the loss of your entire clan. All of your neighbors are gone, the huts are burned down, it's about capturing the emotion of that,” says Toyias, recounting the direction she was giving to her voice actors for some of the grizzliest moments in the game. “You have to have actors willing to roll-up their sleeves and dive in. I felt kind of icky afterwards. We all had to go there. We all had to go to this dark, gruesome place.”
Of course, Toyias did have one advantage as she attempted to manifest gloom in the booth. Some of the earliest sessions she captained for Diablo IV occurred during March 2020, when everyone in America was becoming accustomed to life under lockdown. In those days, all of the voice work was done remotely—with actors building makeshift insulated recording studios in their closets and basements, totally cut off from the rest of society. Toyias posits that it is a lot easier to sound like you're in hell, when everyone is kinda living in hell.
“At first I think they felt like they needed to put their game face on. And I was like, ‘Let's just talk for a second, because we're all barely hanging on right now. A lot of sessions almost started out like therapy. ‘How are you doing? How's everything?’ The game let us lean into everything that was going on around us,” she says. "It allowed us to be raw and real to a new degree. Whatever you’re feeling today? Bring it into the booth. When you hear people sobbing from loss, that’s real, because that's what was going on. It helped us get through."
So do keep that in mind as you continue your sojourns into Diablo IV. For as brutal and blood-soaked as this world appears to be, you can still hear humanity seeping through; mashed pomegranates, clinking chains, and the howls of Covid-19 isolation rumble just below the surface. At last, we finally have something in common with the Prime Evil himself.
