Treyarch has built a brand new audio engine for Black Ops 3, preview of soundtrack released

Forbes recently got the chance to meet up with the composer for Black Ops 3’s soundtrack, Jack Wall, and talk about the changes in the audio that the team is bringing to Black Ops 3, over what they did in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. According to Forbes, Treyarch has built a new audio engine for Black Ops 3 that now relies less on scripted events, but now are trigged based upon contextual clues.

Developer Treyarch has built an entirely new audio engine that’s designed to be less reliant on big, scripted events and allow the soundtrack and cinematic elements to trigger based on contextual clues. The team has been working to incorporate more tactical choice into the gameplay, but they’ve still got to find a way to make the bombast Call of Duty is known for fit into that more fluid setting.

“We can script in music in a number of different ways to make it more interactive depending on what the player is doing. All the cinematics in the game are driven by the engine, so it looks seamless. Sometimes we just keep music going through those moments, other times we’ll go into a new cue, but the way that we transition to the way to what was happening before into that is totally seamless, and it all happens on the fly,” he says. “Let’s say you’re in a battle situation, and when you fire the last shot — on the next bar there would be a cross fade into an outro, which takes you down to no music, and that would crossfade seamlessly so that it feels like the same piece of music. Other times we might go into a cinematic right from battle, so we put a hit right on the thing to denote that something is dramatic is happening, and then fade out into the cinematic music. It works really well — their engine is way better than it was in Black Ops 2.”

In addition, Forbes has shared a sneak peek of the new soundtrack.

SOURCE: Forbes