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Getting a Sense of PUBG Pt.4
Keep an ear to the ground to hear what’s coming.
Creating the most authentic game environment possible means engaging with a player’s senses in powerful, distinct ways. What makes PUBG special is how real it is—the discrete components of the game each appearing, feeling, and sounding just right. In our new Human Factors series, we’re releasing an outside interview with a different PUBG dev every month, highlighting a unique look at a specific facet of the game in context of the five senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. While you can’t—or, at least, shouldn’t—lick your screen when you play PUBG, these interviews should give you a taste of the incredible processes that make PUBG a crisp, true to life experience.
A game as strategically demanding as PUBG requires the most sophisticated soundscape possible, which means the bar for the audio teams working on the game is extremely high. Every footstep, flying bullet, or running vehicle needs an authentic, carefully curated sound effect; every ambient noise has to be intentional. Fortunately for us, in order to deliver on those tall orders, we have Kyungwon Park on our side.
Park also goes by his chosen English name, James. As stories go, it’s a good one—before he started working in sound in gaming 14 years ago, and before serving his compulsory Korean military service, Park played in a serious rock band called DRIA. “In Korean, you add ‘dria’ at the end of pronouns to make them plural,” he explains. “We wanted to show that our sound was for everyone.” So his chosen name, James, comes from one of his musical inspirations: James Hetfield of Metallica.
(I asked—several times—about getting a copy of the band’s album. “I have a master copy at home, but I won’t share,” Park laughed.)
From PUBG’s earliest days, Park has been a part of the sound group. It’s an enormous task to make great sound in any game, but PUBG presents a ton of unique challenges. “There are many things that we cover in PUBG with sound effects,” he says. “Depending on the sound we’re trying to produce, our approach is different. To make the game immersive, it’s not just about realism—sometimes, it’s actually better to have a virtual sound to make players feel like they’re in the world.”
https://www.pubg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Kar-98-Close_Far_V2.mp4
He’s talking about footsteps, which are arguably one of the most critical sound elements in the game. “You can’t really hear the sound of someone running from more than 50 meters away in real life, but in the game that helps players make strategic decisions,” Park opines. As with the rest of the game’s designers, Park and his team are focused on retaining as much realism as possible, but not at the expense of exceptional gameplay.
“For you as the player, gun sounds have to be as realistic as possible,” Park says, adding, “…but for enemies, it’s actually very different from real life.” The sound of a bullet passing you by—they call it the ‘swishing’ sound—is programmatically audible from set distances that don’t match the real world. “We design sniper shots to be heard for up to a kilometer, shotguns 700 meters, handguns to 400 meters, and so on.”
Interestingly enough, the swishing sounds were some of the hardest for the team to produce. “Overseas, it’s easy to access a shooting range so you can actually record a gun, or the swishing sound of a bullet. In Korea, that’s quite difficult,” Park explains. Their solution? They whipped a bunch of stuff at walls and recorded the sounds of various makeshift projectiles in flight, mixing those with existing sounds to recreate the sound of an in-game bullet.
Sound effect creation for games is wacky (yes, wacky is the technically correct term for it). While Park says their game is comparatively simple because they’re not trying to create surreal sounds, like spellcasting for role-playing games, they can’t just grind a vehicle against a building to get the authentic sound of crashing a car. “We couldn’t record that sound,” Park says, “…so we mixed different kinds of clattering iron slates.” His favorite personal example? “Recording the sound for the ledge grab. I thought the [foley] artist had to do parkour to record it, but instead, they put textures on the floor and had him grind his feet against them.”
https://www.pubg.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Shotgun-Close_Far_V2.mp4
Of the things he’s implemented, Park says the most interesting was the reload overhaul. (What he actually said was, “I always have fun, so it’s hard to pick just one,” but work with me here.) Both early on and in the updates since, the most significant focus of the sound design in PUBG had to be on guns, so a year ago during the sound overhaul, the magazine reloading effects got some serious love. “We added a sound for touching the magazine, and the sound of the parts of the gun shaking each other. Those kinds of fine details make a big difference,” Park says.
Those realistic touches often come with drawbacks, which is where emphasizing game balance comes into play. Some sounds that used to be in the game aren’t any more. Park explains: “To make the game very realistic, when you put a lot of things in your bag, it would make a lot of sounds. Accessories would make dangling noises. Parts in your gun would rattle. This would be fine if we only had close-quarter combat, but running long distances with rattling noises all the time would be annoying!”
When we got to talking about the future of PUBG, Park said an area he’s paying close attention to is providing sound cues for big moments during gameplay. “We’ve discussed how interesting it would be to add extra sound when a shooter snipes an enemy to be able to tell if they’d made their shot or not. Sniping at a long distance is a big achievement, but there’s no audio feedback for it.” What kind of sound, you ask? “A squish noise or a splash sound. I think that would be fun.”
Despite describing things as swishy, squishy, or otherwise -ishy, Park notes that his role is actually quite serious. “When you create a sound, you iterate a lot. Gun sounds go through tons iterations,” he explains. Sounds kinda fishy to me.
So concludes the fourth instalment of Getting a Sense of PUBG! Join us for the final chapter next month for a taste of what the future of PUBG has in store…
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