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Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #63 - Audio

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Intro

Hi! My name is Franco Freda, and I’m Head of Audio at Paradox Interactive.

Today I’m excited to talk to you about Victoria 3 and some of the work we’ve been doing for the soundscape of our most anticipated title yet!

As you all know, a video game takes a long time to be made, and it goes through multiple development stages, from pre-production all the way to release. Depending on the scope of the project, it will involve dozens of different disciplines through its pre-release life cycle: Game Design, Programming, 3D Art, 2D Art, QA, and UI/UX… just to name a few.

There’s a general misconception that “Audio comes last”, and while this is typically at least partly true, (when it certainly needs to wait for some other assets to be done to add sound to them for instance, or when it comes to the final mix) a project as big and ambitious as Victoria 3 has had several internal “last” stages where systems and content have been considered “done”, only to be refined and polished, several times before you get to see it on your game libraries.

For us in the Audio team, this means that we have been constantly evolving our way of approaching all the different aspects of the game several times in the last few years, every time thinking that we had it! Only to realize we could do it better.

This amount of iteration and passion has made it possible to bring you an experience we truly hope you’ll enjoy as much as we have while building it.

Soundtrack

Paradox Games always have had great soundtracks. We know how much our fans love it, and how much of a central part of “setting the right atmosphere” they play. For Victoria 3 we teamed up with some of our most trusted partners to come up with a soundtrack that truly captures the style and feel of the era.

I’m talking about Håkan Glänte, Audinity (Yannick Suß and Robin Birner), and our own Andreas Waldetoft. The result is over 2 hours of music that will help you feel right in the middle of the 19th century.

Some of this music you can already listen to by searching for it on all major digital streaming platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Music, or Youtube.

The rest includes a complete remaster, with new live performance recordings for the Victoria 2 Soundtrack, which will be given for free to all pre-orders as a bonus.

Last but not least and for the first time ever, we are bringing forward a new concept for our Music Manager handling that we call the “Music Density System”. The result of this system is a delicate balance between 3 components:

  • “Moods” or “underscore”, will carry the music feeling for extended periods of time in a more adaptive fashion, with random and unpredictable sections that connect seamlessly and extend the duration of a piece in a less distracting way.
  • “Waits” or “silence segments”, for the world map to shine through and facilitate focus and concentration while you're strategizing what to do next, and, of course…
  • “Themes”, the most memorable and recognizable music pieces that will accompany you throughout your play-throughs and act as the musical banner for Victoria 3.

Music System Cycle
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Event Pictures

Many scenarios that Victoria 3 will offer you to take action on are going to be presented in the form of Event Pictures. Art has done an amazing job in portraying them more alive than ever, with a super cool parallax effect, that gave us an incredible opportunity for sound design.

For these scenarios, we wanted to shift the player’s attention to this little window to the world as much as possible, and this of course starts with the mix, making the rest of the soundscape dynamically reduce their presence, as they are welcomed by a Music Stinger (a short musical segment) that precedes a combination of sounds that are related to the images portrayed within.

Diegetic and Extradiegetic sound elements are combined to give the correct feedback according to the type of event you’re presented with, and set up the stage for decision-making!

Anatomy of an Event Picture Audio Trigger
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UI/UX

The first consideration to be had when building the UI sounds for a game such as this one is to make sure to approach it from a systemic perspective. This way, all sounds that are produced by the interface should convey certain information to the player as soon as they are heard and hopefully provide some guidance on what to do about them. The most important aspects are urgency, type, and importance.

Another aspect we considered for Victoria 3’s UI mix is “Balance”, which means positioning the sound based on the area of the screen to which the sounds are being connected.

Another aspect of the UI that has been enhanced via Audio has to do with the several VFX elements that are visible on the screen directly on the Map. This also acts as positional audio that captures the player's attention.

Master Ambient System

One of the most significant areas of development for Audio regarding Victoria 3 has to do with our new Master Ambient System. This, in a nutshell, is a scanner system connected to the camera that translates the province data visible below and translates this information into parameters before feeding it to our audio middleware FMOD, so that it can mix the sounds of the terrain in real-time and give the most accurate representation of ambient sounds possible.

This system works in the horizontal axis as well as the vertical axis, blending airy, windy tones when the camera is far away from the ground, as well as ocean sounds, forests, deserts, tundra, etc. when the opposite is true.

The fact that this system is driven in real-time means that should the province data change for whatever reason by the player’s interaction or anything, in particular, this new information will automatically be translated to the system and reflected with accurate sound.

Logically, the system also recognizes hubs and other layers of information that will, instead of creating an ambient bed, place 3d sound emitters on top of cities, industry hubs, and military structures.

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Audio Profiles

One more thing surrounding the game’s mix and also for the first time ever…! As a player, you’ll be given the option to fine-tune the mix before the audio’s endpoint, with a few profiles specifically designed by us for the most common scenarios: Headphones, TV, and Night Mode, among others.

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Final Words

This project has been an incredibly fun ride leading up to release and involved many sound designers, audio leads and directors, composers, and producers, who all contributed with their best ideas and skills to create a sound atmosphere that would be worthy of the kind of project this is. Countless work hours, recording, editing and planning, implementing, debugging, and testing. People and locations across multiple countries… all coming together to make this all for you, our fans.

We want to thank you for your support and look forward to hearing your thoughts!
 
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I was very concerned with how music would play in Vicky 3. As the diary mentioned, Paradox games "always" have had great soundtracks... except for CK3, which I felt was quite lackluster. I've played every PDS game since vic2 and I can recall songs from every single game except for CK3, which had some novel audio system that I'm not really a fan of... I listened to a few songs from the Vic3 soundtrack and I liked what I heard, and I'm eager to hear the Music Manager next week
 
Awesome. Fist bump for the audio team
 
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Gotta say, Sound design has really stood out to me as being amazing in the live streams. can't shout that out enough with the systems yall made for what sounds and music play when, and when to stop them too
 
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I’ve been super impressed with the audio-visual immersiveness of Vicky 3, and modern PI games as a whole TBH. I grew up on Hoi2, HOI3, and Vicky2, but man have the games come a long way. Not even touching the deeper systems, Vicky3 is looking to be the most polished PI title yet(setting aside teething/early release issues ofc).
 
Quick question: how easy will/would it be to disable the "wait" period? I just really don't like those empty stretches. That's actually the N1 reason form e to turn off a game's music soundtrack and listen to my own - too much silence. I want music, darnit!

Given that this seems to be a component of the music system, it should be fairly easy to simply set the duration to 0 or 1 seconds, right? I for one would welcome that option wholeheartedly.
 
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I hope the Vic II expansion soundtracks are included in the remaster. The takes on US Civil War tracks were really good. I also hope they’ll offer to sell the remaster songs for those who don’t get in on ground floor with the pre-order.
 
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Can we modders add new sound effects to V3?
I have tried to add new sound effects to CK3, but the game can only read .bank files. Some other modders use Music Soundtrack to play sound effects, but they will be affected by track life cycle. Therefore, can V3 read .mp3 files as sound effects or how can we edit .bank files?
 
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Really awesome stuff! The soundtrack is an amazing piece of art and I'm really looking forward to working with the music modding functionality of the game.
 
Can we please get an option to disable event audio? I couldn't stand the soundtracks getting interrupted every time an event popped up in the streams. I didn't mind it at first but it became a little bothersome as the game progressed.
 
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Really cool dev diary! The music manager system sounds really interesting, I really love that there can be stretches of silence, or dynamic mixes of the songs, not just the same tracks on repeat. That tends to wear out the music pretty quickly, and I personally often end up muting it after a while (well, after ~100 hours or so..).

Someone else asked this too, but what does Night Mode entail?

Also, has there been any discussion on varying the tracks being played based on what’s going on in the game, such as playing more dramatic songs when the player is at war? Or playing more modern music (ragtime, jazz, etc) as the game progresses in time?
 
Awesome. Thanks for your hard work.
 
This sounds great and I love the music from V2 most of all of all Paradox music. I just wish PDX wouldn't nickel-and-dime us on the music quite as much through tying new tracks to DLC and pre-orders. 2 hours is a lot of music for a composer to write, but not a lot for a 1,000 hour lifecycle game.
 
Nothing against you but I dont think music from the timeperiod is good background music in a computer game.
I couldnt listen to the music in Victoria 2 or 3 more than once before I was tired of it. The violin and bombastic music interupt your thoughts when you play.
But I know many people like it, but I dont think it is good background music for a computer game.
 
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I get that one song from Victoria 2 stuck in my head all the time. And no, I don't play Victoria anymore and haven't for some time. It just was really memorable. To be honest I was actually surprised when I found out the music was original and not just some famous piece.
 
One more thing surrounding the game’s mix and also for the first time ever…! As a player, you’ll be given the option to fine-tune the mix before the audio’s endpoint, with a few profiles specifically designed by us for the most common scenarios: Headphones, TV, and Night Mode, among others.

Is it just about the sound range or does it affect positioning, maybe the number of channels? Like will choosing Headphones VS Normal switch expected dynamic position from 30 to 90 degrees to the sides and will it fix it to 2 output channels?
 
Cheers for the DD Franco, and thanks to the soundtrack being on Spotify, I'm in the rather unusual position of also being able to say how much I like the soundtrack of a game that hasn't yet been released - it sounds great, and I can't wait to play along to it after release :)

On that note, best of luck for everything tomorrow - here's to a great launch, and I look forward to getting my 19th century on :)

For a naval-themed audio thing, here's a youtube vid of a triple-expansion engine in action. The example is from the post-Vicky 3 timeframes, but triple expansion engines were very much a 19th century innovation, and the engine-room telegraphs here are very similar to those in use prior to WW1. Listen to those pistons go, and that telegraph ring - those sounds are, as best I understand it, very similar to those that would have prevailed in many mid-to-late game steamships :)

 
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Which actually reminds me - does this also apply to physical pre-orders?
Well, found the answer myself, if anyone is interested - Amazon has also added the remastered Vicky 2 soundtrack to the Day One Edition's description in the time since I pre-ordered it.

edit: And now that the package has finally arrived, I can confirm that it even has it in the superior CD form.
 
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As a quality of life improvement, please turn off the music when the game loses focus, so I can Alt-Esc and watch YouTube or tv or whatever without having to exit all the way out of the game.
 
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