“A Game Made By A Village Of People Trying To Get This Thing Out The Door” - How 007: First Light Masters The Beautiful Invisibility Of Sound Design

Gamers often underestimate the importance of audio in video games. So many different and meticulously thought-out aspects of sound design fold into every part of the experiences we play. Combat, narrative, world building, exploration, and essentially every part of a game you can think of has been blessed by the complicated nuance of audio direction.

007: First Light is no exception, and as I play through it, I’m constantly floored by wonderfully timed orchestral crescendos or impactful combat encounters where every single strike brings a satisfyingly brutal crunch. IO Interactive did a tremendous job building the soundscape for this game, so I sat down to speak with audio director Dominic Vega about how it was carried out in such spectacular fashion.

Building From Bond

One thing I wanted to ask Vega right away was whether 007: First Light, like many other video game projects, came together right at the end of development. Production is often all about holding on to the edge of your seat praying that what you’re making will be something special.

“I would say for Bond, my honest statement is yes, I think every game is like that, and that gave me goosebumps. There’s nothing truer,” Vega admits, who has also worked on games like Just Cause 3, League of the Legends, and the recently cancelled Contraband. “I think writers also understand this as well. You step away from something for a week only for someone else to read it and say, ‘hey, your book’s pretty good!’ It’s a kindred experience.

“What I thought was a little bit different [with First Light] than things I’d seen in the past is that this was kind of a goosebumpy opportunity on paper. What I’d hoped was ‘Oh, this is going to be a crescendo to the end, and it’s going to be perfect’, of course that’s not the case. But I hadn’t seen something jump off the page in my career until I came onto First Light where the nugget of an idea has that feeling of it’s all coming together. And then, of course, there is the chaos of development. You make it for years, and all that kind of stuff, but then to see it close and finish the way it has is a testament to the team who put in incredible, high quality, thoughtful, considerate, and detail-orientated work.”

In a linear action experience like First Light, every single sound is grounded within the story that IO Interactive is trying to tell. Whether it’s a punch, a quip, or the rev of a car’s delicious engine, everything is designed with the intention of pushing the player forward. For Vega, that narrative design informs everything he does as an audio director.

“Sound is one of those strange disciplines that is almost entirely narrative. Now, does every sound need to [have narrative]? Of course not. We have to be economic about things. But yeah, I feel strongly that the intentionality and motivation of the character should translate into everything in the game, but especially the sound. If it’s just the tone of the room that you’re standing in, we can subconsciously make the player feel uneasy, we can make them feel at home, we can make them feel like someone’s around the corner, we can lure them into a sense of security. There’s a lot of power inside of that.

“We had an ethos. One of the core design pillars that we had in audio for the game was called ‘Build from Bond’ which is this mentality I wanted the team thinking in to say, how should you treat detail in the world when we have this main character that everybody has gotta love? So we put an astronomical amount of effort into little things like what does the crease in his shoe sound like in every foot type, and put less into the areas that are in the third, fourth, and fifth quadrants from the player.”

Vega regales me with anecdotes of accidentally melting obscenely expensive bits of equipment while recording the sounds of vehicles in the game, or sending one of his team deep into the snowy mountains to fire pistols and record the sounds they made. Very few stones were left unturned for First Light.

If you’re an audio team focusing on minute details like how a shoe sounds, chances are you’re going to have your work cut out for you applying this mindset to a 15-hour adventure. But Vega knew that a distinct emotional deliberation needed to be placed on certain moments and mechanics that players are likely going to care very deeply about. It’s also important to consider that IO Interactive is far from the biggest developer working in the triple-A space right now.

“We are trying to fight in the big leagues, and we’re trying to make a triple-A game. ,” Vega explains. “We need to be smart. So the focus on the mix, the focus on the experience, is all about us building out the experience of who James Bond is. There’s a lot of stuff in the hands and the mix and the details and the crumbles and what we call ‘hubcaps’, like things falling like when a rock falls, or when you grab a ledge, and it falls and falls and falls. That is like uber, uber detailed, but actually what it lets sound designers do is take a step back, because we can sometimes get in our own way.”

The Invisibility Of The Craft

One part of our conversation that stuck with me was the “invisibility of the craft”; good audio direction and design can often go unnoticed if done well, because the player becomes so immersed they don’t even notice it has been created specifically to immerse them. First Light even ensures that Bond’s breathing is in line with his emotions at select moments, like when you’re sneaking up on an enemy or working to save a close ally, because even little touches like this can bring a character and the world they inhabit to life in compelling ways.

And a lot of this immersion comes from performances. While Vega wasn’t responsible for directing the performances of actors like Patrick Gibson or Lennie James on the motion capture stage — that honour went to narrative director Martin Emborg — he was able to work with the cast on mission direction and ensure dialogue within gameplay felt natural, earned, alongside ensuring you never feel pulled away from the action.

“I love voice, it’s a huge part of direction for me. Who is this character? How do we get that character to come out? As an audio director, we built in systemic things like, depending on how the player plays, we recorded the actors recording the lines differently, whispering if they’re in stealth, shouting if they're in combat. These differences are the things that keep you from jumping out of the game.

“Martin got a great performance out of the cast on the mocap stage, and then in the booth we translated that, and I’ve got a voice designer, which is a new discipline in games, on the audio team who only specialises in that for that exact reason. It’s just the scrutiny and level of detail that we want to have.”

Vega also mentions several occasions where actors were brought into the booth to record lines together, rather than recording alone for several hours each day and lacking this natural chemistry to bounce off from. Motion capture is going to build relationships much easier, but there is a disconnect with voice-over that many games fail to notice, and thus our immersion suffers. Once again, every piece of sound — whether it be a character, car, or firearm — comes back to this idea of solidifying narrative.

The Sound Of Violence

Obviously, all the fistfights in First Light weren’t recorded by Vega and his team going into the streets of Copenhagen to stir up a brawl. Sounds like this are instead made using different household objects or even items of food in wonderfully inventive ways. Some of the sound designers at IO have workstations stuffed with trinkets for this very purpose, and for a game like this, you want the moment-to-moment violence to not only hit hard, but sound it.

“Combat was a big focus, because we needed to show that this is a combat-focused game,” Vega tells me. “Yes, stealth is an aspect of it, and stealth is always important because it is in our DNA, and there was also driving. So those were really big audio focuses for us. We did a lot of overhauling of our audio systems to accommodate really robust close-quarters combat across different archetypes and different vocalisations with different actors. But then, also the bone breaks and all the satisfying takedowns and making sure every animation variety had really detailed coverage that makes you feel really powerful.”

Across the entire experience, there was just a lot of stuff that IO Interactive hadn’t done on this ultra-polished triple-A level before. It’s a miracle that everything sounds, plays, and looks as good as it does. But how long did it actually take to make? The development times of blockbusters like this are given quite understandable scrutiny in the modern era, so I ended my chat with Vega by asking how long it took to reach the finish line on First Light. As for him, he was on the project for a grand total of four years and two months.

“I don’t know if it’s a six-year production or a seven-year production. I’m not sure, I’ll have someone at IO give the right answer. But people have been saying publicly it has taken 007 years to make, but I think it depends. You can throw around years and numbers when, like you said at the head, so many games come together at the end. It’s not just out of magic. It’s because you spend years doing stuff that don’t manifest.

“One of the things the team did was learn 100 ways not to make a good Bond game. You learn what doesn’t work, you learn how not to make a driving system, you learn how to make encounters just long enough that players enjoy them, but not too long that they outstay their welcome. Then there’s all that ideation phase and usually projects start with just five people on them for a substantial amount of time, so I think it was a pretty small group of people who started this thing before it grew into this giant thing.”

I’ve always come to video games for the stories they have to tell, and audio plays such a core part in making those narratives feel impactful, emotional, and achingly real, even if they take place in the most unexpected of circumstances. 007: First Light might be an absurd, bombastic spy thriller ripe with violence and camp, but all the work done by Dominic Vega and his team ensured that we knew what it was like to walk in Bond’s shoes like they were our own. That sort of journey is well worth the wait.

As Vega puts it, First Light is “a game made by humans, by a village of people who are trying to get this thing out the door.”

This interview is part of a series to celebrate TheGamer’s James Bond Day, so be sure to check out all our other articles marking the occasion.