News | SOCOM US Navy SEALs Confrontation
The Sounds Of Victory In SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation
October 13, 2008
SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation hits shelves tomorrow. With it comes the chance to suit up as one of America’s most elite fighting forces. Coincidentally, the Navy SEALs pull double duty as the most effective back story device for 80% of all movies starring Steven Seagal and Michael Biehn. But that’s not important right now. What is important is that you understand how big of a role sound plays in Confrontation. The developers at Slant Six put so much stock into in-game sonics that their efforts spawned new official hardware, the PS3 Bluetooth Headset. And who better to explain the importance of good acoustics than SCEA senior producer, Mark Rogers. He’s not a SEAL, but he has been known to drink with a few.
Das Gamer: What parts of SOCOM Confrontation stand out to you as a producer?
Mark Rogers: Voice chat itself is a very important part of the title. You want to communicate naturally with your teammates. It’s one of my favorite parts of the the new game. SOCOM was one of the first games to introduce mic chat for the PS2. It was actually sold with the mic bundled for the original title. When we brought SOCOM to the PS3 we wanted to basically develop a mic for the game as well. We looked at the mic for Warhawk but we weren’t happy with the quality. It was bundled with a headset, a Jabra headset, but when we looked at it we decided we thought we could do better. It was developed with some new features. For one there’s a big mute button if your wife is having a go at you for playing too much. We showed it to Sony management, and because of the features we included they decided to make it the official Sony PlayStation headset. It’ll be available bundled with the game and sold by itself. Within the game we have proximity voice chat. Before you had to push a button then say “heading down this road…” With proximity voice chat your voice is propagated in the game from your location. So allies who are nearby can hear you, but so can enemies. Which works out well as now you can taunt them.
Does the proximity voice chat work with the in-game radio? Basically if you’re prepping an ambush you need to whisper into the radio?
Mark Rogers: It’s totally based on your volume. With voice, as with all effects in the game, are propagated with the proper occlusion also we process the affects so they sound like they should.Sound within the game is so important. If a weapon is being fired you want to know whether that weapon is near or if it’s around the corner. How the sound itself moves through the environment and how it’s affected by the surfaces and solids in the world are all modeled and taken into account. There’s an inherent sophistication to the sound in SOCOM.
Speaking off sophistication, do you have any favorite lines when it comes to talking trash?
Mark Rogers: No. I generally try to keep queiet. But i do apologize to people I kill as I walk past their body (Laughs). Sometimes if we’re going against the quality assurance team for a demo we have to tell them to go easy. They’ll come around a corner and pull off a shot on instinct and you’ll hear this quick, “Sorry!” But when you think about it that kind of interaction is completely natural and I think the technology is really at its best when you have something that, from the tech standpoint that is quite sophisticated but from the user’s standpoint is very simple.
