FALLOUT 3

I have been playing the game Fallout 3... a lot

Fallout 3 is a role playing game based in a post nuclear apocalypse wasteland and its pretty much, awesome. So play it if you can.

The focus of this blog is the amazing sound experience this game offers. The game is filled with thousands of individual objects which each have their very own sounds. If you bump into a shopping cart, it makes the sound of a shopping cart, its great. What’s most interesting to me however, is the way in which the game allows you to interact with these sounds. You are able to use a video game controller to navigate a three dimensional (virtual) space filled with potential sound. Ill have to go back to the shopping cart for this because its one of the coolest sounds. If you see an object, like the shopping cart, you can choose to approach it and interact with. If you push it over, you can experience the shopping cart interacting with the virtual environment. If any part of the cart hits the ground, or a person etc, then the corresponding sound (shopping cart rattle) is heard. You can see what looks just like a shopping cart crash to the ground and in perfect synchresis, hear exactly what you would expect a shopping cart crashing to the ground would sound like. It seems very real. What’s even cooler though, is that you can also interact with specialization. If the cart falls to the right of you, you will hear it panned to the right speakers, it’s all very well done and very smooth.
While playing around with these sounds i discovered a very interesting effect. Imagine you are playing the game and there is another character standing in front of you, talking. The sound of them talking is panned to direct center. Now you walk towards them and the sound of their voice gets louder, you sneak around them to the right and you can now hear them at their loudest from the left speaker. Now you continue walking forward, their voice is getting softer and panning back to center. In this scenario the illusion can be created that the sound is now actually coming from behind you, even if you don't have surround sound and it is most definitely still coming from your tv. In fallout 3, you hear what your character should hear. When you see the visual source of the audio move behind your character and the audio is done properly, your brain may actually interpret the sound as coming from behind you, its very cool.
Also, the game accounts for different acoustic environments. For instance, if a sound is made within the hull of an old abandoned aircraft carrier, a very sweet reverb effect is added, but if the same sound is made outside, you will hear little or no reverb at all.