Baldur's Gate III
GAME OF THE YEAR 2023
EXPERTISE
Gameplay and Cinematic Sound Design & Implementation
PLATFORMS
PC, PlayStation, Xbox
ROLE
Dialogue Editor, Gameplay & Cinematic Sound Designer
ABOUT
Welcome to Faerûn... As part of the sound design team for Baldur’s Gate 3, I got involved in the creation of immersive audio for both cinematics and spells in the game. Over the course of the project, I completed sound design for around 70 hours of cinematics and crafted the audio for about 125 unique spells, each tailored to fit the game's rich, magical world. In the final months leading up to the game's release, I also took on the responsibility of onboarding and guiding additional sound designers into Larian's proprietary engine to ensure we met the release deadline. I'm particularly proud of the scenes I designed with JK Simmons as an antagonist and how often I have used negative space to create spell impacts.
COMPLETED IN THIS PROJECT
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~70 hours of cinematics
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~125 spells
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Additional Dialogue editing support
EXPERTISE
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Gameplay Sound Design
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Cinematic Sound Design
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Audio Implementation
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Dialogue Editor
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Guidance & Support
SOFTWARE
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Glass - Larian's Custom Game Engine
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Wwise
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Reaper
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Jira
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Shotgrid​
COOL STUFF
I'm very pleased with how Baldur's Gate 3 has performed in the game awards by winning the Game Of The Year award, especially when titles such as Legend of Zelda, Spider-Man, and Super Mario were present in the final. Winning such a prestigious award validates the hard work we put into creating such a masterpiece, and I can't express how proud I am to have played a part in achieving this milestone.
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As part of Pitstop, my colleagues and I had our work recognized, which led us to win the Best Audio Innovation of the Year award at the 2024 MCV Develop Awards.
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Additionally, on top of all of this, we have also become the first game to win the Game of the Year award at all major award shows(Golden Joysticks, BAFTAs, Game Developers Choice, DICE, and The Game Awards) and currently the #21 on best games of all time with a score of 96 on Metacritic.
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SPELL WORK
The Spells, ah the spells... During my work on Baldur’s Gate 3, I focused extensively on the sound design for spells across all classes to reflect their distinct abilities and power levels. Each spell sound was designed with intricate layering, so blending organic and synthetic elements lead to create loads of different feelings within these spells. These were posteriorly implemented into the game using Glass which is Larian’s custom engine as well as Wwise. This allowed the audio to interact dynamically with the game’s environment, ensuring that every spell felt distinct and impactful within the gameplay. A good trick and a key part of this process of creating so many powerful spells involved using the concept of negative space to amplify the impact of the spell’s most powerful effects. This approach added depth, contrast and a looooooot of power, which made some of the spells feel like they would instantly kill you.
CINEMATIC WORK
The cinematics, ah the cinematics... Due to the immense amount of work cast upon the cinematic team, I shifted my focus to support the audio design of the game's staggering 174 hours of cutscenes (a monumental task considering that this is more screen time than the entire Game of Thrones series). If you’ve played as the Dark Urge or encountered characters like Scratch the Dog, the menacing Ketheric Thorm (voiced by the legendary J.K. Simmons), the heroic Wyll, the cute Tara the Tressym, or the seductive Mizora, you’ve experienced the cinematic audio I designed to bring these interactions to life. Actually, the audio for the very first scene in the game is my doing, so if you played the game you have indeed heard my work. Completing audio for these cinematics was no joke, dialogue trees still haunt me until this very day, some scenes were very complex and required a lot of work, blood, tears, and patience to be completed, as an example, the image on the right is a funny tweet made by Larian themselves on a dialogue tree of a scene that I have worked on and a good example of how big they could be. And yes, for the curious ones, I am indeed to blame for the sounds of some of those sex scenes.
