“At the time, we had no idea how big the game was going to be.” Hopefully it was nice beer. Some beer was involved to get them to be OK with even hearing the sound of their own voice,” he says. I think they’re funnier because their voices are shredding, they’re losing their voice sometimes, and they sound stressed,” he describes. “If lines were just spoken, it wouldn’t sound right, no matter how funny they were. “I wanted all shouted, as if you were in a loud, raucous medieval battlefield,” he says. Buckley describes back-to-back dinner parties with drinks flowing that doubled as recording sessions, a process that allowed him to freely iterate on the end product with a group of eager amateurs. Justin Pappas, Chivalry‘s former lead level designer, played the Agathian and Mason knights. “Just in talking through your nose, you already sound like a jerk,” he says. “Every single voice actor in that game was a close friend of mine or a co-worker, so I knew them all personally.” Buckley himself voiced the fan-favorite Mason man-at-arms, inspired by the late Alan Rickman’s nasally intonation. “They were all people that I knew, because we had no budget or anything,” Buckley says of the cast. Once again, this is thanks to Torn Banner’s bootstrapped origins. It helps that the vocal performances in Chivalry are like something out of the most drunken, unhinged LARP you dare imagine. It’s odd to bring up comedic timing when you’re talking about a competitive game like Chivalry, where the chaos of battle ensures you have zero control over what ultimately happens to you, but yet every match feels like it’s guaranteed at least one moment of ad hoc comic genius. The next one you encounter will bellow “ No, my lord!” as he assails you with his claymore. The first enemy to kill you might repeatedly yell “You’re welcome!” at your flailing corpse. The typical Chivalry match is in effect a gruesome bloodbath punctuated by bizarre, hilarious non-sequiturs. Players most often use it as a means to taunt the opposition, exult in their massacre, or simply mock the absurdity of their circumstances. With a couple of keystrokes, you can call for help from your teammates, signal enemy positions, or issue simple statements like “Yes” or “Thank you.” But in practice, the system serves a more performative purpose. On its face, its purpose is to let players communicate without relying on headsets and mics. This explains why Chivalry‘s in-game communication system – which Mirage has inherited – is so deep and complex. “It starts to take the actual person who’s playing out of the game and putting in some pre-scripted robot.” “I hate being made to say something,” he says. And he takes particular issue with what he calls “auto VO” – lines in a game that a character says without the player’s prompting. As a result, his own tastes had an outsize influence over how Chivalry ended up. Torn Banner was a small team when they were starting out, and as audio director, it was Buckley’s job to score the game, create all the sound effects, and write all the lines. But so much of what’s wound up feeling fundamental to Chivalry is unilaterally on Buckley. We tend to think of successful games as the product of a committee, whittled into shape by teams of hundreds, forever seeking consensus with market research and focus groups. “I could make it really funny, or really immersive to the point where it could freak you out to be in a battle where you could get cut to pieces by swords.” Funny won out, and Chivalry wound up an unlikely comedic masterpiece. He recalls giving studio president Steve Piggott a choice. It turns out this was always the point.įrom the start, Ryan Buckley, audio director at Torn Banner and a self-proclaimed “wise-ass” growing up, set out to temper the slapstick brutality with a heavy dose of comic relief. And as players tend to do, they deploy them in ways that don’t seem entirely consistent with the game’s fiction. These fighters have voices – dozens of yells, utterances, and blood-curdling screams that the player can unleash with a couple of keystrokes. Thankfully, it also has a built-in release valve: its sound design. It feels great to stick an enemy with a pike and it feels like complete shit to die. When you’re actually playing seriously, though, the fighting is tense, demanding, and fraught with consequence. But if you look long enough, you notice that their movements are just slightly off, that the gore and dismemberment doesn’t actually register as horrific – it’s more funny than chilling, almost like the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The enduring image of Chivalry is a grand, gruesome melee where grizzled fighting men whale on each other with swords, axes, and spears.
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