Dr Stephen Baysted has recently completed work on the latest iteration of Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed series of video racing games – Need for Speed: Shift. As well as being a Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Chichester, Dr Baysted is also Director of Sound and Music for Slightly Mad Studios Ltd. who have spent the last 2 years creating and developing Shift for Electronic Arts. With worldwide sales totalling 100 million copies, the Need for Speed series is seen as Electronic Arts’ best selling franchise; and Electronic Arts is the world's leading interactive entertainment software company.Released worldwide this week on PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, Shift represents a new direction for the Need for Speed series and features a highly immersive and unique race driving experience. Sophisticated and ultra-realistic vehicle audio modelling techniques, for which Stephen and fellow sound designer Greg Hill have won international acclaim in previous projects, form a central part of this experience. Where the innovative music soundtrack is concerned, Stephen worked with a team of leading video games and film industry specialists to shape a radically dramatic sonic backdrop to the game.
Need for Speed: Shift has already received glowing reviews from the industry press and video games channel IGN (ranked among the top 200 most visited websites in the world) has just awarded the game 9 out of 10, and audio specifically 9.5 out of 10. The reviewer enthuses that the sound ‘… is awesome … and brilliantly executed. A lot of other racers have great engine samples, nice crashing effects and so forth, but very, very few actually get the mix of all of this correct. It's a raw sound … and pretty much no racing game on the market conveys this correctly. Need for Speed Shift actually does, and it's music to the ears … This is how it should be done.’
Stephen describes the engine modelling process as one that is extremely complex and technically demanding. ‘It’s a protracted task which starts with recording the actual racing car on location with specialist microphones. Once the recordings have been carefully edited and mastered, the modelling and the ‘fun’ can start! Every single sonic characteristic of the vehicle is modelled including the engine, the transmission, the exhaust, the gears, turbochargers, superchargers, tyre noise, wind noise, chassis resonance and suspension noise.’ Stephen continues, ‘Slightly Mad Studios as a company is renowned for its fanatical attention to detail, its dedication to realism and accuracy, and the audio team is no exception.’ There are over 80 different cars modelled in Shift.
‘One of the most exciting aspects of working in the industry’, Stephen comments, ‘is being able to bring this industry experience and expertise back to the University environment and to the students in the classroom. Because we’re working at the cutting edge of video game development and media production, the teaching can be shaped by it and module content already reflects this.’
Stephen, and Slightly Mad Studios, are currently working on future video game projects.
Posts
