It's easy to miss one of the finest audio details of Spider-Man

In the very good new PS4 Spider Man In the game, Peter Parker spends a lot of time navigating through Manhattan in search of truth, justice and collectibles. As he rushes, he frequently receives calls from his friends on the radio and he reacts differently depending on whether he is practicing or not.

I bought Spider Man when he came out last Friday. From the beginning, I noticed that when Peter was talking on the radio while swaying, he looked a little tense, as if he was exercising. Then I noticed that when he was talking on the radio while he was standing on a roof, he had the impression of staying motionless. Did I hear things or was the game that was quietly played between two different voices behind the scenes?

I decided to test it. I finished a quest, and then I listened to the radio chat about the open world that followed while staying motionless. Then I pulled out of the game, reloaded my control point and listened to the same audio tracks while swaying. The results clearly showed that, yes, two different vocal tracks were occurring. I gathered them in a video and tweeted it:

It was actually an incomplete video because it did not show the transition between the two vocal states. If you hit one line and then land when the other person is talking, Peter will move in his easiest and most relaxed way to speak for the second line, as shown here:

It's a pretty cool little detail, and the Tweet has been shared enough so that some Insomniac developers have appeared in my endorsements and elsewhere to explain in more detail how they were successful. "So, for those of you who are wondering if we have recorded the Spidey dialogue twice in the open world # spidermanps4 – yes, we did it" tweeted lead author Jon Paquette. "Take a rest", a "exercised" grip. Programmers have exposed a variable to Wwise allowing the game to switch between dialog elements, depending on the player's state. (Wwise is a development tool used for the game's audio.)

"This can happen in the middle of a conversation on a per line basis, but not in the middle of the lines" more elaborate The insomniac audio designer Alex Previty. "We tried to put this in place, but it would have taken a lot of work to make it look natural"

"I can not take credit for this system at all!" continued, saying he would rather give credit to Paquette, director Bryan Intihar and voice actor Yuri Lowenthal, "as well as Insomniac's and Sony's dialogue talents to do magic … and our incredibly talented programmers everything works fine.

"It was a group effort of the highest level" rang in vocal actor Lowenthal.

The voice switching thing seems to me to be the kind of thing that does not excite science on a technical level, even if it's cool when you notice it and signal it. By highlighting it, I do not suggest that Spider Man does something completely revolutionary, but Insomniac's approach seems exceptionally smooth and deep, especially for an action-adventure game like this.

Switching voice tracks works particularly well when combined with other smart dialogue tips. Spider Man uses. One of these includes how Peter realistically resumes conversations or calls interrupted after their interruption, as in the systems seen in Grand Theft Auto V or this year God of the war. If you interrupt or interrupt a conversation in any other way, he will take the following opportunity to call the person and resume the conversation with something like "okay," as I saying … ". , carefully crafted details that make the simulation of Insomniac superheroes a little more credible and much more impressive.