This video was originally released on the 25th of October 2022, it was added to the website on the 4th of April 2025.

Beginnings

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Few multiplayer games achieve the chaos and visceral action movie feeling that Torn Banners Chivalry 2 puts on the table! With great swordplay, interestingly designed Team Objective modes and great visuals, a game like it can come very far! But sound is the unsung hero of an action game title.

Sound design is an often overlooked aspect of game design due to its nature. Sound design mostly becomes noticeable when there is a problem with it. If everything sounds as it should, there often is no need to point it out!  And especially for an experience which emulates the Hollywood interpretation of medieval warfare, the soundscapes can be too busy to really take in and analyse on the fly. At least I can help out in bringing up the most interesting aspects of the sound design for you. Put on your helmets and pick up your weapon; Welcome to “Sound Design in Games"!

It can be a bit hard to describe how visceral Chivalry 2 truly is. So much is going on around you at the same time; Destruction, Death, Dings and Klangs, Taunts and yelps, running, rustling and smashing. Chivalry’s design is a worst case scenario for making a coherent and functionally sound audio system that doesn’t tire the player. When taking the sound design of Chivalry 2 apart, it becomes apparent how much information is conveyed to the player subliminally, to not distract from the experience, but also effectively inform the player of happenings hundreds of meters away, but also right in the immediate surroundings. Let us get down at foot level and explore how the battlefield sounds from one of the many warriors perspectives.

Context

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A bloody skirmish is unfolding right in front of us. Agatha and the Mason Order, warring factions that have been going at it for years, a conflict that is seemingly endless, in a world that is accustomed to brutality and violent conquest. 

The warriors, some of them present against their will, only have one option: Push ahead and destroy the enemy. Almost as if the soldiers are in a tunnel vision… or rather tunnel hearing?

A major role of sound design in a game is the establishment of context for the player and the environment they are flung into. While visuals should look pretty too, their role mostly lies in accessibility and also in appeal. The visual aspects of a game are vitally important, but no matter how good a game looks, most game experiences depend on well designed audio to make an experience functional, rewarding and emotionally impactful. The visuals represent the scene, but the audio shapes the scene into something meaningful, adding function and emotional weight to an experience. Chivalry 2 tries to depict a violent battlefield and it succeeds masterfully.

The voice acting, sound effects, environmental sounds, soundtrack and audio mixing all contribute to the epic medieval warfare portrayed in Chivalry 2. Audio mixing especially is the most important factor in terms of functionality for the game, as you will realise throughout this presentation as it is vitally important in every aspect of Chivalry 2’s sound design.

Combat

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For a melee centric medieval fighting game, Chivalry 2 had to nail the combat! It not only has to sound good and exciting, but it has to be functional for 64 player servers, not be too overwhelming and chaotic for the player in order for them to orient themselves in the battlefield and know where the danger comes from and the audio of course has to be fitting with the medieval theme of the game. 

Chivalry 2 features a running respawn, that means that the player from the second they spawn is in movement with several other people. Getting to the combat is quite easy as the player is always oriented towards the next objective they have to get to, but additionally, further adjustments have been made to make it easier to differentiate between friend and foe. Footsteps are not all represented equally! While footsteps come with their details, like the sounds of different armour types being layered on top of a step, the more interesting part of the footstep is the difference in volume between factions. The steps of a foe are significantly louder than the steps of a friend, reducing confusion and making it easier to find people to fight against in the chaos of a 64 player server.

Contrast this with a game that has the same loudness in footsteps across teams; In a game where individual performance is much more important and where the team sizes are considerably smaller, knowing where friend and foe are exactly might be an advantage! Counter Strike, with its smaller teams, small arenas and team based gameplay, does not need to amplify the footsteps of an enemy and a lot of the times an enemy is identified visually, while ranged combat also takes precedence over knife duels up close. Highly experienced Counter Strike players can even pinpoint where exactly a friend or foe is located in a map based on sound alone.

In Chivalry we have a completely different type of multiplayer experience. Individual performance isn’t as important, and with the sheer size of the battlefields and player numbers, there was much more of a necessity to amplify certain sounds over others. The audio mixing does not end here! 

Depending on if a fight is being fought by other people with or without your involvement, sounds of swords clanging together and deflecting from each other will be different. A separation from distant fights and fights you are directly involved in had to be established to ensure that information is being correctly conveyed to the player, in order to understand where a hit is coming from, and where the distant battles take place, in relation to where the battle you are involved in begins. Every player has an invisible bubble surrounding them that symbolises the characters personal space. Attacks happening in that sphere are heightened through sound additions that are only played if an attack pierces the bubble.  

This is Ryan Buckley, the sound designer of Chivalry 2 and other Torn Banner titles! I got to chat with him about all the aspects of Chivalry 2’s audio and was blown away by a lot of the details! Some of the combat centric systems even have surprising origins in another game developed by Torn Banner!

Lessons from the Middle East (Combat Subchapter)  

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This is Mirage Arcane Warfare, a game that married the visceral combat of Chivalry together with magic and high mobility. It sadly is a dead multiplayer game, but a lot of Chivalry 2’s DNA lies in that title. Regarding Audio, one system in particular was carried over from that magical Slasher game.

And another tool which was heavily utilised in Chivalry 2 was also first implemented in Mirage…

And not to mention, Mirage being set in an Arabian Knights setting, also served as splendid inspiration for the new Persian-styled Tenosian Invasion update, which introduced combat in desert regions. Mirage Arcane Warfare was a significant inspiration for Chivalry 2 and while there is so much more to explore in that game, we have to get back to the main subject of this presentation.

Aside from the directional and distant audio, there is a LOT going on in Chivalry 2’s combat department. Aside from the clanking metal sounds themselves we have the hard hitting impacts, which are multiple layered sounds, culminating in a satisfyingly crunchy and painful sounding impact. It wasn’t just impacts for swords, maces and axes that needed to be taken into account, but ranged weapons, shield throwing and improvised weaponry also. During the fight we also have a lot of emoting from friends and foes which not only makes the battlefield a little bit livelier, it also is a quite popular gameplay mechanic! Actually… let us talk about voice acting! 

Voice Acting

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From wimps to nobles and hardened warriors, Chivalry 2 features a range of many different voices, all harbouring different personalities, insults and funny little phrases! It is even possible to communicate with each other, only through in game voice commands! Surprisingly, this aspect of communication has arisen accidentally!

Roleplaying is really important in Chivalry 2! Personally, I love the Squireboy, a good example for a funny character with tonnes of personality! A guy that really does not want to be there.

The Squireboy is faction exclusive to the Agathians -actually- every voice is faction exclusive to one of the three factions in the game. This is another intentional design choice to further separate the teams from each other. 

There also is a screaming button, which the player can spam at their discretion, which paints the battlefield and incoming hordes of warriors with a diverse assortment of screams, in addition to the many combat sounds and other miscellaneous sound sources… Which puts into question how the game was optimised for consoles.

CPU, RAM Budgeting, Wwise; Boring but Important

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With a tonne of sound sources in combat, music playing in the background, environmental sounds and Battlecry spam, Chivalry 2 needs to process an incredible amount of data. For games, a big balancing act is uncompressed versus compressed sounds. Uncompressed audio does not need to get decoded by the CPU, but a larger file is loaded into Random Access Memory. A compressed file is significantly smaller and takes up much less space in RAM, but the file has to be decoded on the CPU. This is important because not only sounds, but every other file needed for the game to run has to be loaded into memory.

The CPU cannot be stressed too much either, as it is needed to handle many other processes in the game, with Physics calculations, AI and also animations being just a few examples of what a CPU could process in a game. This balancing act makes it a bit difficult to optimise a game for the consoles. While the last and current generation consoles have far more available RAM than the previous machines in their families, they still are trumped in the sheer amount of RAM capacities PCs can have nowadays. 24, 32 or 64 GB of RAM and beyond, are a luxury no console can currently offer.

This means bad news for a 64 player multiplayer game in which over a hundred sounds can be triggered simultaneously at any moment and even play continuously, while also having to load all the other game assets into memory- and by the way, the game not only has to work on the PS5 and Series X, which boast 16 GB of RAM, but also the last gen consoles which only have half of the memory available!

Sadly, compromises had to be made. With a combination of various compressed and uncompressed files, lower bitrate data and cutting certain sounds off at a certain distance, the console versions of Chivalry 2 sound marginally worse, but not by too much. The Unreal Engine supports the vorbis codec which saves sound files in ogg containers. This audio format has a higher compression ratio than the mp3 format, allowing smaller bit rates, but harbouring a better quality than mp3 files with a comparable bit rate. To put the benefits of ogg vorbis over mp3 very simply: “file size smaller, quality better”. 

The trickery doesn’t end here. Sounds do not play continuously over a large distance, not even on PC. Thanks to the middleware software Wwise, audio systems that exist in Chivalry 2 were able to be prototyped by Buckley to then be hardcoded into the game by programmers, one impressive feature relates to distant battles. The most important sounds during combat, like big impacts, explosions, sounding horns and battlecries, are accentuated in order for them and only them to be played dozens and hundreds of metres away. This achieves two things: For one, less sounds have to be played at once reducing space taken up in RAM and also minimising CPU usage. Added to this there is another knock on effect, which would be a dynamic and natural soundscape system in which distant combat and voice commands are not only for show, but are actually happening in the game.

Half Life 2 features soundscapes which play a variety of sounds randomly. Those distant audio sources do not represent actual happenings in the game world, but they suggest that something is happening kilometres away. In reality, nothing is happening, but that does not matter in a Singleplayer Game.

For Chivalry 2 and other Multiplayer experiences, this system would not be good for combat sounds. Imagine the sounds of fighting in the distance with a low server population, or worse, no players at all present in a server. Fake combat sounds are immersion breaking, but not having any distant combat sounds results in silence while playing in a populated server, which also isn’t good; So a solution like Chivalry 2’s is not only great for optimization, it also enables a dynamic sound scape that accurately scales with the current server population. Smart!

Wwise also muffles sounds that happen behind walls, it enables dynamic music, it can modulate sounds on the fly and even add certain audio layers when certain actions are committed, it is a nifty middleware which is great for prototyping or even to be used in a final version of a game.

Environments

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To recover a bit from the “techno-talk” whiplash we now have the golden opportunity to take things slow and appreciate nature, or well… Other stuff in our environment which is less “screamy”! Chivalry 2 has a surprisingly detailed soundscape in every level I have examined so far. Bodies of water sound appropriate, flies and mosquitos whizz by your ears, seagulls seagull away on the beaches where you also hear the waves crashing in… All things considered, Chivalry 2 has a surprisingly relaxing atmosphere when the Agathians and Mason Order don’t want to constantly kill each other in the many beautiful maps the game has to offer. Let us take Aberfell as an example. Say, you are an Agathian and arrive by boat on the shore, running straight into a skirmish. If you listen real close you can make out the granularity of the scene, with the aforementioned seagulls and waves crashing into the sea.

If you move up stream a bit, you will hear the waves and seagulls less and less, but the sounds of a stream, a river will become more and more prominent. This is achieved with event triggers, the sound designer dictates where to play the sounds of flowing water instead of waves crashing on the beach. Let us visualise what those trigger zones might look like. 

These circles represent different sound sources that will play within them. Moving away from a circle more and more will result in the sound gradually fading out. When two circles intersect, and a player would move from one circle into another, the player would hear a gradual crossfade from one sound into the next, achieving a simple but convincing gradience of sounds blending into and away from each other. Now this isn’t all that special by itself, but now please consider how often the water sounds change the more upstream we go!

Arriving at the little village, or encampment, the water sounds changed to a lighter trickle instead of gushing flowing water. Going further upstream we hear more harshly flowing water being reintroduced. 

So essentially what happened here was that Buckley went through all the levels and implemented meticulously detailed soundscapes in every little part of the map. Maps are littered with other environmental props too like ballistas, trebuchets, destructible structures and siege vehicles which all emit their own characteristic sounds. Fire sources also give off fire-y sounds I have seldom noticed in game, and sounds like explosions are heard throughout the entire map, for instance when a gate gets blown up, or the ships masts go kaputt in Galencourt. 

In one map there is a waterfall on the right of a castle from the invaders perspective, and appropriate waterfall sounds are present, even though not many players would find themselves there. Or, this absolutely beautiful lake in the same map, features an amazingly relaxing soundscape with insects whizzing by and I believe even frogs croaking…. But that portion of the map is relatively far off from the places where most of the battles take place. And all of this in a game with 48 to 64 player lobbies, filled with people screaming and smashing each other over their heads with Zweihänder and full plate armour.

One might say that putting so much environmental detail in the soundscapes may be a waste of time, but in reality it is exactly what most games need. Chivalry 2 is actively played by many right now, but player numbers won’t stay high forever. Additionally, huge skirmishes are mostly localised in one specific area of a map, while smaller duels may happen outside of mission objective areas where more environmental sounds would be vital for making a map feel alive. Too many games have either very minimal environmental sounds, or none at all which makes a game less believable and even makes a multiplayer map somewhat uncomfortable to play on.

Subchapter: Meta Sounds

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Sometimes what a soldier needs, is a reminder.

Tick, tock, tick, tock… My favourite little sound implementation of the game is this synthetic tick of the clock. Over time, I noticed that every now and again I look up at the top of the screen to check the clock. The game manages to subliminally inform the player to pay attention at the time, making them look up at a most of the times hard to distinguish clock during normal gameplay. 

In a game where every sound has to feel rustic and be in line with the time period, an alien sounding tick of the clock may be the best sound to inform the player that something is up!

But cool metasounds aside; What is an epic medieval multiplayer game without great music? 

Music

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Chivalry 2 features A LOT of epic music! Ranging from the bombastic end of round ensembles, to the calm main menu composition and to the many accents playing when entering a new arena or when leveling up. In Chivalry 2 music takes on a much more prominent role than it ever did in Medieval Warfare. It also was composed by a Person who is new blood at Torn Banner Studios! 

This is JD, the guy that composed the soundtrack of Chivalry 2!

Interestingly, the composer for the first game was Ryan Buckley, the now sound designer of Chivalry 2. How come JD became the composer of Chivalry 2?

So after sending a demo and landing a job JD got to work! The sound track went through an interesting transformation throughout the development process of Chivalry 2, initially the soundtrack was composed using samples in a Digital Audio Workstation, but later on the music was recorded in a live orchestra, because the studio had extra time on its hands! Live recordings have their advantages, especially when it comes to how much livelier the music feels.

The soundtrack consists of both Dynamic Stem Based music and Linear music files.. Stem based Dynamic music works in the following way! A track is split up into multiple components, say, drums, bass, background FX and potentially more. Each Track can play on its own, or be played in combination with another or multiple other stems. Linear music would be a music track that plays from beginning to end as one whole piece, something everyone is accustomed to when listening to music casually. While there is nothing wrong with linear tracks, Dynamic music, as the term implies, can be as reactive and malleable as the musician wants it to be! The Dynamic music in Chivalry 2 is kept more in the background of the game, as it would otherwise distract from the sounds that matter during gameplay… the SFX! Implementing Dynamic music in this way comes with its challenges: 

The most prominent use of linear music files would be the end of round music at the very end of a match or when the time for an objective is running out. The linear tracks for the round ending music have different variations that swap each other out to avoid too much repetition as repetition is immersion breaking and too repetitive. 

As to the orchestral music… It makes one wonder how smoothly recording really goes with so many instrumentalists playing these ensembles they never played before.

So while the experience of it all was a bit odd, it overall went great, giving direction over a video stream!  To finalise a piece of music, there are some more extra steps needed. For instance many instruments were recorded individually and then mixed together in post. Entirely different recordings from different takes were mixed and matched together and even digital components were reintroduced into the music to deliver more flavour to the track and make a piece stand out more.

A lot of trickery is applied in order to make one outstanding piece of music! And that is a rather normal thing in music production. The game also did not impose many restrictions on the music production, as the gameplay didn’t need to eliminate reverb in the music or set other notable restrictions aside from of course utilising a more classical, thematically appropriate style of music. 

JD Spears reimagined compositions which were initially written by Buckley into new original compositions, referencing motifs from Medieval Warfare’s soundtrack. Buckley was also very supportive throughout the creation of the soundtrack having a lot of positive affirmation and advice on standby!

Epilogue

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In the sum of its parts Chivalry 2 provides a surprisingly reactive and dynamic soundscape that puts the main emphasis on the hero in the game, which would be the combat. With audio mixing taking on a major role in the game’s sound design, Buckley made sure that factions are unmistakable, friend is clearly separated from foe, the player is aware of their personal space and that the player always keeps the progression of the game in mind.

The game’s design imposed some limitations, mainly the massive battles that could take place on the battlefield and the fact that the game is a cross platform title, but with smart and thought out compromises and a lot of trial and error, those limitations could be effectively overcome, making a reactive and compelling soundscape possible, even on last generation consoles! 

Sometimes just creating cool sounds, voices and music is not really enough to make a game readable and functional. Many times it needs many small adjustments and some technical trickery to make an experience sound leagues better. Chivalry 2 provided us with an important lesson: Sometimes the most important part of a game’s sound design lies in putting an emphasis on certain sounds over others. It may sound like a bit of a boring conclusion but maybe all your game really needs is to turn a few dials.