How the Sound Design of Dark Souls 3 Improves the Immersive Experience and Storytelling

Sound design is an important part of creating immersive storytelling and atmosphere in games. Bad sound design can ruin the player’s immersion. It is vital not just to have quality sound effects, but to put them in the game with purpose, considering how the sound can enhance the experience. Dark Souls 3 is a great example of sound design in games - using purposeful sound design to create the dark, lonely atmosphere that the series is known for.

 

Music is a big part of sound design in games and most games have music in the background for most of their run time. Dark Souls goes against this trend, using music sparingly - reserving it for high action moments like boss fights and important areas such as the hub area. Much of the game will be spent with no background music, which helps draw attention to the diegetic sounds of footsteps, monsters and ambient sounds like wind. Dark Souls has a loose narrative, centering around a journey through a corrupted, dying world. The infrequent use of music creates a lot of quiet moments of exploration, combat and traversal that makes the player focus more on the environment and atmosphere rather than the emotion the music would be conveying. Reserving music for boss battles is a clever way of highlighting their significance, making them stand out more from the rest of the game and mirroring the gameplay loop of long, lower action exploration sections followed by short high action boss fights. A good example of this is the Sister Friede boss fight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDGSxkxrI0w). The music starts off soft and quiet, then becomes loud and intense as the fight progresses and the boss becomes more aggressive - mirroring the action. Another touch is that boss fights are nearly always followed by silence, rather than a cutscene or continuation of the music, giving the player a chance to reflect and wind down after the climactic boss battle.

 

The diegetic sound of Dark Souls is also designed to aid not only immersion but also gameplay. As previously mentioned the player will spend a lot of time exploring, hearing mostly diegetic sound and no music. Much of the sound design in this regard is focused on adding to the lonely yet hostile atmosphere. The player will often hear the action sounds of their character’s footsteps and armour as they walk, cutting through the silence. It gives the player a sense of presence, as if they are the only living thing left in an otherwise dead and lonely world. Besides this they will mostly only hear ambient sounds and the sound of enemy monsters. Other action sounds such as rolling, attacking,  Dark Souls often uses techniques similar to horror games. Sometimes, the player will hear enemies before they see them, putting them on edge as they expect to be ambushed. Other times the enemies intentionally make no sound, suddenly jumping out and scaring the player with a loud screech or roar. 

 

The sounds in Dark Souls may have been acquired through foley. Sounds like footsteps, clothing, metallic sounds, ambience could easily have been captured this way. Harder sounds like supernatural creatures or magic may have been created through editing. For example, a pre-recorded animal roar could be edited to sound otherworldly.