Once again, developer Oxide Games has posted a new video developer diary looking at how the team"s various divisions are helping to create their upcoming PC grand strategy game Ara: History Untold.
This week"s video dev diary on YouTube has host Steven Bell speaking with Oxide Games"s Audio Director, Michael Curran. He offers some info on the game"s audio and also its music soundtrack.
Ara is supposed to have a "living world" theme when you play it and that will also extend to the audio effects in the game, thanks to Oxide"s Nitrous Engine. According to Curran:
Just the ability to have thousands and thousands of individual unique living things in the world meant that you could have sounds coming from all different places. Places literally where you see them . . . that"s kind of the way I always imagined.
As far as the game"s music, Curran stated:
We came up with 11 themes that we wanted to evolve over time from ancient history to Future age. We wanted the soundtrack to be completely data driven . . . so we looked for things in the game that we could pull and apply to our music manager which is what we call the system that chooses which theme to call, which theme to play and how it"s mixed.
If you want to listen to a preview of the game"s soundtrack, it"s available to stream right now on Spotify.
Ara: History Untold is currently set for release on the PC sometime in 2024 via Microsoft"s Xbox Game Studios. You can join the Ara Insider Program right now to play pre-release builds for the game. In fact, last week, Oxide announced that a new technical alpha test is slated to begin "soon" and you can learn more about how to participate on the game"s Steam page.