Riot Games are switching over to a new tool for controlling the music and sound effects in League of Legends. That’ll mean marginally clearer champion barks in the near future, proper support for surround sound setups, and even slight performance improvements.
But the biggest gains will become apparent in the coming months and years, as Riot experiment with the new sorts of noises the engine allows them.
“Our new engine opens the door for us to explore more ideas for how we create and use sound effects, voices and music in League of Legends, allowing us to create a more expansive and immersive experience,” wrote Riot senior sound designer Adam Swanson.
“We’ve grown a lot the past few years and hope to be playing League of Legends many more years from now. This change makes our game more scalable for the long term.”
Riot will drip feed files for the new audio tools over the next few patches – before activating the new engine on their servers.
Swanson added that the engine should ensure stereo issues are far less frequent.
“In general the overall stereo imaging of the game should be a lot better,” he said. “This won’t fix every issue you run into with camera movements, but should address a lot of the speaker to speaker ‘hopping’ of sounds.”
In October, League of Legends will be a five year old game – no wonder it needs the occasional software upgrade. Is this one particularly welcome?
Cheers, Reign of Gaming.