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At what was ultimately a somewhat flaccid E3 in many respects, it was non-sequels like The Last of Us

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Quiet. Too quiet.

The attention is much-deserved and there have been plenty of column inches filled about just how terrific The Last of Us looked. But there’s been little said about how good it sounded.Watch the E3 demo again, but this time pay close attention to the audio.The incredible richness of the audio design in The Last of Us was even more evident in the behind-closed-doors session, an extended and slightly different take on the segment showcased at Sony's E3 press conference. A more measured and patient playthrough, it was even clearer here that sound is an immensely crucial part of The Last of Us equation. From the ear-exploding report of a shotgun in a small room to the subtle metallic rattle of a vibrating aluminium ladder, it seems nothing has been spared.“We actually discussed it very early on that audio was going to be very important throughout the experience of this game,” says Phil Kovats, audio lead on The Last of Us. “We really wanted to play up the stealth ideas and we needed a lot of detail.”“One of the biggest things is to really help Joel and Ellie feel alive to the player, and to help the world come alive we had to make sure it was a fully realised environment.”

The approach to recording can be staggeringly straightforward at times, as the team highly values real-world sound. Want a clip of coat hangers softly clinking against one another in a closet?

“ We just really wanted to keep it as real as possible.

"Fingers in your ears please, sweetheart."

“You just go to your closet,” says Kovats. “You use what’s there.”One of the key focuses in The Last of Us is juxtaposing moments of eerie and empty post-apocalyptic silence with moments of deafeningly loud shocks. You can hear this in the demo, which begins with the serene chirp of insects and ends with a shotgun blast of buckshot and brain.

Kovats stresses it’s an important element of the game’s atmosphere.

“ The loud moments are really loud in this game.

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“We wanted to have a lot of dynamics in the game,” he says. “So there’s a lot of quiet moments compared to the loud moments. The loud moments are really loud in this game.”“A lot of different games, I think, use guns, explosions... Those kinds of things are kind of on level with dialogue because that’s the whole experience. It’s a fog of war kind of thing. Here we want to bring it into a very tight, visceral, intimate feel, so we want to make sure there’s a lot of dichotomy there.”“Absolutely, says Kovats. “I think the whole idea when we split to a two title studio was really exciting because we could really take on something new and give it a life of its own.”“When they brought me aboard and I saw the pitch for this game it was like a light went off. It was like, ‘Wow, this is just something amazing we can sink our teeth into.’“And we’ve really come at it from a really collaborative point; I think this is the tightest team I’ve ever worked on.”Kovats is most satisfied that people seem to be getting on board and becoming emotionally invested in the action.“I think, honestly, the thing that really hits me the most is the point where people really get drawn in,” he says. “Story is very important to me; I come from a post-audio background so I love movies and TV and things like that and I moved into games. I think the ability to tell stories the way we do is huge, and it really gives an opportunity to the gamer to really experience something different.”“So any time that we can get the player to get involved and really feel something, whether through humour or through shock or anything like that, it’s just very, very satisfying. So last night in the demo when Ellie threw the brick at the guy’s head and people were cheering, that was a huge moment. It’s not a huge audio moment, but it’s just one of those things where it all came together... It’s about bringing people alive, getting them into the story making them feel like it means something.”

Luke is Games Editor at IGN AU. You can chat to him about games, cars and shotguns on IGNor find him and the rest of the Australian team by joining the IGN Australia