2K Sports have posted the eleventh Developer Insight for NBA 2K12 over on the official Facebook page. It features audio director Joel Simmons talking about the audio in this year’s game, beginning with the commentary. Joel details the changes with the new three man booth that now includes Steve Kerr and mentions that the commentary will better react to late game and clutch situations, as well as recent events and performance during a season.
He also talks about the commentary in NBA’s Greatest and the decision to approach it from an archival perspective, as well as the vintage arena effects and PA audio that were added along with 500 new contemporary arena-specific sounds and music clips. Improvements to crowd audio are also covered in the Insight and Joel touches on their ability to patch commentary bugs in NBA 2K12 as necessary post-launch.
Finally, the Insight includes some audio clips from the game, so that you can download and listen to examples of what Joel is talking about. Check it out and post your thoughts in this thread or feel free to leave a comment below.
Good to hear they re-recorded and revamped 97% of Clark Kellogg’s lines to fit the new three man booth. Listening to the commentary in the OS gameplay video, I did get a sense that they worked Kerr in fairly seamlessly with the effect being that it does seem like the three of them are there interacting with one another, rather than Kerr just also happening to be there.
It seems they’ve addressed some of the issues with repetitive commentary in Association, though I expect we’ll still grow tired of some of the lines. More acknowledgement of the current situation, standings etc definitely sound good. The late game clip sounds pretty good, I like the way they all react at once and have that overlap as they would in real life, rather than waiting to delivered a cued up line.
I’m definitely in favour of the archival perspective approach to the NBA’s Greatest games. It makes much more sense than pretending those guys were actually there calling the game at the time. Short of getting some voice over artists to mimic people like Johnny Most and Chick Hearn, I think that’s the best approach.
It’ll be interesting to see just what they can do with the audio patching.