BG3 Harm Spell Sound Redesign

Baldur's Gate 3 Sound Redesign

Hey there! Welcome to my first blog post 🙂

I wanted to share my BG3 Sound Redesign for the Cleric's Harm spell and what was going through my mind when I was redesign the sound. I would love to hear anyone's feedback and criticism.

Since Harm is a high level necromancy spell with a devastating effect, I wanted to balance the ideas of necromancy, clerics and devastation. So the keywords in my mind were - evil, dark, church, powerful and also light.

For the precast / preparation I wanted something “flowy” and gracious, since the animation for the spell is very fluid. I used some predesigned “vocodery” samples, which came from a recording of the hum, clicks and pops of an older fridge. The fridge samples were post-processed using a lot of compression, distortion, multiple vocoders and OTT.

The main focus of the loop part of the spell was to make it sound foreboding, like an evil church or a temple. The loop or hold of the spell has several layers - metal bowl resonance, glass resonance and an electricity loop (the good old crisp bag). All of the recordings used were processed using a granulator, to create a pad, later adding several effects to achieve a flowy movement, mainly modulated choruses, flangers, filters and harmonizers.

The main impact of the spell was made by taking recordings of heavier rock impacts. The fx chain consists of a frequency shifter, then a frequency splitting rack, the low channel has several transient shapers, to make it powerful, Distortion, low end enhancement, Saturation and Delay. The Frequency splitting rack was used to add neccessary effects to the lows, mids and highs, aswell as to keep the signal clean. For example the low and mid channel focused on the heavier transients, the high end channel focuses on movement and some sweeteners with filtering, delays and distortion.

The Mindflayer getting hurt was very fun sound to design, it’s quite minimal, but gets the job done. At the core, there are 3 recordings of me attempting to do fry and inhale screams, 1 recording of canned tomatoes being poured out and wiggled around in a bowl (a tasty sauce afterwards), 1 free online recording of a whale sound. These recordings were first processed individually, using pitch shifting, Dumpster Fire by Freakshow Industries, Frequency Shifting and Distortion (TaraTube, Decapitator, Ableton’s roar), some of the recordings also have a modulated Phaser-Flanger in their respective chains.

Recording Equipment - Zoom H6, Sennheiser ME 66 shotgun mic, Samsung A56.

Gameplay footage captured by me.
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Baldur’s Gate 3 © Larian Studios.