I decided to test it. I finished a quest, then listened to the subsequent open-world radio chat while standing still. Then I quit out of the game, reloaded my checkpoint, and listened to the same audio tracks while swinging around. The results clearly showed that, yes, there were two different vocal tracks happening. I put them together in a video and tweeted it:
It’s a pretty cool little detail, and the Tweet got shared around enough that some of the developers from Insomniac showed up in my mentions and elsewhere to explain more about how they made it work.
“So for those of you wondering if we recorded #spidermanps4 open-world Spidey dialogue twice—yes, we did,” Tweeted lead writer Jon Paquette. “One ‘resting’ take, one ‘exerted’ take. Programmers exposed a variable to Wwise allowing the game to switch between dialogue assets, depending on the player state.” (Wwise is
a development tool used for game audio.)