I played through Doom Eternal's Ancient Gods Part 2 DLC recently, and had a smashing time - that sentinel hammer is such a satisfying weapon to bonk demons on the head with! Firing the game up again inspired me to go back and add some more details to an Archville glory kill re-design I made towards the end of last year.

Here’s the re-designed clip itself, and a video breakdown of the different sound layers that went into it:

I’m fairly happy with how this clip turned out, but I did struggle a bit with managing the mix. As there's so many big and hyperrealistic elements all fighting for the listener's attention at once (creature roar, fire magic, combat impacts, gore etc.) I found it tricky to get the balance right between these exciting but competing parts of the soundscape.⠀
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In the end, I decided to downplay the Archville's flame sounds in favour of focusing on its roar, as that felt like the most visually important element of the clip. I'm not 100% happy with the roar sound, as I don’t think I quite managed to get the individual parts (metal scrapes, alligator growls, tiger, lion & elephant roars) working together as one singular & cohesive voice as I'd intended. Nonetheless, I think the roar sound I ended up with still works with the visuals, and it was an enjoyable part of the design to iterate upon.⠀
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I then used Waves Factory’s Trackspacer plug-in to duck down the volume of the Archville layers when Doomguy performs the grab and stab moves, which helped keep those impacts feeling beefy and punchy on top of a loud and dense soundscape.⠀
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Overall though, I'm pleased with the end result of this re-design. I had a lot of daft fun chipping away at it, and the process of putting it together has been helpful in identifying areas in my mixing workflow that I need to continue to work on.⠀
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KAR EN TUK!