Beastie sounds
Posted February 17th 2006
In places along the cliff edge and elsewhere, you can hear the eerie cries of wild beasties down below if you care to stop and listen. You've probably heard them if you've played through the level a lot, but it's also pretty easy to miss them in your haste to wreak havoc among the enemy. Here's a little safari guide. You can use any difficulty setting.
A good listening spot
There's a good listening spot near a tree, which you can reach as follows. Fight through until you're approaching the third enemy area; the one with a rocky bridge. You approach it around a scarily narrow cliff path. Up ahead you'll usually find a Grunt in a Shade, and further on there's a pacing Elite. Staying down on the cliff path, kill them with the sniper rifle and move along. Kill a Jackal or two and stop near the first tree past the entrance.
The sounds are relatively loud here (for a few metres either side of the tree), and there's no music drowning things out as you didn't trigger a full-on attack yet. Any Marines should be hanging back. There may be a few Grunts snorting away near that first Shade, but they're not loud. Other background noises including the sound of the grav-lift and a sort of cricket sound that comes and goes. You've got the occasional bit of whistling wind, and it's all quite atmospheric as you look out into the gloom. Easily my favourite spot.
If you prefer to eliminate all nearby enemies, go ahead. Music will stop once you wipe out the enemies from the passage that leads through to the grav-lift area.
Sound types and frequency
There seem to be three types of sound. Firstly there's something like a wolf howl; that's the easiest to describe. Secondly, I hear four long deep resonant foghorn cries that sound like they're coming from something pretty big, which is namely what ace reporter Suzie met up with in 'Mysterious beastie'. This type is fixed in my mind as being the first I ever heard, and it really got my attention. "What the heck was that?", I thought. A beastie down below! More amazing detail from Bungie. Not content with sending scary Elites our way, now they want to creep us out with the wildlife too! Thirdly, there are several high-pitched screeching sounds.
This all suggests that we're hearing from at least three types of creature. More than three if you think those screeches are sufficiently different from one another. Personally I assume there's a whole menagerie down there and we're just hearing the loudest guys.
You seem to hear about five sounds per minute, fairly regularly spaced. In a ten-minute period I heard 4 wolf howls, 15 foghorn cries, and 31 screeches.
Caught in the act
The three types of sound have been nicely captured in an mp3 sound file by Captain Spark (from the PC version), giving most or all of the sounds one after another, with no background noise. It's available at the HBO's dialogue databank here. You'll hear first some screeches, then the wolf-like howl, then the four foghorn cries of Suzie's beastie, then some more screeches. Probably best to listen to this creepy file with the lights on!
Listen with an assault rifle
Huh? Listen with an assault rifle? Let me rephrase that. When you want to listen to beastie sounds, it's best to be armed with an assault rifle because it makes no 'passive noise', i.e. noise from the periodic fiddling-with-weapon animation that you get when doing nothing. The animation is also visually unintrusive. With other weapons the repeated animation gets a bit annoying when you're just standing around for ages.
Other listening spots
There are many other places to listen from, including near the cliff edge in your initial landing area (preferably once all music has stopped of course). Explore if you're interested. I'm not sure anywhere is as loud as near the tree I mentioned, but some places at least rival it. Some stretches of cliff edge give no sounds at all; which doesn't really make sense, but never mind. Perhaps Bungie limited the listening areas so the sounds didn't become too commonplace. Sounds don't always come from the direction of the nearest cliff edge; sometimes they seem to come from the direction of the grav-lift or thereabouts.
Some of the listening spots are well away from the cliff edge, near inner cliff walls. The sounds are fairly loud in some of these, though there's not really the same atmosphere as when looking out into the void. One such loud spot is in the first enemy area, below the far end of the raised path you can go up onto to shoot. Another is under the branches growing out of the wall just outside the Elite's 'cave' near where the first supplies. Captain Spark informs me in an HBO forum thread that his sound file was actually recorded there.