More than 18,000 unique sound files and a uniquely composed soundtrack carrying players through countless fantasy scenarios in one of this year’s most talked about multiplayer games. The Pole engagement in the making of Fellowship has been long, sometimes challenging, great fun, but most of all a great ride with a magic outcome.

After more than five years of development, the highly anticipated game Fellowship entered early access in mid-October, giving players their first chance to experience this online dungeon adventure. For Pole, it marked a significant milestone in their longtime and still ongoing collaboration with game studio Chief Rebel.

“This has been one of the longest, and most exciting, projects we have been on. I remember running into some of the guys from Chief Rebel at GDC before the pandemic, and how they told me that they would start developing a new game and needed help with the sound design,” says Max Lachmann, CEO and co-founder of Pole.

That brief conversation eventually led to a major engagement for Pole. During the development of Fellowship, Pole has designed and implemented all the game’s sound and composed the music.

“They outsourced the entire sound department to us, and we have been fully integrated with all operations at Chief Rebel. As an outsourcing company, we need to be able to assist our clients in multiple capacities. Sometimes we provide specific assets for a project, but other times – as in this case – the client wants us to run the entire department and take full ownership of all audio.”

The engagement has mainly included three experts from the Pole crew. Mats Lundgren has composed the music, while Niklas Olsson and Robert Lindell have designed and implemented the sound. Niklas and/or Robert have essentially been on the project every day since day one and sometimes have had company from additional sound designers from Pole. Mats’ involvement has come in phases as the project required, rather than spanning the full development period.

“This is one of the main benefits of outsourcing the entire department to us. Instead of recruiting personnel whose involvement might not be needed for the entire project, we can ramp up and down depending on project requirements. This is much appreciated, especially by smaller organizations.”

A Cohesive Soundscape

Niklas and Robert have designed the entire soundscape for the game. Recording sessions, ambient and character sound design, how sounds are triggered, audio infrastructure, file management, implementation – the list goes on. As experienced sound designers, they knew that one of the keys to a cohesive audio identity was capturing the right feel for the game and securing buy-in from the game directors early on.

Working on-site and collaborating daily with designers, programmers, and the rest of the team – combined with their own creative intuition – ensured the collaboration worked smoothly from the start.

“This game represents a new genre called MODA (Multiplayer Online Dungeon Adventure), but we have a lot of experience with audio, animations, and VFX from similar games. So, especially when it comes to audio, we knew instinctively what sounds would fit. We got a lot of artistic freedom from Chief Rebel and that was so much fun but also gave us confidence,” explains Robert.

“I remember when we implemented the first sounds, and one of the game directors nearly had tears in his eyes and said, ‘Sh*t, this is exactly how it should sound!’ We earned their trust not only to build this world audio-wise but also to communicate the gameplay – making sure players can feel and understand what they are doing at every moment of the game. During development, we found that this – communicating gameplay – increased in importance, while world-building became less of a focus,” says Niklas.

Challenges of Multiplayer Audio

Designing audio for a multiplayer game added another layer of complexity. With up to four players exploring the dungeon together, the sound engine must constantly determine what each player should hear – and what should be deprioritized.

“The whole multiplayer dimension has been its own challenge,” says Robert. “You suddenly have four listeners running around the map, all hearing everything at once, and the system needs to know when a sound should be prominent and when it shouldn’t. Sometimes it’s really important to hear what the others are doing – like when they trigger a major ability that affects the whole fight – while other sounds, like footsteps or even less important abilities for that matter, should sit further back in the mix.”

To handle this, the team built a priority and mixing framework that presents sounds differently depending on who triggers them, ensuring that crucial gameplay cues always cut through the mix while less critical sounds remain subtle. That dynamic mixing approach keeps the audio readable and balanced – even in the controlled chaos of multiplayer combat.

An Agile Workflow

The audio workflow has been highly agile, largely because the game’s development direction wasn’t fully defined from the start.

“Anything could be reshuffled and turned into something completely different at any time. Early on, we set up an SFX kit – actually several different SFX kits – and what we call magic kits. These allowed us to quickly rearrange elements and rapidly prototype characters, both heroes and enemies. Working this way has been a constant for us: always staying agile and always prepared to throw things out when the design changes. And it really has changed – large amounts of work simply became irrelevant as the game evolved from what it was in 2021 to what it is now,” says Robert.

“And to clarify what the magic kits are: we’ve created, for example, a fire magic kit, a blood magic kit, and so on. I think we’re up to around 13 or 14 different magic kits, each with its own library of sound ingredients that we can apply to any type of character. With just a few clicks, we can scale a fire spell to make it bigger or smaller, depending on what fits the character. That agile, kit-based setup has been incredibly valuable. Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with production. Looking at the project folder right now, we’ve created roughly 18,000 unique sound files for the game,” says Niklas.

Evolving Audio

The fact that the game is still in early access – and therefore under continuous development – means that this agile approach will remain essential for the audio team. New features, mechanics, environments, and characters are still being added or reworked, and each of these changes has direct implications for sound.

“We will need to create more kits, more sounds, and continuously maintain everything, making sure the audio plays back correctly and that the overall mix stays balanced and doesn’t drift in the wrong direction. That’s also been part of our workflow: keeping a consistent reference for how an asset should sound when it comes in. If it’s an ability or an attack, it should feel punchy and cool. When we add it to our structure, we place it within our reference volumes for different character types. Bosses are mixed a bit stronger and heavier, while a small skeleton in the corner of the map is mixed more subtly. Everything is sorted into a priority system,” says Niklas.

“And the mix is dynamic. It depends on the gameplay. Major actions performed by the player, as well as by enemies, all need to have their rightful place in the mix. And that requires constant maintenance as we continue adding new content, making sure nothing starts tipping out of balance,” says Robert.

Organic Recordings and Expansive Sound Libraries

The sound effects and ambiences in Fellowship are almost entirely (“98 percent!”) organic recordings. The team built several custom libraries. Tonal Colors, Metal Hit Sweeteners, and many more. Tonal Colors for instance gathers sounds from saw blades, metal beams, glass, bells of various sizes and even a massive Swiss church bell they managed to track down. They spent two full days experimenting with the materials, striking, scraping, and testing anything that could produce an interesting tone.

These raw recordings then became the foundation for a wide range of magical and environmental sounds. By feeding them into granular tools, the team could stretch, reshape, and animate the material into evolving textures, an approach that shaped much of the game’s magical sound and gave it its distinctive character. They drew heavily on Pole’s Stone & Sand library, using its extensive collection of elemental materials – gravel, stones, tiles, rock flakes, boulders, and other varied props – to expand the palette even further.

Another Pole library that was used was The Cinematic Transformation Library, packed with a wide selection of drones, BRAAMS, hits, whooshes, stylized pass-bys, and risers.

“On that library, our colleague Eric Thorsell went bananas with effects and a lot of our recordings and created sounds for trailers, but we found multiple structures and loops that were perfect for building this magical world. We also want to make a shout-out to Boom Library. We’ve made good use of their magic library, where they had already done a lot of the initial groundwork,” says Niklas. “Since we had such a massive amount of audio to produce, we couldn’t create absolutely everything from scratch, even if that would’ve been ideal. Much of the core material still comes from our own recordings, but their library was a huge asset. They had already gathered and lightly processed sounds, combining them in ways that saved us an incredible amount of time.”

Composing Fellowship’s Musical Identity

Pole composer Mats Lundgren was responsible for creating the musical identity of the game. He wrote all the music, including the main theme and the score for each environment and gameplay scenario.

“The first thing I wrote was the main theme, which essentially set the tone for the entire game,” says Mats. “It became the starting point for how everything else should feel and sound. Fellowship consists of a number of dungeons and environments, each with its own distinct character – icy landscapes, crystal caverns, and so on – so I composed music that fit both the narrative and the atmosphere of each place. The work was incredibly varied because the environments are so different from one another, which meant writing many different types of music with their own ingredients and nuances. It was challenging at times, but in a very inspiring way.”

Before composing the main theme, Mats worked closely with Niklas and Robert to get a clear understanding of the game’s world, its environments, and its characters.

“The first step is always collaboration with the sound department,” he explains. “They gave me a brief about what happens in the game, key moments, key emotions, the types of enemies you encounter, and I got a video capture to see how everything looked in motion. From there, I tried to find a musical idea that framed it all. Maybe using icy, brittle timbres for a cold environment, or drawing on specific instrumentation if the setting had a Viking-inspired tone. Each environment has its own character, and the music has to reflect that.”

Much of the early musical development was shaped through shared references and discussions with Niklas.

“We exchanged a lot of ideas in the beginning. The game lives firmly in the fantasy genre, so there’s a huge amount to draw from there — but always with my own touch added to it.”

Finding the Main Theme

Finding the right main theme was a meticulous process. Mats searched not just for a melody but for a feeling he believed could carry the story of the game.

“In this case, it became a melody,” he says. “I spent several days turning just a handful of notes inside out, trying to find something that felt right. A theme is really just a short phrase, and creating one that actually means something and represents the world is quite difficult.”

He’d sit at his keyboard, playing variations of the same four or five notes in different shapes and figures.

“At some point you feel it connects with the game, and you know you’re playing something that belongs in that world.”

Mats relied heavily on intuition throughout the process. He recorded sketches on his keyboard, moved notes around, and explored countless variations until he found the right expression.

“You test it against your own gut feeling, and in the end you just have to trust that you’ve found something that fits the game.”

Early on, he also received a brief from Chief Rebel’s Axel Lindberg, one of the game’s creators. Axel described a world where the player is constantly being thrown from one reality to another, entering a new environment, having it flipped upside down, and then being propelled into yet another.

“For these scenarios, I used the main theme as the starting point and built from there. The theme itself is quite simple and is the thread that runs through everything, while these tunes must be more elaborate and able to carry the story.”

A Varied Musical Landscape

Working on Fellowship proved to be an exceptionally varied experience. With so many different environments in the game, the music often needed to shift character, each piece built from its own set of ingredients.

“Every environment demands its own musical identity, and you only have a short window to communicate what’s important to the player. You have to be very clear in your choices and find those small musical elements that instantly convey the right feeling.”

To create the final music, Mats worked entirely in a digital environment. He composed in Logic Pro, one of the most common tools for professional music production, supported by a large collection of orchestral sound libraries.

“I use several different libraries to build the orchestras I need,” he explains. “And I work with a program called Vienna Ensemble Pro Server, which lets me load all the orchestral banks instantly. I have a template with everything preloaded, so I can quickly jump to any instrument and start shaping the musical world.”

This workflow effectively gave Mats command of a virtual orchestra.

“You could definitely call it that. In this setup, I’m the composer, the orchestrator, the musician, essentially, I was the entire ensemble at once.”