“You never know what you're going to get,” he continues. “With high-frequency microphones, we retain a lot of the detail when you pitch it down really low. You get a really clean, gross, disgusting, slimy quality.”

One of Giampa's favorite discoveries came in the form of a tub of peeled tomatoes. He'd grab the skinless fruit and drop them back into the sauce, resulting in a “sloppy, smacky, gut-type” sound. In other words, it was a perfect fit for Diablo.

But Sanctuary contains more than steel broadswords and eviscerated demonic husks. People do live here too, and may God have mercy on their souls. Blizzard's casting director needs to fill out the whole expanse of this accursed realm—well beyond the soliloquies of Tyrael or the loose banter of side-quest dispensers. For instance, how does one articulate the ambient wails of unspeakable agony as your hero explores the razed villages and labyrinthine dungeons teeming with the shattered peasantry? That is what Andrea Toyias, who has been casting and directing actors at Blizzard since 2008, needed to figure out. 

Sure, it's distressing to come upon a pile of twitching corpses expelling a long, tortured death rattle within the context of a fantasy RPG, but seeing performers of flesh and blood unleash that misery in a recording booth summons up its own special type of uncanny woe. Everyone in the cast needed to briefly inhabit the phantasmagoric misery of Sanctuary; to nobody's surprise, it's not a very nice place to be.

“It's one thing to say, ‘OK, make the sound of a disembodied torso attached to a pole,’ because who knows what that sounds like. So as a director, I use the words as if. Let's do it as if you just found out your entire family was murdered. Moan and sob like you're grieving the loss of your entire clan. All of your neighbors are gone, the huts are burned down, it's about capturing the emotion of that,” says Toyias, recounting the direction she was giving to her voice actors for some of the grizzliest moments in the game. “You have to have actors willing to roll-up their sleeves and dive in. I felt kind of icky afterwards. We all had to go there. We all had to go to this dark, gruesome place.”