Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
108 M PS E . O R G EM: What sort of challenges does working on a loot shooter bring to how you build the sounds for weapons, explosions, and other assets in the world? MP: In a loot shooter anything can do anything - that is the challenge. There is no limit to the combination of mods that any particular weapon can have. The weapon system that Brian developed on BL3 is a modular system that we pushed into projectiles and explosions to get the same variety. For weapons, it's never a comp shot—it is multiple layers at runtime based on game parameters. Our approach provides a huge amount of personality and variety to all the different manufacturers and weapon types—the "bazillion guns" thing that is part of the Borderlands looter shooter world. Jesse Lemons, Lead Tech Sound Design: In this game, we added shared manufacturer parts. There are manufacturer parts for Maliwan, Jakobs, and Daedalus that can be used on any weapon. That adds another wrinkle that we didn't have in BL3, where now we have to make contingency mixes for the bullets and the weapon shots so that when certain arrangements of parts are on the weapon, you can hear particular layers that you'd expect to. That way when you fire any gun, you're going to hear some variation on those pieces. Additionally, our creature and enemy design team think of enemies as loot as well. In the same mantra of "anything can do anything," they created a system they call their "AI traits." There are a handful of "traits" that cause an enemy to do elemental damage. So now we have to think, "Okay, well an enemy can do these three attacks, but can they also do these three other things based on random rolls or what your level is?" This added an additional challenge of figuring out how we needed to craft