Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
M OT I O N P I CTU R E S O U N D E D I TO R S 77 standing next to a tree, that spot emitter should be culled completely for a brief moment; not only to enhance immersion of that individual moment, but also a competent jet pilot in our game is a huge threat to the balance of the match and needs to prioritize your attention. Prioritizing what's right for our gameplay loop takes a ton of time and refinement and it's one of the things that truly leads to "Battlefield Moments." David Jegutidse: Adding to the trifecta Drew mentioned, what helps as well is having a long-lasting franchise which will have differences from game to game, but still maintain a core of how the game plays moment to moment. We can use those years of experience to make better educated decisions from the beginning. A loud and busy sandbox is inherently messy and full of the unexpected. It is impossible to fully predict how a sound will sit in the overall soundscape until you hear it in practice over and over again, in all kinds of situations. Luckily from past games, we already have a great starting point for predicting the different scenarios that unfold with real players. Continuous iteration from day one through launch and beyond is essential, but it also requires a steady hand. You need to keep refining the work without making knee-jerk reactions to every issue or piece of feedback. Something might not work perfectly in one situation but making a change might worsen a plethora of other situations. Much of the dynamic mixing really comes from reducing elements when we know for sure they are not important. For instance, staying with the jet example, we want them to be big and powerful of course, but when a jet is circling at the other end of the level, far away and offscreen so the player does not even need to know of it, then it's OK to make it leave room in the soundscape for the more immediate player experience. This mindset is applied to just about everything. WEAPONS RECORDING THE ARSENAL Weapons are central to the Battlefield experience. Can you walk us through the lifecycle of a weapon sound, from field recording to editing, implementation, testing, and final mix? Drew Elder: The weapons for Battlefield 6 all began in pre-production in terms of setting the intention for direction, tone and style we're trying to go after with this title and its soundscape. We're all huge fans of our previous titles, especially Battlefield 3 and 4, and so for this title we really wanted to figure out a way to thread the needle between evoking nostalgia for those titles, as well as pushing the needle forward, with refining bespoke systems and content that sounded as good as they could with a modern shooter soundscape. When thinking about recording weapons, we first want to start with how we'll achieve that direction and record for new improvements to our systems and game mechanics we know we want to refine. From there, then you have to figure out the limitations of your recording budget in terms of money and time and refine even more. We couldn't get 100 percent of everything so we had to strategically record what we knew would bolster our pre-existing libraries to help fill in coverage. For example, we knew we really needed more polymer-based weapon Foley in our libraries for Battlefield 6, so we targeted about 40 guns for Foley