Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
78 M PS E . O R G recording. We then checked with our armorers, who supplied both the guns and operators to safely handle the firearms during recording, which from there, we had to do even more culling down. We really wanted to refine the environmental tails of our weapons, so we had a huge emphasis on recording various locations, as many as we could pack in with three main calibers of weapon for different levels of impulse per shot—9mm, 5.56, and 7.62, etc. For this product, we try to always leverage current recordings first to see how far we can get, then move to recordings from our archives if needed. Tom Wright: Initially, we always look for reference, whether that's online videos or recordings from our library. We try to identify what makes a weapon sound unique; whether that's the internal mechanisms cycling, the barrel length and width, which can affect whether the weapon firing sounds more snappy or boomy, or the caliber being fired, which impacts the level of energy being released and how the environment reacts. Our firing sounds are built from many granular elements, some of these elements can be pulled from a pool of meticulously curated shared assets, which often represents a weapon's archetype—but this also gives us the opportunity to maintain a lot of consistency across a large roster of firearms. Examples of these types of assets would be 'punch', environmental layers, spent casings, and bullet cracks. Each weapon firing sound is also built from plenty of unique assets. One of many layers is the sound of the weapon's internal mechanism. This is typically bolts or slides flying back-and- forth, but also the moment spent shells are being ejected and fresh rounds being loaded into the chamber. For this edition in the series, we really doubled down on a newer layer we call an 'Add' layer. This layer is specifically designed to help give a weapon its unique flavor. In the case of single-fire or semi-auto weapons, this could include added textures to a weapon's tail but in the case of fully auto weapons, this could be used to achieve a more bespoke transient. During implementation, we usually would spend a lot of time in-engine tweaking the delays, pitch, or amplitude of the various different layers. Minuscule alterations to these parameters can harbor drastically different results, and we will often leverage this approach to apply a multitude of different characteristics across our weapons. When recording firearms for Battlefield 6, what perspectives were essential? Close, medium, distant, mechanical, environmental tails, impacts, or other layers? Tom Wright: Early in Battlefield 6's development, we had a good look through our library and tried to identify any potential gaps in our source content. We decided to arrange an enormous shoot over in LA. Our primary goal here was to record as much environmental- related content as possible, and from a wide variety of distances from the shooter. While most of our recordists were spread out across these environments capturing all the different tails and David Jegutidse recording weapon Foley.