Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
90 M PS E . O R G compared to the first game. In the first game, you were encouraged to avoid combat in certain scenarios due to Sam Porter Bridges' (protagonist) limited capabilities. But in this game, you get a lot more options to handle situations, and it becomes a combat sandbox. From a sound design and mix perspective, there's a lot more gameplay depth that we had to factor in, where you're not just making a cool narrative experience, but you're also making a game that has a lot of intertwined mechanics. So the complexity added a lot of interesting scenarios, but also a lot of really exciting opportunities for every department. EM: How early did you each begin working on this game, and how did the focus of your work change as you moved toward completion of the project? JW: It started pretty early for the dialogue team. I came onto the project in February 2022 and stayed on through April 2025. In the early days, it was mostly performance capture. We were working closely with KJP when they came down to our motion-capture stages in Playa Vista, Los Angeles. We ended up shooting scenes with the actors for over a year. After that, we moved into voice recording and ADR, which became about a two-year process. That part was tricky because our actors were spread out all over the world. We recorded in a lot of different places, from Tokyo to London, Melbourne, Toronto, New York, Nashville, and beyond. A big part of the job was making sure the dialogue felt cohesive across all of those recording environments throughout the years. The workflow really had a few different phases. First, we helped build and solidify the dialogue pipeline. Then came dialogue recording. After that, we moved into design, focused on how the content was playing in-game, and eventually into the mix. So throughout the project, we had to change hats depending on each phase of production. AB: On the music side, we started a little later than Justin. I think it was mid-2022, about three years before the game door and ask a sound designer, "Hey, what props did you use for the BB pod on the first DEATH STRANDING?" To have someone like Juliet Rascon run in and start collecting props with me, recreating entire Foley setups, "Oh, it was this toilet. It was this fish tank with this speaker cone filled with this boxing glove." We were able to really get in there and get that level of specificity through our team. DE: There was a really strict adherence to the legacy sounds. We had this opportunity to be really creative and exploit all these new opportunities, and at the same time really call back to everything that had already been done. It was challenging, but having the original designers like Juliet, Rob Castro, and Aaron Sanchez on the team made getting answers incredibly fast, especially since they still had so much of the original source material on hand to share with us. AP: DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH definitely pushed the boundaries of combat and capabilities Sam (portrayed by Norman Reedus) facing off against Chiral Creatures