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 111 ambiences and leaned less into beds. So things like birds, rustling leaves in the trees, small gusts of wind, little sandstorms - those kinds of details create interest. We tried to propagate the world as opposed to just static beds, which was a big change. In prior titles, persistent ambient music typically filled this space, but we felt that would become fatiguing over time. BF: Selling that sense of space was important, and leaning into source for that was a big goal. With it being an open world, we have a lot of different types of environments and biomes within that world, and we wanted to emphasize the differences in those environments with the weapons. So we deployed a multi-day, multi-mic recording session to record weapon tails and the way that different objects respond in those environments. We traversed across different types of terrains, mountains and valleys, and set up a quad array of mics to capture tails and the environmental response. And then Jesse developed a system where we could blend those within the world. EM: Julian, what was your team's approach to creating interactive music that could keep players engaged through the open world gameplay? JP: In all of our previous titles, the music is level-based. You're in this level for a while, and even if the player goes back, there's still a chronological arrangement. You can think about the order that the music is going to happen in, but when you've got one big map the player really has the agency to go in any direction. So not only are there no clear boundaries, there's also no clear order that the player is going to move through that space. It changes the way you think about the organization of those things. We used to marry ambient music with combat music—so one level would have this pair, and the next level would have this pair. In this game, those things are completely separated, and we have a tool for painting the world. We can go in and say, "Hey, here's a beautiful pond. Let's paint a nice, pretty ambience around that. Here's a threatening area, let's paint an ambience there that communicates that. Here we're near the city walls, and I want the player to have the experience of it being a bad place. I can't get there yet, but I know that something terrible is over there,"so when you're around the walls, we have an ambient music queue that comes in, which is a separate layer. There's a separate layer of paint for combat, so we can go in and say, "here's an area that's controlled by the Ripper army that should have Ripper music. Here's an area of control by the order that does this. And here we're just outdoors in the mountains fighting cats, so we want the outdoor music." We organize things by painting these different zones within combat music. Our creative director communicated very early on that even though it's open world, we still want the players to have the experience that they can go into a dungeon and it feels like a dungeon from a previous Borderlands game. There is this distinction between "I'm outdoors doing stuff," and "I'm indoors doing a specific activity." We tried to design combat music that filled those two roles. So if you are outdoors in the mountains, there is general mountain combat music Lead sound designer Josh Davidson and sound design director Brian Fieser at a Texas location recording for explosions for Borderlands 4.