Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
74 M PS E . O R G The first two days consisted of large destruction, where we had a quiet outdoor space and access to a forklift with an extension height of 36 feet. We started with concrete K-rails, which are large concrete barriers you often see on highways. Those weigh around 3,000 pounds, so when they're dropped from 36 feet, it's an incredibly punchy sound. And as you continue dropping them, they start to break apart, and the source shifts sonically and just gets better. We then moved into dropping large wooden beams. We would drop five to 10 beams at a time onto concrete. And as we continued, they would bend, break, and splinter, so the variation in the source just kept growing. After that we started dropping a car. It was a four-door sedan, and we dropped it around 10 times. This gave us vehicle impact effects, as well as just general metal bends and wronks. We finished the three days with bullet impact and material destruction. We chose concrete blocks, ceramic tiles, metal tiles, wooden boards, and a junked car. We placed those down range and used a 5.56 AR with a suppressor to hit those objects. You can, of course, break and/or impact these materials by hand to record object destruction, but with our method, you also get the bullet impact, and you'll often get a ricochet. So, we're getting material destruction, plus bullet effects all in one go. Part of our field recording ethos is "It sounds real because it is real." And these sessions really helped us achieve that. Mari S. Minto: In addition to the destruction recording session in the US, we spent two days recording destruction materials in Sweden. One day focused on tree destruction, and the second on brick walls and different junk materials. The brick recordings took place on a farm outside Stockholm, where walls were built and then dropped from height. We were particularly interested in capturing brick because in the Brooklyn maps that was a recurring material. It has a very specific character and tone to it that we felt we were missing in our libraries. Tree destruction was another area we wanted to explore further. We recorded a pine tree falling over in the forest, breaking branches and dragging the root out of the ground with a winch. Really juicy sounding recordings. One of my favorite parts is actually the sound of the wind moving through the tree as it falls. What's interesting is that we don't always end up using those recordings directly. Sometimes the real value is understanding the behavior of the event. What parts stand out and which sounds surprise you. Tree destruction is a good example. We couldn't simply record every possible tree fall we needed for the game. But because we had experienced and studied those recordings, Adam, one of our sound designers, was able to use this source material in combination with other source and recreate that behavior in a believable way. That's often what these recording sessions give us. Not just content, but an understanding of the event itself. Once you understand that, you can start constructing and designing it in different ways while still making it feel believable. What makes destruction sound believable in a game like Battlefield 6? Is it the scale of the source, the detail in the debris, the way it is layered, or how it behaves dynamically in gameplay? David Jegutidse: It's a bit of all of those things with a healthy dose of smoke and mirrors. While we do have an extensive list of materials that can be destroyed in different ways, just putting one and one together does not sound natural, especially when it happens all at the same time. The game itself is of course, a simplification of the incredible chaos of what would happen in reality, so we try to go beyond the actual events and materials. If a facade of a building collapses, what actually happens is many small elements breaking at roughly the same time and if all those would have a sound appropriate for those individual events you would just get a big wash of many small sounds. We have built a new system in which we can play just a few sounds, designed appropriately for the scale of the overall event by checking all the things that are happening nearby within hand-tuned time windows to escalate many small events to fewer big ones instead at multiple tiers. This allows us to design for the overall experience in which we add extra flavor to sell what's happening. For instance, a building might have all its windows blown out and be largely empty inside, but when we design the sounds for it crumbling down, we add in breaking glass and furniture and the types of sounds you would associate with such an event into those medium and large destruction sounds, even when the game events would only say "many small brick destructions." Mari S. Minto: I think perspective plays a big role as well. The same way we approach weapon recordings, we also think about destruction from different distances. A building collapsing sounds very different depending on where you are in relation to it. Whenever possible, we try to capture or design those perspectives directly rather than relying entirely on processing a close recording afterward. Understanding how these events behave over distance helps us create a more believable sense of scale. How do you keep destruction and debris from becoming repetitive during extended gameplay, especially when players may trigger similar events over and over? Mari S. Minto: I think it starts with making sure every destruction event has an interesting story to tell. Whether it's a window breaking, a barrel exploding, or the facade of a building coming down.