Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546054
82 M PS E . O R G All other bullet impacts are overpowered by your own weapon fire. Then there are suppressed weapons… All of this is working together and on top of the HDR system, which in short, allows for dynamic loudness-based ducking and culling of quieter sounds. MAKING THE BATTLEFIELD REACT SYSTEMS, TECHNOLOGY, AND IMPLEMENTATION The game uses environmental response and reflection systems to make spaces feel alive. How did those systems influence the way source assets were recorded, edited, and prepared? Gonçalo Tavares: I would say that the relationship between the two is the other way around. Our recordings heavily influence the systems that we created! Experiencing these sounds in real life gave us the golden target of what our game should sound like, so we use the systems to build upon the recordings with the goal of getting the experience closer to real life. As an example, our early/mid reflections system only has 3 delay lines. This is so that the digital processing doesn't overtake the recorded content, while shaping it to reflect the environment the player is in. Did the scale and density of Battlefield 6 require the team to rethink any traditional FPS sound workflows? Gonçalo Tavares: We are lucky that we have a very large team to tackle this behemoth of a project, but a large team comes with its own set of challenges. Our workflows had to be done with this in mind, if a common task takes five more minutes to achieve, this time gets multiplied by the number of team members and suddenly, a small speed bump is a substantial delay. If a process has too many options, the more likely it is that we'll have inconsistencies across the project. With this in mind, we tried to find parts of our work that could be optimized to reduce these issues. One example is that we've created a script that bypasses our DAWs render step, so that every asset is rendered with the exact same settings, and gets automatically checked for common issues we've had in the past, like clicks, naming issues, fades, etc. On the other hand, we've added steps to our workflows to support the scale of the project. Peer reviews, sharing of work in progress, and overall intentional communication became an integral part of our day-to-day, so that we could deliver this project as one team! How much of the final clarity comes from asset design, mix decisions, implementation systems, or runtime prioritization? Braeger Moore: Each of these elements stacks on top of one another, with asset design being the foundation, followed by implementation, prioritization/culling, and mix. Without a good sound to play, nothing else matters. That is the reason why so much care goes into when and how we do our field recording trips. That said, each system, process and decision between that sound and the player's ears plays an equally important role in arriving at the quality bar we set for ourselves. This balance is one of the principal challenges we face in game audio, especially so in Battlefield 6.