On the sound side, this led Infinity Ward’s sound team to push boundaries as well, giving the player a more reactive environment that responds in realistic and varied ways. People should be like, "Oh, of course it sounds like that when I interact with this future thing that I've never seen before and doesn't even exist.The reveal trailer for Call of Duty: Modern WarfareĬall of Duty: Modern Warfare uses a brand-new game engine that allows for more detailed environments, more accurate lighting, more photo-realistic images, and precise object tracing - all contributing to a higher degree of visual realism. And again, usually if you get it to a place where it's right, no one will ever think about it, necessarily. Like, a helicopter can crash, and I'm like, "Okay, I know this is going to have metal, an explosion, a fireball, all these different elements," but what does it sound like when you interface with this thing and say "Yes”? Or you push that button? What does that sound like? The simplest sound can take you so much longer to work on. Jimmerson: I was just going to say, one of our sound designers had a great observation the other day, that there's no correlation between the time it takes to work on a sound and the significance of the sound in the game in a visual sense. It's the same thing, you know? It's giving you that. Tuey: Just for nobody to ever go, "Whoa, that's a really awesome sound."Ĭowell: But then you know you love it, you know, when you put it in there. Tuey: It probably took a sound designer weeks to make that just right.Ĭowell: To get it just right, that stuff's really hard. When you hear those sounds, that tink-tink-tink-tink, and you're like, "Yeah!" That's another good classic sound that has a lot of meaning behind it. There are certain things that you just don't want to mess with too much, because you just upset people who are playing your game.Ībout a year ago in Team Fortress 2 I changed my hit sound to the Sonic "ring." It's pretty Pavlovian, it's a good incentive for shooting people.Ĭowell: Yeah, that's a good one. Within our community, there's that same sort of thing.
Jimmerson: But people have that expectation. There's a lot of expectation, you know, even in films, when somebody punches somebody else, it's not a realistic sound. You're firing and you want that immediate feedback that I am actually scoring hits. Shawn Jimmerson, Sound Designer: You want to know that your bullet has hit someone, especially in MP.
But it's more important for us that the gameplay aspect of it is supported, versus "Hey, now it sounds more real." Tuey: I made it sound more like a bullet hitting somebody, as opposed to a tick. What did it sound like when you changed it? But usually we just want to see what people's reactions are. So the experience was different, so people who were playing the game didn't even know I'd changed it, right? It's not like we make a big production about, "Hey, I changed this sound!" Well, sometimes we do. Tuey: And that's what the problem was with the new one I dropped in, it sounded different. That experience needs to be consistent across all of them, but not the sound. Tuey: But it has to cut through the guns, the explosions, and give you the same exact feeling you had when you heard it last game.Ĭowell: Yeah. The last game, it took me weeks to get that little thing right, because you have to fire it, get the tick and hear it and know what it means. The same stuff doesn't sound the same anymore.Ĭowell: Little things like that can be a really difficult sound to make. Tuey: Our whole DSP chain in the engine is completely different. They're all very similar, and they serve the same purpose, but the actual content and the creation of it is redone every game, because our guns sound differently, you know? The music's different, the situation's different.