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Where the actual f*ck are the realistic shooters with great sound design?

A

arkhamguy123

Member
So I saw civil war yesterday and man how about those last 20 minutes? What a great battle scene. How it’s shot, how long it goes, the tactical nature of it. And my GOD the sound design. They had a god tier military advisor(s) and sound team on this bitch.

I’m not really a gun guy per say but it sparked a little inspiration in me so I go rewatch the great cinema shootouts, or at least my favorites. I go look at Heat, Sicario 1, and Den of Thieves. Last one is an underrated gem a lot of you probably haven’t seen. And man I was itchin to play that shit in video game form in some way. So I get my debit card and I’m going through the PS and Xbox digital store’s aaaaand…. Nothing?

It’s shockingly, bamboozling barren in the gaming land scape. You can always get a cod or battlefield I guess but I was looking for literally even just one thing outside the 2 literal biggest mainstream brands. I googled “best gaming shootouts” and “best audio design in games” and unironically get forums and articles talking about goddamn sackboys big adventure and stuff like that. For best sound design. Or if it’s a shooter it’s some outlandish sci fi thing. Which isn’t what I’m looking for right now. Conversely a Google of “best shootouts in movies” yields dozens of good results

This should be the easiest lay up ever for gaming. It was weird. I was let down. Are there any games besides BF and COD that offer visceral infantry action like the 4 aforementioned movies I named? What’s goin on gaming industry?
 
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A

arkhamguy123

Member
hyperbertha said:
I mean if bf and cod is enough to hit you in the feels why are you starved? 1 game per year not enough?
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Well no man but I’ve just played those. 2042 wasn’t exactly my cup of tea and the modern warfare reboots are alright but pretty meh to me. I was looking for new. For novel. Not the usual 2 most typical *insert shooter here* casual franchises
 
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A

arkhamguy123

Member
Beechos said:
Although they are not war games. Rainbow six vegas games are really good.
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They don’t necessarily need to be war! Heat and Den of Thieves weren’t war either. But that’s the kind of brand I’m looking for. Just gritty tactical ya know?
 
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scarlet0pimp

scarlet0pimp

Member
I had some of the most memorable shootouts in a game called hunt showdown on xbox and PS and even due a next gen update soon. Sound design is awesome too. It's a fantasy setting though with cowboy type guns.
 
Guilty_AI

Guilty_AI

Member
Bry0 said:
All PC games, which would explain why he isn’t finding them on the Xbox/ps stores
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If you want first person shooters of any kind, PC is pretty much the platform to go with. Consoles don't give you much choice there.

Well, Hell let Loose is on consoles so you could try that, though i have no idea how it compares with PC. For single player, i guess there's Trepang2 and Severed Steel.
 
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StueyDuck

StueyDuck

Member
Cod 2019 really raised the bar for that stuff after BF had been king for so long, but mw3 and 2042, neither game really has that same punch.

It's weird we've gone backwards.

But if you looking on PC games like Squad and squad 44, insurgency sandstorm, 6 days in fallujah and ready or not (plus I'm sure others like tarkov) deliver that meaty gunplay audio
 
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B

Beechos

Member
arkhamguy123 said:
They don’t necessarily need to be war! Heat and Den of Thieves weren’t war either. But that’s the kind of brand I’m looking for. Just gritty tactical ya know?
Click to expand...
Rainbow 6 should def scratch that itch then. Tactical and realistic compared to most gamed.
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
Sound design in games is tough because you can't control the player. You can record gun sounds, you can add a bit of variety to shots or use modern sound modification/"raytraced sound" approaches to add distinctive reality to shots, but if a player is just going to lay on the trigger, it's going to make a pretty repetitive sound over and over.

Movies like Heat or Sicario can time out the shots and add different sounds to the exact moment, making it like an orchestration with guns as instruments. Loud, quiet, loud. They can also add booming blasts well beyond the reality of the scene in order to heighten the impact. And, they only last 2 hours; the sound a big movie uses in its five-minute shoot-out setpieces will overwhelm or dull your senses in 30 minutes, 2 hours, 8 hours, what have you of gameplay. (Games use a lot of the same sound libraries or employ the same audio technicians to create their gun sounds, so it's not that they're not using the same guns, they just don't sweeten them the same so that there's a more reasonable balance to sound.

Game sound has to fit the reality of the scene. You can have ridiculous sounds (gunshots are much sharper and often less exciting than they are in games or moves, and BTW, silencers don't sound like that...) and they have to sound like they're coming from the character in the scene. Movies usually put you right in the actor's face, sometimes right at the tip of the barrel, and the sounds make sense; gun in games are pointed away from the player (...if you're doing it right.) You know what the space is that you're playing is, and so if a gunshot sounds overdramatic for that area, it can seem corny.

There are still important innovations being made in game sound design, albeit it's more to simulate reality than it is to heighten the coolness. (However, if you add in the effects, you can then mess with the algorithm and maybe get additional results?) Check out the MADDER audio system used in Killzone Shadowfall; this fires a "wave" of sound through the game geometry and determines the acoustical response you'd get from that sound in that environment. So in warehouses, gunshots bounce off of steel walls and sound massive, while outside shooting doesn't have the bounce but creates a distant echo. (Microsoft has a similar system it uses.)

 
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TintoConCasera

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
Play FEAR if you haven't already, the devs based the action visual design on the movie Hard Boiled. You got tons of exaggerated particles and smoke effects, which combined with the dynamic lighting and stencil shadows makes for a treat for the eyes.

You get bullet time which might not be very realistic, but the enemies have a sort of squad AI that makes them work together (or makes it seem like they do in a very believable way).
 
XXL

XXL

Member
Max Payne 3 is the best third person shooter ever made.

I've been playing it on Steam again recently and holy shit is sooooo fucking good.
 
violence

violence

Gold Member
fwkAgsP.jpeg
 
CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
arkhamguy123 said:
It’s shockingly, bamboozling barren in the gaming land scape. You can always get a cod or battlefield I guess but I was looking for literally even just one thing outside the 2 literal biggest mainstream brands...

This should be the easiest lay up ever for gaming. It was weird. I was let down. Are there any games besides BF and COD that offer visceral infantry action like the 4 aforementioned movies I named? What’s goin on gaming industry?
Click to expand...

I'm curious to ask, what is it you are thinking is the easiest lay up ever?

You already said that CoD and Battlefield are among the literal biggest mainstream brands in gaming right now, so why would a developer try to compete? In the past, you could draft off CoD with a CoD clone and make some money in the off-time between releases, but now CoD is a year-round service game with new content and perpetual online play. Battlefield and R6 are suffering in competition, and these are venerable games. And the adrenaline drip of fast-paced shooters with multiplayer hooks creates a challenging situation for the more realistic games like ARMA and Insurgency to stand as opposition when players are hooked hard on the satisfaction hit; similarly, open-world shooters have driven scale to levels that only well-funded developers can deal with. And gamers have played everything already before, there's not much room for innovation in the shooter market unless you go crazy with setting or gimmick, which usually leads away from the street-level or military shooter game setting. A game might be able to thread the needle and get players in with some kind of particular attractant (the co-op and gritty scenario of Payback, or the cold survival challenge of Escape from Tarkov,) but they're usually dealing with fractions of the player base of the big hits, and the failure cases (even for hits; Payback was a blockbuster for 2 games, now it's a laughing stock) are brutal and costly.

I think it'd be rad if a new game hit that prioritized realism (and did it with naturalistic, cinematic audio design,) but it makes some sense why there's not a great variety of them.
 
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SlimySnake

SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
Yeah, there haven’t been many great FPS campaigns these past two gens. Killzone 2, resistance 3, halo 3 and reach were the last good ones. Bungie went full gaas and forgot gg and insomniac went full action adventure. That’s left cod studios who suck ass and dice who last made a great game in 2016. And even that was only great in mp. Sp campaign sucked.

I’d recommend re4, village, tlou2, and maybe returnal if you are into sci fi shooters. But for real guns, only those three survival horror games are your best shot.

Stay away from cyberpunk. It’s trash. Maybe the shooting gets better 30 hours in but i dont care about number based shooting.
 
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Represent.

Represent.

Represent(ative) of bad opinions
Finally someone else says it. I’ve been hyping the shit out of the final 20 mins in the thread all by myself lmao. It’s a fucking masterclass in filmmaking.

It has the best sound I’ve ever heard in a film

Nothing in games is doing this. Just a bunch of boom boom explosions and cartoony trash
 
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Represent.

Represent.

Represent(ative) of bad opinions
arkhamguy123 said:
So I saw civil war yesterday and man how about those last 20 minutes? What a great battle scene. How it’s shot, how long it goes, the tactical nature of it. And my GOD the sound design. They had a god tier military advisor(s) and sound team on this bitch.

I’m not really a gun guy per say but it sparked a little inspiration in me so I go rewatch the great cinema shootouts, or at least my favorites. I go look at Heat, Sicario 1, and Den of Thieves. Last one is an underrated gem a lot of you probably haven’t seen. And man I was itchin to play that shit in video game form in some way. So I get my debit card and I’m going through the PS and Xbox digital store’s aaaaand…. Nothing?

It’s shockingly, bamboozling barren in the gaming land scape. You can always get a cod or battlefield I guess but I was looking for literally even just one thing outside the 2 literal biggest mainstream brands. I googled “best gaming shootouts” and “best audio design in games” and unironically get forums and articles talking about goddamn sackboys big adventure and stuff like that. For best sound design. Or if it’s a shooter it’s some outlandish sci fi thing. Which isn’t what I’m looking for right now. Conversely a Google of “best shootouts in movies” yields dozens of good results

This should be the easiest lay up ever for gaming. It was weird. I was let down. Are there any games besides BF and COD that offer visceral infantry action like the 4 aforementioned movies I named? What’s goin on gaming industry?
Click to expand...
Also to add to my above post.

I wanted a new SOCOM that was in the vein of these films you listed. The single player portion at least. Gritty, visceral, realistic shooting, amazing sound, grounded art style, etc.

But I know instead we’d get a GAAS game with none of these elements instead. I just don’t see a publisher allowing any studio to go out there make a non Micheal Bay style shooter
 
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CamHostage

CamHostage

Member
I kind of get the OPs frustration if you don't like the big multiplayer games. 1P is in short supply these days due to production costs and timeline.

We might get a new pop of realistic sorters shooters if .some of the bodycam games work out.

This could spurn on a new buzz of photorealistic game experiences where the gameplay isn't revolutionary (albeit the way they do loose gun aiming is interesting and a little more like actual shooting tactics/panic than typical gunsight FPS view) but the gameplay is still compelling because of the audio-visual experience.

... However, IMO, it's likely to be a short-lived genre fad unless there's more to it than just looking cool.



 
WitchHunter

WitchHunter

Banned
arkhamguy123 said:
So I saw civil war yesterday and man how about those last 20 minutes? What a great battle scene. How it’s shot, how long it goes, the tactical nature of it. And my GOD the sound design. They had a god tier military advisor(s) and sound team on this bitch.

I’m not really a gun guy per say but it sparked a little inspiration in me so I go rewatch the great cinema shootouts, or at least my favorites. I go look at Heat, Sicario 1, and Den of Thieves. Last one is an underrated gem a lot of you probably haven’t seen. And man I was itchin to play that shit in video game form in some way. So I get my debit card and I’m going through the PS and Xbox digital store’s aaaaand…. Nothing?

It’s shockingly, bamboozling barren in the gaming land scape. You can always get a cod or battlefield I guess but I was looking for literally even just one thing outside the 2 literal biggest mainstream brands. I googled “best gaming shootouts” and “best audio design in games” and unironically get forums and articles talking about goddamn sackboys big adventure and stuff like that. For best sound design. Or if it’s a shooter it’s some outlandish sci fi thing. Which isn’t what I’m looking for right now. Conversely a Google of “best shootouts in movies” yields dozens of good results

This should be the easiest lay up ever for gaming. It was weird. I was let down. Are there any games besides BF and COD that offer visceral infantry action like the 4 aforementioned movies I named? What’s goin on gaming industry?
Click to expand...
Get a PS2 and play Black, the 2006 game. Maybe it's on PSOnline. That was stellar in this regard. Half Life 1 also had perfect weapon sounds.
 
Emedan

Emedan

Member
Ready or Not, spiritual successor to Swat 4. True tactical shooter. Arma 3 perhaps if using mods and want grander scale warfare.
 
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