Case study: Borderlands

Borderlands is a video game franchise developed by Gearbox games with three instalments the first releasing in 2009 and the third released in 2019, the game takes place in a dystopian sci-fi future where the player travels from planet to planet as a “Vault Hunter” in search of “treasure”. Taking place in a sci-fi future, of course, means plenty of robotic and mechanical based content, however, the content that I’m most interested in when researching Borderlands is the futuristic energy-based weaponry that takes a large role in the game. The games weapon system steps up considerably in the third instalment as they implemented a new weapon system into the game, this being the addition of weapons having a giant amount of weapon attachment randomisation. This means that the player could find two types of the same weapon, yet one has a different muzzle and the other an added silencer etc, this feature is prevalent in every single type of weapon in every level of the game creating thousands of unique randomised weapons that the player can come across. This, of course, creates a challenge for the audio designers of the game as they will have to individually create sounds for every single possible weapon possibility in the game. Thankfully Gearbox’s audio team thought of a great way to manoeuvre around this problem creating a system that mixes the base gun sound with effects that a certain attachment may have on the weapon, this system is discussed and explained in this video provided by Gearsoft (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHwG-JqbUuI&t=). For example, for a revolver with a short barrel, the audio would take the base revolver sound and mix it with certain effects possibly such as eq, gain and spread to make it sound louder and more percussive, or on the flip side, a revolver with an extended barrel could have been made to sound more precise and tighter using effects such as eq and compression. This idea made it so that Gearbox only needed to design the sounds for all the base weapons in the game and the effects that different attachments would have on these base weapons. This system gives a great range of variation in sound design for many of the energy-based weapons in the game making every new weapon found seem unique and exciting, a lot of these weapons give great inspiration when creating sounds for my sound pack. The weapons system in the game features “brands” of fictional weapon manufacturers in the game that produce the different types of weapons, the “Maliwan” brand are the primary energy weapons brand in the game and its these weapons I will focus on mainly for inspiration for my sci-fi weapons.