The guns will not sound like the same, and there won’t be a lack of variety either – Gearbox is giving it all when it comes to the audio design of Borderlands 3.

45 bazillion guns, including some that „chase down enemies while hurling verbal insults,” fire volcanoes, or use a new elemental type of damage, radiation. These will have sounds as well, and Joshua Davidson, Gearbox Software‘s senior audio designer says that Borderlands 3 already has 25 times more of weapon firing .wav sounds than what Borderlands 2 shipped with… and they aren’t even done with recording them all!

„So yeah… Borderlands 3 is currently sitting at just over 7,500 individual .wav files for the weapon firing sounds. For perspective, Borderlands 2 shipped a little over 300 .wav files to cover all the guns and their manufacturers. And yes, we’re still not done. Pew pew!,” Davidson wrote on Twitter.

That sounds serious – although there could be some tricks here, and some weapons might have the same sound, with the only difference between the two is that one of them deals a bit more damage than the other. Let’s hope that Randy Pitchford’s team won’t pull it off. (But we may never know…) It seems to be a lot of sound engineering work, and there could be as many as ten thousand .wav weapon firing sounds by the end of the recording, although we are just guessing here. It’s surprising how Borderlands 2 got away with only 300 weapon firing sounds – did we evolve that much in one (one and a half?) console generation?

Borderlands 3 is going to launch on September 13 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The PC users will find the game exclusive to the Epic Games Store for six months. (And Tim Sweeney, the head of Epic Games, said that they will only stop their aggressive expansion if Steam will follow their business model of giving 88% of the game sale’s profit to the developers…)

Source: PCGamer