With a little less than two months until launch, ARC Raiders developer Embark has taken us behind the scenes to see sound design is a critical part of the extraction shooter. The team shared a new trailer featuring audio snippets pulled straight from the game, from locations throughout its maps. The trailer also appears to tease a new map, the inclusion of helicopters, and more. It’s worth a watch (and a listen), but the real insightful stuff was shared on the ARC Raiders Discord channel, which I’ll get into a bit below.
First off, the team at Embark understands how important sound and music, or a lack thereof, are to their games. Look no further than their other shooter, The Finals, for proof-of-concept. But sticking to ARC Raiders, the audio team captured live recordings for the majority of sounds you hear in-game. Using the same microphones at a variety of angles, they captured everything from gunfire to rain falling. Embark believes capturing live audio and incorporating that in the game makes things feel visceral and grounded:
“For example, when the Audio Team at Embark records the firing of a gun, we attach a microphone to that gun, and then a microphone hundreds of meters away from that one, and one in between those two. The same goes for explosions and projectiles. When things sound plausible and grounded, you start to believe all the unbelievable things that are happening around you.”
Where things really start to coalesce are when they take these live recordings and incorporate them into the game logic. So, for instance, if you are by trees, you hear birds. If you’re standing next to a car and it’s raining, you’ll hear raindrops hitting metal. These are all rules running under-the-hood to make sure ARC Raiders feels believable. And I can tell you from playing a previous playtest that the sound design is one of the standout elements of the ARC Raiders. The way Embark has designed it adds an incredible amount of immersion to an already tense extraction shooter experience.
ARC Raiders launches October 30th for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
