Borderlands 3 offers you countless weapons. Each of these weapons comes with a unique sound. Senior Sound Designer Joshua Davidson explains in a video how this variance comes about.
In Borderlands 3, you have a huge selection of weapons. There are various types such as pistols, rifles, or rocket launchers. Additionally, there are 9 different weapon manufacturers that give the guns unique characteristics.
There are so many weapon sounds in Borderlands 3: And of course, with each of them, there is a “bang” when shooting. Creating this ruckus was, according to Senior Sound Designer Joshua Davidson, quite a task. There are over 5500 individual weapon sounds in Borderlands 3.
A lot of noise and racket
This is how the variance of weapon sounds is created: As Joshua Davidson explains in the following video, the weapon sounds in Borderlands 3 are based on the construction of real weapons.
Each weapon consists of various parts to which the team has assigned individual sounds. By assembling these parts, a huge number of differently sounding weapons is created.
Are all weapon parts affected? However, not every component received a sound; otherwise, it would have clashed. The developers focused on what they considered the most important parts – like the barrel. If you play a rifle with a long plasma barrel, it will sound different than if you fire it with a short laser barrel.
If you want to dive deeper into the technical side of sound design, you can find more videos on Joshua Davidson’s YouTube channel.
This was still the case in Borderlands 2: In the predecessor Borderlands 2, according to the sound designer, there were only about 350 different gunshot sounds. This was mainly due to the older console generation, which did not provide enough capacity. So, when you fired a Jakobs pistol in Borderlands 2, it sounded like pretty much every Jakobs pistol.
Which boss did you find hardest in Borderlands 3? Here is the poll:
