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Windows Central

Technology

Cole Martin

It's beginning to sound a lot like Call of Duty—a new intel drop details Black Ops 6's audio innovations

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The Call of Duty team shares new details on audio engineering ahead of Black Ops 6's release date.

What you need to know

The latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 intel drop shares insight into the innovations to the game's sound from Treyarch Software's audio team.
New spatial reverb will affect the game's audio scape, with footsteps echoing down long hallways and gunshots and grenades realistically filling the space around a player.
The audio for Black Ops 6 was developed in partnership with Microsoft's Project Acoustics system.
Project Acoustics is a physics-based acoustics model that replicates the complex wave physics of sound in 3D game environments, without requiring manual tricks.
To enhance the game's audio further, Black Ops 6 will also include an enhanced headphone mode, more accessibility options, and live mixing.

Call of Duty is an inherently "audio-forward" game. The first-person shooter title released annually by Activision, a Microsoft-owned publisher, leans comfortably into being more of an arcade shooter than its more tactical, hyperrealistic competition. However, there's still plenty of room for important audio cues that give players valuable feedback when playing the game's Multiplayer mode or the free-to-play tie-in battle royale, Call of Duty: Warzone.

A recent blog post from the Call of Duty team takes a closer look at the audio development for Black Ops 6 ahead of the game's October 25 release date.

Treyarch's audio team is led by Lead Audio Designer Collin Ayers, who has 18 years at Treyarch Studios, and Expert Audio Engineer William Cornell, who has 9 years at the studio. The two have worked on multiple Call of Duty titles, earning an array of accolades to go with their experience in the field. "The goal for the audio team on Black Ops 6 is what we're calling the adaptive battlefield, a more purposeful and directional soundscape that focuses on the information players need when they need it while reducing the clutter of extraneous noise," said Ayers.

To create a newly adaptive audioscape, the team had to capture all-new sound effects and redesign old ones for every weapon in the game. From reloading and firing sounds under different environmental circumstances, Black Ops 6 didn't just have to sound like a shooter—it had to play like one with audio that gave players valuable information in the heat of battle. Everything from direction, distance, and threat level of distant gunfire and grenades had to be easy to identify, giving players the chance to create a counterattack against combatants who may be closing in on them.

"Gunshots and grenades will realistically fill the space around [players]," Cornell said, "Footsteps will echo down long hallways, and the sound of rain and crickets chirping will come in through open windows and holes in the wall." To pull this off, Cornell and Ayer, along with the rest of Treyarch's audio team, partnered with Microsoft's Project Acoustics system. Project Acoustics is an audio tool developed with research on audio engineering during the development of Gears of War 5. Project Acoustics further uses Azure batch and other Microsoft technologies to create immersive audio with support from the cloud that respects the environment's geometry.

Project Acoustics makes it possible for the audio in Black Ops 6 to be more dynamic. Snow, for example, will absorb footstep audio while the trees of a nearby forest may cause gunfire sounds to reflect and bounce. "We've been working closely with the Project Acoustics team to simulate the way that sound waves bounce and propagate through the world down to the smallest details like what materials are made of, the size and shape of the room, and what path the sound has to take to get from where it happened to where you're hearing it," said Cornell.

With an emphasis on hearing, greater accessibility in Call of Duty for those who are hard of hearing becomes more important. Black Ops 6 will further build on Call of Duty's ongoing accessibility efforts by introducing Asymmetrical Hearing Compensation and Reduce Tinnitus Sound features at launch. Asymmetrical Hearing Loss is a condition in which a person experiences different degrees of hearing loss in each ear, which can make localizing audio in a 3D space more difficult. Black Ops 6's compensation will adjust the intensity of selected frequencies in each ear to balance the sound in a way that makes it more symmetrical to the user. It can also adjust the loudness of frequencies that users may find uncomfortable to hear.

Tinnitus—or "ringing in the ear"—is a common hearing impairment where sound can be heard without any source. External sounds can make it uncomfortable when they are at certain frequencies. Flash and concussion grenades in Call of Duty titles often produce a ringing sound not unlike what a person would experience from one of these devices in reality. For those who already suffer from Tinnitus, the simulation can be unbearable. The new reduction feature in Black Ops 6 will instead replace the Tinnitus sound in the game with a dimmer audio cue.

Live mixing will prioritize the more important sounds around the player in the heat of the moment. (Image credit: Activision)

Of course, some audio is more important than other sounds when you are face-to-face with the opposing team in Call of Duty. Black Ops 6 will prioritize and emphasize important sounds to the player dynamically. This new live mixing system gives players greater insight into their situation. A zombie is a more imminent threat than your teammates chattering, so the zombie's audio is going to be louder to instill that sense of urgency in the player. This is compounded by advancements in Head Related Transfer Function technology that simulates how game sound is transferred to the player.

Black Ops 6's enhanced headphone mode makes use of Embody's Immerse Spatial Audio technology for improved directional accuracy of in-game audio. The tech is compatible with all headphone and earbud models, and a specific Universal HRTF profile has been created just for Call of Duty's soundscape. If that's not specific enough for FPS-loving audiophiles, a personalized profile can be created that will take into account the player's physical attributes, like head size and ear position, for a customized audio experience.

The new audio experiences aren't just limited to Black Ops 6. Because Call of Duty titles are all now together on the Call of Duty engine, changes in premium titles also affect Call of Duty: Warzone. However, Warzone players will have to wait until Black Ops integration for the free-to-play Battle Royale takes place with the launch of Season 1 in early November.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches on Xbox, PC via Steam, Battle.net, the Microsoft Store, and PlayStation on October 25. Xbox Game Pass subscribers who don't want to use up all their storage space on Black Ops 6 can also opt to play via Xbox Cloud Gaming while players on PC can stream Black Ops 6 through NVIDIA GeForce NOW.