User blog:Smuff/The most common sound in Call of Duty you don't appreciate

You hear it when you shoot someone, when you stab someone, when you stick them with semtex, hit them with a flashbang or a claymore; the fwip-fwip-fwip that comes with damaging an enemy player or killstreak that's existed in been featured in every game since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Luckily for us, PC Gamer editor Evan Lahti visited Black Ops II developer Treyarch and asked about the most common sound you'll ever hear in the world's biggest FPS franchise, which gave way to some pretty interesting facts.


 * Evan: Why does it sound the way it does when I shoot someone in Call of Duty?


 * Brian Tuey, Audio Director: So… The sound has impact and it has meaning and it’s useful and all that, but it’s not a particularly pleasant sound, especially in isolation. There was a time recently where I was like, “You know? I’m gonna redo this with something else.” So I kinda went a different direction, and it felt like this was going to be good. I checked it in, and within three hours, my email box was full of, like, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO MY SOUND?” I’m like, “But it’s so much better!”


 * Chris Cowell, Audio Lead: ''The other thing that you might not actually know, it’s different every game. Little things like that can be a really difficult sound to make.


 * Evan: Really?


 * Cowell: It has to be. They’re all very similar, and they serve the same purpose, but the actual content and the creation of it is redone every game, because our guns sound differently, you know? The music’s different, the situation’s different… The last game, it took me weeks to get that little thing right, because you have to fire it, get the tick and hear it and know what it means.


 * Tuey: But it has to cut through the guns, the explosions, and give you the same exact feeling you had when you heard it last game.


 * Cowell: Yeah. It’s the same experience. That experience needs to be consistent across all of them, but not the sound.

The rest of the interview continues on PC Gamer.