How's It Sounding?

Let me start off by saying that I have been a die-hard Medal of Honor fan since the first game hit the shelves for the PlayStation in 1999.  Then Rising Sun came along and things changed.  Let’s not get into that because I have still played and loved every game in some way.  There is no difference for Warfighter.  This is one of the most visually stunning and auditory pleasing games I have played in some time.

Courtesy of Just Push Start

Medal of Honor: Warfighter has been out since October of 2012, but even after I have long since beat it, I cannot get the quality out of my mind.  The series itself has no consistency anymore, and I miss fighting on the heels of Jimmy Patterson and listening to the beautiful music of Michael Giacchino.  So there; let’s start with the music.  Ramin Djawadi has been responsible for the music of the MOH series since “Tier 1” which was the last game to come out in 2010.  His music was a long shot in Tier 1.  It was modern sounding, but had accents of the Middle East (where the game took place).  I was not impressed and continued to wish for Giacchino again.  However, Warfighter surprised me.  The music had a similar sound, but it was much deeper.  I could feel the music.  It wasn’t background music for the action in the game, but a storyteller that toyed on your emotions.  Of course, the end of the game really surprised me with the amazing song Castle of Glass by Lincoln Park seen below:

So what about the actual audio?  Incredible.  It is the most dynamic audio I have heard.  If I was running around and someone fired a shot, I could tell that he was 100 yards away.  I could tell the other shot came from upstairs, around the corner, to the left, and in an empty room.  The closer to a sound, the louder and cleaner it was.  The farther, the more muffled, reverberated, and distant it sounded.  It wasn’t just volume being turned down.

The High Dynamic Range (HDR) mixing technique the developers Electronic Arts uses is working well for them in the Frostbite 2 game engine.  This system allows the game to mix the audio in realtime based on prioritization, loudness, the location of the player, and more.  There are systems that implement this concept, but nothing comes close to this.  Everyone says that Battlefield 3 has some stellar audio: hello HDR!  The system was finessed even more when it was used in Warfighter.

Something I did not like (and I am being very picky), which EVERY game is at fault for are the little things that are designed to make the game enjoyable.  Ever fire a weapon?  It’s loud!  In a game though, you can hear what people are saying as you are shooting, and reloading is generally as loud.  I can let that slide.  It’s to make the game enjoyable and not super loud and super quiet.  I will say this game did make the gun shots seem louder then other sounds better in this game them in others.  Dare I say that I might have missed what the characters in the game said from time to time due to the realistic audio? 

I can go on for a long time on this.  While I miss the classic WWII games, this game was amazing.  Like most modern Medal of Honors, it suffered from a terribly short gameplay.  That’s hard for me to overlook, but for Warfighter, I will make a happy exception. 

Medal of Honor Warfighter, one of the best games I have seen and heard in a long time.  And yes, I am listening to the soundtrack as I am typing this.