Will we get sonic booms?
TL;DRSonic booms could be implemented, including varying with atmospheric pressure, but they probably wouldn't apply speed-of-sound delay for gameplay reasons, though they aren't ruling it out entirely.
That's a slightly different question to what we've been asked in the past. I think people quite often ask the question about speed of sound, and we talk about why it's not something that, mostly for gameplay reasons, for player response times and things like this, we choose not to implement, and it's really a gameplay decision. But sonic booms specifically, there's no reason why we couldn't do that. We can allow sonic booms. We can play them at the correct speeds depending on atmospheric pressure and things like this. And yeah, we could absolutely implement that. But what we would probably not do with it is respect the speed of sound distance from the sonic boom to the listening device. And why not? Again, mostly because we need to make the same decision across the whole game so that everything knits together nicely. And for gameplay reasons, that decision is not to have speed of sound delays. I'm not ruling it out entirely. It's not impossible to implement, but it is much more of a gameplay decision because it affects so many aspects of gameplay.