Simon · Audio Director

The benefit of me coming in fresh means I've made a value judgment and assessment independently of any development issues or the scope of development. He probably knows much more about cinema than I do. I've worked on hundreds of films, hundreds of releasable materials, and it's going to be a cinematic game, and that's what I want. I'm going to raise the bar and we are raising the bar. That's the way we're going to do it. Now, that doesn't mean any of these considerations haven't been talked about before. We are not just suddenly coming to the idea. It doesn't mean we threw everything away. And it's unfair of me to suggest that prior to me coming, these considerations weren't active; they were. It's just there has to be a sense of scope for the release of them, and all the different departments have to work together organically.

Simon · Audio Director

Yeah, nothing we do is there to upset anybody. I read the comments constantly, but I can't address how many hundreds came in. We do listen and we don't ignore those things. I'm aware of many of the topics, which are not worth talking about now because we can't promise anything on that just yet.

Jan · Vehicle Audio Designer

And I would also say, in a project that's been in progress for this long, there's a lot of value in having people that have been on the project for a really long time, because they just know the project inside out. They know where the bodies are buried. I haven't discovered them yet. But there's also a big value in bringing new people in, like me, Josh, Nathan Gibson, Ilyas Malkov, our other vehicle audio designers, and Jack as well. And when we came in, we obviously come in with fresh ideas. There are already systems that were created in the past by previous great sound designers, some of them were my friends. So there are systems that pre-existed, but over time, like you said, things evolve, change, plans get scrapped, new ideas come in, and we have our own ideas. We want to make sure things are working, but we also want to improve things. And like with these pass-bys and vibration systems, we have a lot of ideas, but it's always a balancing act.

Josh Bell · Sound Designer, Vehicles

I think with the scope of the game as well, it can be quite easy to chase after all these different ideas that pop up and that people want. But we're trying to, as you said, tackle things one at a time, like we've improved the system, vibration...

Simon · Audio Director

Specifically, so we can start delivering after all the time talking about it. We've started boosting up the vibration system over the last couple of ships, and we're increasing that. We're recording new assets for that, new sounds that we can put into the vibration system, because a very expensive ship is going to rattle and vibrate completely differently to something that is stuck together with rivets. And we're doing that. That's being done.