Game Design Philosophy - Sound

Sound is such a huge part of games. Visual is like the frame work of the game, and sound is the decorations of the game. Good sounds often make action games look more realistic and easier to time the button pressings. Shooting games all need great sound design, and having better sounds, would make the game much greater.

There are tons of technical tricks in making good gun sounds and how the system should run it. Medal of Honor's gun sound design is not proper, it is the same sound file played each time u start shooting, and once u let go of the trigger, it will stop. This causes the sound to be really unrealistic if u burst fire, which is a common thing to occur. Modern Warfare 2 has decent gun sounds, but it's all crispy, on purpose I think, to make it sound real nice if those shots received hit markers. The hit markers make this small thud sound, in combination of most assault rifle and sub-machine gun sounds it sounds nice.

For MMORPG games, it can be difficult to get good sounds for all spells, espeically the ones that have small fragmentations that flies around. Some poorly made MMORPG games, relatively, has incorrect programming. There is suppose to be a sound played when target is hit by something, depending what, and te sound for the launch of an attack. I've encountered some MMORPG games where they pre-rendered that and put it into a single file.

Voice in game is something that makes newer games better than the previous ones. Now that we no longer use 8 bit speaker to play our games, it's time to stop the ancient way of making game, which is to have a 8 bit music on loop throughout a scene or boss level. When players are playing games, they are often in front of a computer, using the crap out of their eyes and fingers, to unstress those loads, it'd be nice to have good voices in game to help them, to relieve the stress on those areas. Warcraft III and Starcraft II have that, in both games, when your town is under attack, you'd hear a voice saying "We are under attack!", which is good, and players enjoy hearing those well made voices.

I see many korean or asian games lacking in sound design, I hope they change that, as having good sound is so important.