Game Design Philosophy - Sound Mix

Just like a painting, to have good sound for a game, is to make it realistic, with a bit of artist's touch to it.

Sounds for any great game should be realistic, both by what it sounds like and also its reverb matches that of the environment and the location of the sound emitter relative to the ear in the game. Seemingly realistic, but not really realistic is also fine, for example, a swift sound for a knife stab, may pass as a knife stab. But to players experienced to real life knife sounds, they will find slight disconfort when experiencing. Game sound designers of great skill would examine each sound piece individually, and also examine them when mixed together. A good mix would be that nothing is too loud, nothing is too covered up and that each sound piece can be heard easily if under tracking and no confusion between the sound pieces. To do so, sometimes, designers would have to eletronically alter the sound pieces, a common practice is to exaggerate the emotion or symbol behind that particular sound piece. If everything is too muffled up or sound similar, it would create sound chaos.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare games have great sound mixes, the gun sounds are crispy and sharp, where as opponent gun fire are purposely slightly deeper, so when both sides are firing, both gun sounds can be heard, this is not existant in Call of Duty Black Ops.