Turn up your headphones: Black Ops 6 will bring ‘more detailed, dynamic’ sound design to CoD

With under two weeks left until launch, Treyarch and Activision are full steam ahead towards Black Ops 6’s full release, unveiling detailed announcements about everything from gameplay to sound design.

Sound is always a point of contention within Call of Duty—or any multiplayer game, for that matter. Hearing an opponent approaching you could make the difference between clutching up or having the entire lobby laughing at you. Thankfully, Treyarch feels it “will deliver one of the most technically impressive soundscapes yet.”

In a new CoD blog post, Treyarch said it’s working on “enhancing the 3D soundscape to new levels, allowing players to better sense the location, speed, and direction of nearby activity, helping them to respond more effectively and become even more immersed.”

“The goal for the audio team on Black Ops 6 is what we’re calling the adaptive battlefield, a more purposeful and directional soundscape that focuses on the information players need when they need it while reducing the clutter of extraneous noise,” lead audio designer Collin Ayers said.

Treyarch has been “laser focused on distant firing sounds, giving players information on directionality, distance, and threat level so they can more easily identify where the enemy operator is firing from and then formulate their plan of counterattack.” The same can be said for the always-controversial footstep sounds, as illustrated in the video below.

Additionally, Ayers said he and his team want to ensure that the soundscape in Black Ops 6 “will adapt to each player as they play, creating a living and breathing play space.”

This includes optimizations such as prioritizing the most important sounds when a lot is going on at once, like emphasizing the sound of enemies moving towards you more than teammates behind you, or a zombie jumping off a building behind you being prioritized over other sounds “due to its imminent threat.”

The next-level audio design also features a system called Enhanced Headphone Mode, which uses technology that can emulate how “sounds are affected by the shape of your head and your ears before you actually hear them.” Accessibility options include the ability to adjust select frequencies in each ear or replace the tinnitus sound of grenades with “a dimmer audio cue.”

It’s not long now before gamers everywhere can experience BO6’s sound design and everything that comes with it when the game launches on Oct. 25.