3 Call of Duty Titles Headed to Xbox Cloud Gaming, Black Ops 6's Immersive Audio Detailed

A couple of new slices of info for the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 emerged today, chief among them being the October 25 release will also be one of three Call of Duty titles available to play via Xbox Cloud Gaming for peeps with a Game Pass Ultimate subscription. Joining Black Ops 6 will be Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone. Hopefully you have a decent connection though, as all three aren't small titles by any measure.

The other share from Activision and the dev studios, is a deep-dive into Black Ops 6's "dynamic soundscape". Specifically, Treyarch has been working on enhancing the game's multiplayer 3D soundscape to allow "players to better sense the location, speed, and direction of nearby activity". The goal being to equalise the playing field through audio, while also creating an even more immersive experience on the battlefield. The best example of this is that each weapon in Black Ops 6 has been either redesigned from older assets or completely recaptured, from firing to reloads and beyond. Additional to these updates, however, is how the audio team has made those sounds interact with the environment utilising "spatial reverb".



“The goal for the audio team on Black Ops 6 is what we’re calling the adaptive battlefield," said Collin Ayers, lead audio designer at Treyarch via the Call of Duty blog. "[It's] a more purposeful and directional soundscape that focuses on the information players need when they need it while reducing the clutter of extraneous noise.”

“Gunshots and grenades will realistically fill the space around them,” adds expert audio engineer, William Cornell. “Footsteps will echo down long hallways, and the sound of rain and crickets chirping will come in through open windows and holes in the wall.”

The full blog post linked above has some fantastic examples of what the team is doing with Black Ops 6, which also includes an all-new implementation of Microsoft's "Project Acoustics" system (complete with a visual representation of what this looks like). It's a system that, specifically, does away with canned audio tricks crafted manually, offering instead a dynamic projection of how "soundwaves bounce and propagate through the world". This is a first for the franchise and team, and presents as an absolute game-changer in the competitive and immersive stakes.

Audiophiles will really get a lot of the post, and it's certainly got us champing at the bit to experience this leap in audio delivery come October 25.