: There are only a couple of games I can think of that have weapons that sound
: even remotely realistic. Probably the closest thing to genuine firearm
: sounds in a game was Battlefield: Bad Company, but even it failed to
: capture the raw sonic power of actual guns. I don't get why audio
: directors, including the ones for Halo, saw fit to make field recordings
: of weapon sounds only to process the shit out of them. Having been to the
: range more than a few times myself, nothing beats the loud, sharp pop of
: an actual firearm.

:
Well, there's the reality of weapons, and then there's what you want them to do in a video game context. Guns are overpoweringly loud, and that's not something you're going to actually want in your video game, for instance. You have to make choices that are probably by necessity going to alter the "true" sound—simply decreasing the volume on an untreated gunshot and it's going to sound weird and wrong.