: 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.

I don't necessarily want video game guns to sound as overpoweringly loud as a real firearm, but at the very least they should sound reasonably enough like weapons of war. Firearms should have satisfyingly beefy pops and bangs. Alien guns should sound like they'll burn, maim, and shred me, not like weak little pew-pew toy ray guns. Battlefield: Bad Company did a good job of this (see the video in my previous post), and even Sabre did an excellent job with the UNSC weapons in H2A:

I prefer their work on the plasma weapons and Needler in HCEA, though, but overall Sabre has done better audio work for the weapons than Bungie or 343i ever did.