I've played games such as MAG, where you have anywhere up to 250 people fighting each other on one map, numbers which are far greater than the 24 players on every BC 2 match, but still BC2's matches always feel grander. This is due to many factors but crucially, it's the sound design that helps sell the experience to the player...

Coming off BC 2 and entering Mag I was instantly put off by the audio presentation, the sound track was quite generic and the sounds were for want of a better word, weak. There was a distinct lack of detail for distant sounds and a general flatness to them. BC 2 has a beautiful system of close sounds and distanced sounds combined with very clever normalising, compressing and filtering techniques pulled from the audio engine. But the devil is in the details and this is where BC2's soundscape shines. The mostly pertinent shouts from the soldiers echoing out, sitting ever so delicately but clearly over the mix of explosions and gunfire, the reverb zones making every sound play differently and realistically depending if you are inside, the heavy normalising on close tank fire or explosions drowning out every other sound for a brief period, sometimes damaging your 'ears' disorientating the player as he looses the audible location of gunfire.

Most of these techniques have been used in games before, but not many games have used them all at the same time, with a masterful dynamic mix. I think it's the dynamic volumes and frequency of each sound which impresses me the most, how a sound can morph from he massive, echoed, slapping of an assault rifle to becoming a dull feint whisper if you're shooting next to a tank under heavy fire is one of those touches which most players wouldn't recognise but which still greatly contributed to immersing the player.

David Mollerstedt (head of audio) and Stefan Strandberg (audio director) with Bence Pajor (sound designer), Jonatan Blomster (audio programmer) and Mikael Karlsson (Composer) have all collaborated in rare form for game audio design. 'There's a lot going on and it's difficult to know what's going to happen, so volume balancing has always been tough. Ducking systems with 'static' rules to cover fairly predictable situations aren't enough – we'd need thousands of those rules' Explains Mollerstedt in an interview with Develop from 2008 (post BC 1 launch).

'Instead we have a sophisticated run-time system that deploys the available dynamic range intelligently moment by moment, logically selecting and balancing the loudest sound for each player.' Concludes Strandberg.

The fact that most players wouldn't notice these techniques is a further testament to the quality of the audio, nothing stands out to the point where the player can be taken out of the experience. Everything is believable and everything exists with a keen synergy between the player interaction, the graphics and the sound. Is it realistic? Not quite, does that matter? No.

Battlefield, like most war games are a very dense and dramatic illusion of the idea of war and this is something which is also reflected in the sound. The audio was collected from the real world sounds of the weapons provided by the Swedish army. As Develop explains, 'luckily the army performed a military exercise running a fake war two weekends in a row which gave the sound team the perfect opportunity to capture the sounds and reflections of the various vehicles and guns in urban streets from a variety of perspectives.'

I believe it's this source of the real 'found sound' which sells the sensation of shooting a gun, all of the post processing and audio manipulation in reality can make the guns sound larger than life but, the difference between shooting a gun and pulling the trigger on an Xbox pad is of stark contrast to say the least. The user needs that little extra 'omph' to try and emulate the real experience of shooting a weapon.

I do hope that future large-scale war games take inspiration from what Dice have done with Bad Company, a sound engine like this in Arma 2 would be incredible. Bad Company 2 has become a sort of case study in game design recently, it's one of those games like Half Life 2 where students will study the macro-detail of how the game plays, down to the terrain in a map, building placements, HUD elements, vehicle positioning, gun balancing and many, many other areas where BC2 try to perfect the multiplayer modern combat shooter – yes that's MMCS – BC2 also however, much like Killzone 2 and Dead Space is also a game with which sound design students and audio programmers will be studying for a good long while.