If there's one thing about the new Mad Max game that gets us really excited (apart from the 17 brutal things we managed to do in just two hours of hands-on play), it's the chance to our grubby mitts on a bona fide post-apocalyptic set of wheels.
The car Max will be tearing the wasteland, the deliciously named Magnum Opus, won't just be the kind of car you upgrade with scrap with beaten convoys - it'll have an engine that changes with every part you replace. "We make sure that whatever you do, you get your trademarked audio on what it is you choose to do. If you tried your friends car - ‘oh that sounds different’ - it will affect every little choice you make," says Avalanche Studios' sound director Magnus Lindeurg. "If you change gear box you will have different ways that the engine will react on the gear shifts. If you change the intake - the thing that comes out of your hood - the sounds of the valves opening and sucking air into the carburetor will change. Everything will change how the car sounds."
Think Avalanche is done there? Apart from some key influences from stellar cinematic effort Mad Max: Fury Road, the Swedish studio has taken the time to record countless engine configurations in mountainous terrain. "We recorded outside, measuring mountain ranges to see how you get the feeling of sounds bouncing, based on how empty the world is and what can it bounce to," adds Lindberg. "We have a simulation of that also in the game. On everything surrounding the player that has some kind of elevation we have a system to make sure that audio bounces back to the player from that to get the right feeling."
