Authentic Weapons, From the Source
In September 2025, Team17 and Expression Games announced a formal collaboration with the Royal Armouries — the United Kingdom’s national collection of arms and armour, and one of the oldest and most extensive public collections in the world.
The collaboration began in July 2024, early in development. Members of the Expression Games team visited the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds to capture:
- High-resolution video and photographs
- 3D scans of weapon bodies, components, and furniture
- Audio recordings of the weapons — reload sounds, mechanical actions, firing
Those recordings form the basis of the visual models, animations, and audio design for Vietnam-era weapons in the game.
What This Means for the Game
In the original Hell Let Loose, weapon authenticity was a defining feature — bolt actions felt and sounded different, reload animations were grounded in real procedure. The Royal Armouries partnership takes that further:
- Visual accuracy: scans rather than reference photos mean models are dimensionally correct
- Animation accuracy: real mechanical movements captured and referenced
- Audio accuracy: in-game sounds derived from actual weapon recordings, not foley
Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries, worked directly with the Expression Games team throughout the process. Ferguson is well known to the gaming community for his appearances on the Royal Armouries YouTube channel, where he analyses weapon accuracy in video games.
Expression Games on the Partnership
Matt White, Creative Director at Expression Games, said:
“Working with the Royal Armouries and Jonathan Ferguson was a unique experience for our team. Their detailed knowledge and collection of historical weapons was invaluable in helping us achieve visual, animation and audio authenticity in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam.”
What to Expect
Every Vietnam-era weapon in the game — M16A1 and the NVA arsenal — will benefit from this groundwork. The Type 56, the AK-family rifle that forms the backbone of NVA infantry, would logically have received the same treatment given the collection’s scope.
This is a significant marker of the production quality Expression Games is targeting. For a game where audio and visual immersion are central to the experience, hearing the real sound of a 1960s M16A1 bolt cycling matters.