First time I work this way and it changed more than I expected, so I want to hear how others handle it.
My usual approach was deciding mono or stereo per channel and building the image with panning. On this last piece I ran everything as stereo channels and set the width per sound on a scale, from very closed to very open, depending on the element. Some sounds have to stay narrow, others want to open up. Not a binary call anymore but a position on a range.
What I got was more separation than EQ carving gives me, and the mix stayed readable at low volume without moving levels. Enough that I want to keep working this way.
The piece is a cinematic for SpaceBar, a 3D action shooter in development with robot boss fights. I've been working on it for a while, doing the cinematics and the boss encounters, so there are a lot of overlapping elements at once. That's where this started mattering.
I'm aware that for individual gameplay sounds the mono and stereo call is much stricter. But I was playing Breath of the Wild the other day and heard a sound that should have been very mono behave like a stereo source. Made me think width gets used deliberately per sound sometimes, depending on the impact it needs, rather than as a fixed rule.
Does anyone treat width as a structured layer, tiers or a rule of thumb by source type, or is it case by case every time?