14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Obsidian is continuing its series of updates linked to the upcoming Pillars of Eternity video game with a new big information package that talks about the music of the video game and about the way the studio is making sure that it’s integrated with the story and the core mechanics.
The forum post is written by Justin Bell, who is the audio director at Obsidian, and the audio lead and composer on the party-based role-playing title.
He explains that music is very important when it comes to recapturing the atmosphere that was created by Infinity Engine title.
The developer states that, “if you were to loosely analyze the music from Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 for example, you would find a number of stylistic similarities between them. Without getting too technical, their music combines tropes found in European folk and pre-Renaissance modal music, and mashes that together with modern day orchestration techniques and film music aesthetics.”
The audio director then goes on to offer info on how he finds his inspiration, how he tries to capture bits and pieces of sounds that would make sense on the soundtrack and how he then moves on to combine them in order to create actual tracks that can be integrated in various areas of the game.
He adds, “While we are following in the footsteps of the Infinity Engine soundtracks in terms of style and implementation, we have decided to tweak that formula a bit. Most of the in-game tracks for the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games are between 1-2 minutes in length, and in some cases those tracks loop immediately. There are some inherent risks and benefits to looping a short piece of music immediately.”
He also says that in Pillars of Eternity, gamers will be able to hear both shorter pieces of music, which can create more variety, and longer ones, based on the area of the game they are visiting.
The title is at the moment set to be launched before the end of the year on the PC.
Obsidian has promised that it will use classic role-playing game mechanics that have been adapted to the needs of modern gamers and a fantasy world that has been created from scratch.
The team delivers the first piece of music composed for a game area and how it will be integrated with other aspects of the title:
