In our second post, we talk about sound effects. In this third and final post, I’ll talk about voice-over and music.
VOICE-OVER
Voice-over refers to any spoken lines recorded by humans speaking them. This is typically narrative dialogue and exposition, but is also, importantly, the less-important off-hand comments and reactions people utter in various situations, like the NPC grocer talking to an NPC customer or a soldier crying out in pain. In situations where you want to hear people around you, voice-over brings it to the game.
Our plans for voice acting, scripted lines, background NPC chatter... anything like that, are not yet set. We might have none! Whatever we settle on, Stars Reach will almost certainly not be a voice-over-heavy game. But if we do, again, variation will be the crucial factor. You just don't want to hear that guy tell you about how he took an arrow to the knee... one... more... time. I love Skyrim, but I kinda felt like that particular Nord could have had something like forty to eighty different voice-over comments, rather than the... what, two or three? that he had?
BGM - BACKGROUND MUSIC
In the 80’s and 90’s, my career was in music. In the 90's and 00's, I composed a fair amount of music for games. As I pushed my career more towards general audio design and implementation, I took that experience with me and was able to act as liaison/interpreter between team leaders and composers. (Who do not speak the same language) What I have come to believe is the role of music in games is:
- Music creates the soul of the game.
- Music speaks to the player on a level deeper than does information.
- Music speaks to the heart.
- Music supports the emotional experience the player is likely to have. (Not the one you wish they were having!)
However, music is undoubtedly the aspect of games which has the most conflicted, unclear, emotionally-charged history. It is difficult because music is a difficult target to begin with (because individual tastes vary so widely). It is difficult because there is no consensus on the role of music in games. It is difficult because we can't just follow the film model for several reasons. And yet, we have to do it, because few companies have the courage to release a game with no music. This has tended to create a fear-based approach to music in which teams look around at reliably-successful examples (cue Star Wars theme) and just do that. Then if it doesn't turn out well, you can at least point and say "Hey! We got triple-A music! We recorded in Prague! John Williams made it! It's not my fault!" (Cue Lando)
The basic problems in game music are:
- Games are not films. They are not linear narratives. You can't control what is happening every second, so you can't guarantee coherence between the music and what is on the screen.
- Games are long. Any game team with a budget can commission a great theme song. Any composer worth their salt can put a music score under a cinematic because that's just linear film music. Ad agencies can put music under your 45-second ad. The hard part is what to do with aaaaaaaaaaaallll the rest of the time. The *other* 99.72% of the player's experience which is neither the splash screen nor a cut scene. This is where the real work of game music happens.
- Repetition. Most music relies on certain forms of repetition to be what it is. But this repetition tends to be at the lower levels. e.g. a drum beat, a repeated motif, or a sixteen-measure break which is mostly just the same four-bar pattern four times. At middle levels, you can repeat things somewhat. e.g. a chorus which is repeated three times, or the same guitarist doing a solo in two different places in the song. But on higher levels, the repetition becomes more problematic. If Green Day played a concert and played the same song four times in a row, that would be weird. If Beethoven's Ninth had only two sections and they alternated for ninety minutes, that would be boring.
And I don't know about you, but I had more than 7000 hours on my main character alone in EverQuest.
But you can't commission 7000 hours of unique music. Even at the relatively low cost of $2000 per minute of music, that would cost your company Eight Hundred And Forty Million Dollars, and for that money you could buy two F-22 Raptor fighter jets and invade a small country. So what do you do? Maybe you commission about 30 minutes of music and just repeat it a lot? Yeah... about that... see next paragraph.
The over-arching problem to avoid is what I call 'Zombie Music'. (Which is a sub-category within 'Zombie Audio') By this I mean music behaviors which seem to be disconnected from what the player is actually experiencing, lurching about like a zombie. The player becomes annoyed and distracted and is likely to turn the music off, and there goes your $200,000 budget recording with an orchestra in Prague. Music is experienced by people as a sentient entity speaking to them on an emotional level. But now imagine that person repeating themselves over and over like a drunken office-Christmas-party co-worker. You want to get away. Imagine the music telling you about a funeral while you're trying to play Frisbee with friends, or laughing at jokes while you're trying to solve a difficult work problem. Music must be in alignment with how the player feels, and unlike a film, you can't dictate how they're going to feel. You can only make good guesses and be gentle in your musical messaging. It is there to support, not to lead or dictate.
And so, repetition at a high level (i.e. looping a 2-minute song for which you paid $4000) is Zombie Music.
How to avoid? As described above, all-unique music for an entire play-through is usually impractical, and with an MMO that problem is 2-4 orders of magnitude larger. One answer is music which is randomized yet connected to the game experience such that it always sounds appropriate, recognizable, but not identical. This is the method I prefer for MMO's, and the method I have spent much of my career developing. It is not a method I invented; look up Aleatoric Music, Music Concrete, Generative-Adaptive Music, and this:
The basic idea is that rather than playing pre-recorded music, we party like it's 1999 and give the game musical sounds, along with randomization and playback data, and tie the audio playback engine into the game at a very intimate level. The game's conditions alter how the sounds are played, and which sounds are played. The most obvious and classic example of this is combat-specific music. But that was 1985. We can go so much further now.
Stars Reach is exquisitely well-positioned to make compelling use of this kind of music system to create rich aural support structures for the player's experience. We can tie in environmental data to make the music respond to weather, time-of-day, seasons, etc. We can tie in player actions to make the music respond with a gentle congratulatory feel. We can tie in assessments of the level of enemy challenges nearby to create a sense of danger, or ease. Let’s change from major to minor key when it starts raining. Let’s increase the tempo a bit if the enemies in an area are way higher level than you are. Let’s let the player set little melody motifs which will then play occasionally with subtle variations!
Back to the beginning of this segment about music: It can be the soul of the game. All without clumsy switching between over-stated, insistent musical cues which try and fail to dictate your feelings.
TO CONCLUDE:
I feel like my whole career, both of my careers, really, have led me to this project. The opportunities we have here to create wonderful, socially-connected, fulfilling player experiences are unprecedented. This is exactly the kind of project on which I want to work, and seeing it through to becoming a real living, breathing collection of worlds and people will be a crowning achievement for my entire gaming life. From 1975 when I first saw Pong, to now when I really need to be sure to keep doing the daily and weekly Umbar crafting tasks in LotRO so I can get enough luck-stones to fully upgrade my Elven Pickaxe... Stars Reach is all I need to say I really did the gaming thing as well as I possibly could have. :)
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