Vidya Games Thread

[PleaseCheckYourReceipts]

It's not rose tinted glasses; older game music was better.

The combination of more personal touches - usually one guy, or a small group, working with a small dev studio of four to thirty people - and the limitations at the time requiring the composers to get creative in order to make the music as distinct and memorable as possible resulted in much better music than today, where they're being made for large studios owned by corporations and have access to all manners of instrumentation with no technical limitations.

Limitations are vital to creativity. Only a handful of people in any creative field actually make good use of no limits; most need limits to produce anything worthwhile.

You need boundaries to focus the mind. Without them, the effort put in greatly diminishes.

I also think that older games were forced to have a clearer melody. I can remember most tracks from FFVII extremely well, but anything from the remake that isn't based on the original tracks I have a vague sense of if I remember it at all.

Like visual designs, most music gets way too overdesigned. Too much going on without the experience to control the effect. This is a really weird reference, but in the late 1800s to early 1900s, the big trend was to write Church Hymns. There was somewhere in excess of 100k *published* by 1920. Only a couple hundred were good enough to survive into the post-WW2 era. It was this massive media environment that is almost completely lost to time now. We're simply seeing the same thing play out. Every game needs music, so there's too much music to be made. It's very hard to be memorable because all of the genres have defined instruments & soundscapes.

 

[Awoogers]

Anyone played expedition 33 yet I'm hearing a lot of good things and apparently you can parry in it despite it being a turn based game

 

[God's Strongest Dragoon]

Anyone played expedition 33 yet I'm hearing a lot of good things and apparently you can parry in it despite it being a turn based game

I haven't played it and only seen a few clips but apparently its basically Super Mario RPG rules where you parry when an enemy attacks but this game makes it so if you do it properly, you can do a counteract during their turn.

 

[UberSoldat]

Whatever you think about Dark Ages, this OST though

 

[PleaseCheckYourReceipts]

Whatever you think about Dark Ages, this OST though

The trailer track slapped pretty hard, but there's 22 chapters. But the big thing is they changed up the audio engine. The music isn't quite as forward. Would need to play it on headphones in a couple of weeks (when I have time) to see the difference.

Didn't realize the team they brought in wasn't internal. Interesting.



Some of them slap really hard, but you can kind of feel them pulling back from that full wall of murderous noise motif that Mick had settled into. Which is actually something Mick probably would have done in most tracks as well, being a prequel.

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Funny bit, to me, about the first round of the blowup between iD & Mick was even listening to game rips of the Eternal sound track, it would make sense, if there had been any delays, for putting out a full song of each level taking a while. Eternal's system was a huge collection of responsive riffs and not actually a Soundtrack, in the classical sense. It takes a while to wrangle all of that into functional "songs". Thus, if they'd just run out of time and were legally required to get something out, the entire situation made plenty of sense. Sure, would have been nice to have been better, though the fact that Bethesda advertised a soundtrack by Mick Gordon before anyone bothered asking Mick Gordon if he'd put one together is just brilliant corporate disaster making.

 

[UberSoldat]

Stalker Trilogy getting a next gen update