Justin Bell

Most of the sound work that has gone on is on the technical side, i.e. figuring out tools, proving out pipelines, getting functionality working. Full on production for sound won't start for a few a bit more. Though update #49 should give you a good, if somewhat limited, preview of what's to come... Well, I'm glad! It's one of the soundtracks we've discussed, and it's definitely one we'll be looking at for inspiration. I love the soundtrack for Morrowind. It's my number one favorite game score, of all time. Hugely influential on me as a composer...

Been a while since I contributed to the forum... but this is something I can speak to. I can say that IWD 1 and 2 are inspirations for the game as a whole, as well as the soundtrack. So in that sense yes, it will retain some of that quality. Absolutely. It'll be it's own "thing", but will draw inspiration from all IE games to some degree or another, and IWD is at the top of that particular list.

Hi Brother Godfrey, and welcome to the Project Eternity forums! Thanks for supporting our project, and for your very generous offer. I would love to discuss this with you further, and I'll send you a private message about this shortly. Regarding your question of wetther you can form a party without magic users, unforunately I don't have an answer to that particular question. However, I did pass your question on to Josh Sawyer, Eternity's Project Director. He said he might be able to clarify this further, though I don't know when that may happen. For what it's worth I think it's great that you still find the time to play games amongst your other duties, and I appreciate your thoughts on how that ties in with your vows as a monk and as a priest. Thank you for sharing that.

At this point, it's really very early to tell. We won't finalize plans for the audio CD for a while yet. But as soon as we have a plan and are ready to announce it we definitely will!

Wrong Justin Bell Though he's got a great name, I gotta hand it to him. In all seriousness, I think this conversation is great and I couldn't agree more with the general consensus. Music is a critical component of the narrative. Connecting the player to that narrative, whether it be through art or music or whatever it may be, is a big concern for us.

Seriously though, I have no idea when Obsidian's publsihing partners will be ready to discuss further details about SoT. I imagine they will when they feel the time is right. Until then, it's safe to assume nothing about the game.

A little late to the party but what the heck... We don't have anything concrete to say at the moment, BUT I can tell you quality is a top concern for anything we do with regards to the audio book. That includes the narrator. I can also say that we are very cost conscious on Project Eternity and won't financially commit to something if it will be at the expense of the overall quality of the game. We're making a big game, and that's the priority. These two things may seem mutually exclusive, but they don't necessarily have to be. Music and sound effects are quite likely, though its still very very early to confirm anything 100%. Regardless of how things actually play out, we're going to do our best to deliver the best audio book experience possible.

1st RULE: You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB. 2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB. Does that answer your question?

Here, I've got an idea. Lets talk about other games that have awesome atmospheric sounds! What games really stood out to you in this regard? Why?

Absolutely. Over-compressed dynamic range leads to diminishing returns in terms of quality over the long term. Fortunately most professional game audio folks understand this, though it does pop up now and again...

Great conversation, as always! Thanks for having it. I'd like to chime in on a couple of the points raised above: Ambient sounds - Ambient sound effects are very important to us at Obsidian, and as I've said before, I hope I don't sound too arrogant when I say that I'm confident you won't be disappointing in this regard. We love nothing more than to hear games with great background sounds that draw you into the environmental From my personal perspective its one of those things that I love designing and I take a lot of care to get that right. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to design and implement the vast majority of ambient sound effects for Fallout New Vegas, and I'm a firm believer in their importance in all games. Balance between music and sound - One thing I'm not a huge fan of in games is omnipresent, looping, wall-to-wall music. Particularly in games that have a significant exploration component like IE games did and PE will. It just gets tiresome to listen too, particularly if there is no variety and the repetition is noticeable Finding the right balance between the ambient sound effects and music is something we're going to focus on a lot. They both need to serve a purpose and function, we want to avoid having them compete with one another, and we won't have them in just for their own sake. I love nothing more than to play a game that has rich detailed environments and getting lost in the ambient soundscape, only for music to subtly come in underneath, providing emotional context.... It's no coincidence, at least for me, the best games I've ever played have done this exceedingly well! System resources - Since we aren't targeting consoles, this is much less of a concern for us. We'll be able to use higher quality compression settings, though it still has to be able to run on peoples machines! A high quality audio pack isn't a bad idea, it's just a matter of figuring out if the sound archive can be swapped easily. That said, the impact of audio on system resources is relatively minimal and won't prohibit us from designing and implementing a deep soundscape. Interesting side note... WoW has a sound quality slider in the options menu that lets the user define different compression rates. That could be a solution, BUT (big but) it all depends on how much systems programming time a feature like that would require. We won't be able to get something like that in if it ends up being too complex of a task. Making the game awesome is our highest priority and I can easily see a systematic approach to audio compression being a much lower priority in terms of programmer time... Dynamic range - This is something we talk about all the time in the audio department here. A super compressed dynamic range will have a long term negative impact on the game experience as a whole, and it's something we are keen on avoiding. People will want to either turn the game's audio off, or even worse, the game itself off, and they won't even know why. This is because of a phenomenon called "listener fatigue", which occurs when your ears endure aural saturation for extended periods of time. Two things happen as a result of this: a. the listener's brain tunes out sounds due to sensory overload and b. you become physically exhausted from listening to the game. Both of these things are bad and we will do whatever we can to avoid it. The other issue you mention has to do with contrast between loud and soft moments of the game. Contrast, as it turns out, is directly tied to emotional impact. Here's a crude example... If the volume level of a chirping bird in the distance is equivalent to the sound of a castle suddenly exploding out of nowhere ten feet away, you've essentially robbed the exploding castle of it's dramatic impact. I went into this subject in some earlier threads that you might find interesting. They talks about contrast with music instead of sound, but the aesthetic concepts behind these two threads are more or less identical. http://forums.obsidi...60#entry1196618 http://forums.obsidi...00#entry1202767 So yes, I agree with you 100%. Another interesting side note... This concept is not actually all that new... In the European Romantic era, artists and writers explored a concept which they refereed to as "the sublime". In an oversimplified way, the sublime was a means of surprising the viewer/listener/reader/audience through the use of stark and sudden aesthetic shifts (i.e. contrast). Anyhow, it's fascinating and the concepts still hold true today. Those "jump scares" you see in horror films? Those things can be traced back to the sublime. Check it out if you're interested: http://www.tate.org....art-and-sublime Multi-channel sound - We will use mutli-channel sound if/where it makes sense. Obviously the camera dictates a lot of what that will mean in practice, but I can see (hear?) randomly panned ambient one shot sound effects working great in the rear channels. Which is not to say listening to the stereo version of the game will be any less engrossing, because that won't be the case. Things like special abilities may also work well for multi-channel sounds. That all said, we won't really know how well it works until we try and we're a while away from that. Hope that answers any questions you guys have! If not, I'd be happy to talk more about this (I can talk about audio all day as you can probably imagine...)

I'm definitely considering it yeah, but I really have no idea wether it will fit the narrative though. It's worth experimenting with though, I think it could be cool.

A 5.1 music mix isn't something I've considered, but it's an interesting idea. Not sure what Unity's down/up-mixing capabilities are yet, but if they are flexible enough, a 5.1 mix isn't out of the question. It just has to make sense in terms workload and what not...

You wouldn't be the only one

Oh man, what a day! We. Did. It! Live instruments will be in the score and you guys played a big part of that. Even for those of you who feel that this is an unnecessary cost, I still appreciate the fact that you came on here and voiced your opinion. To you guys, I assure you, this stretch goal will not detract from the main game in any way. I've been inspired by this conversation, and others that we've had on this forum, and it's really helped me think everything through. I have some great ideas now for how the score for PE will sound. I also know we won't be able to please everyone with the score, though I do know that we will do the best we can to make something that we hope you will enjoy! No matter what it takes, that's the goal. The dust still hasn't settled from this amazing day. Thanks to all you guys who supported PE, we really did have an AMAZING day. But I'm eager to get a backer update out there about our plans for the score. We'll see. It will come, I just don't know when. Keep talking about this, I want to hear what's on your mind. In the meantime, work on South Park remains, and that game is going to be awesome too! So yeah. Thanks awesome music supporters.

First off, thanks to everyone who has written in and followed this thread. I'm happy to announce that, due in no small part to this conversation, that we have a new stretch goal that will add Live Musicians to the soundtrack! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts Thank you again for this inspiring conversation. Please, spread the word and help us get those live musicians!

First off, thanks to everyone who has written in and followed this thread. I'm happy to announce that, due in no small part to this conversation, that we have a new stretch goal that will add Live Musicians to the soundtrack! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts Thank you again for this inspiring conversation. Please, spread the word and help us get those live musicians!

First off, thanks to everyone who has written in and followed this thread. I'm happy to announce that, due in no small part to this conversation, that we have a new stretch goal that will add Live Musicians to the soundtrack! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts Thank you again for this inspiring conversation. Please, spread the word and help us get those live musicians!

First off, thanks to everyone who has written in and followed this thread. I'm happy to announce that, due in no small part to this conversation, that we have a new stretch goal that will add Live Musicians to the soundtrack! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts Thank you again for this inspiring conversation. Please, spread the word and help us get those live musicians!

Hey hideo kuze. Good questions! This is what we currently have in mind: - Full color everything - 4 panel booklet with liner notes - 2 sided back panel with track listing - Concept art from the game layed out in an awesome way As far as content, thats a good question.... Let me talk it over with some folks here.

Yes! Post them! Your music sounds awesome Casey, and it deserves to be heard. @everyone reading. Please listen to this man's music. It's good stuff!

Thanks! I'm happy with it turned out too.

Bastion is, at least in an indirect way, an inspiration of mine when it comes to writing music. Check out this video of the composer talking about his process, its great. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/175296/Video_Creating_the_audio_for_Bastion.php

This will happen

Wow check that out! That's VERY old school. Yep!