Justin Bell

Nice! Glad you like it Truth be told I was skeptical that people would like it, but I'm glad I was wrong. It felt almost like an intermittent song from a pirate movie. One you might hear between scenes in a film with lots of ale clinking and swinging from ropes. I would love to have some additional similar tracks for one of the future DLCs. In particular, I thought a good place to have some kind of shipboard atmospheric track or sound effects would be during the storm events on the overworld map. All around very good job with the music this go around, it is a massive improvement over the first's soundtrack (which was very repetitive in it's scope sad to say). I would like to echo the sentiments from another user about there needing to be a few areas that should have had unique soundtracks (such as the bathhouse). It might seem like a waste from a development point of view, but one thing that has always stood out to me in games that have become all time favorites is those areas where you get exclusive chills from epic music you've not heard anywhere else in the game. Some very good examples of this type can be found on late SNES early N64 video games. One of my all-time favorite games is Mario RPG (it is the first RPG I ever played to fruition back when I was 10). One of the things that still sticks with me about that game is some of the unique soundtracks for certain areas, from those with a sense of urgency to whimsy. While most areas still use the main soundtrack/themes. Some other good examples of this can be found in Ocarina of Time, though not exactly an rpg they did well with the idea of "unique" tracks to select areas which make them stand out and help one reimagine those places decades later. Just something for your consideration. Thank you for that @Excerpt. Glad you liked it. The scope of the game and the amount of work required meant we had to de-prioritize certain plans, and the bathhouse was one of them unfortunately. I agree with you though and I also would have liked to do something unique for this area. As an alternative, what if I just persist the music from the exterior into the interior? It might be more tonally fitting than the inn music. Thanks! At first I couldn't understand the choice of combat music, but i kind of like how understated it is. Most of the music is really appealing, the only part that really bothers me is the level up music. It just seems to drone on when you're levelling up 5 party members in a row, since it stops and starts again. Edit: And also like others say the sound design in general is a massive step up since the first game. I love the Queen's Berth track like other's have said and the sea shanties. Understood about the Character Creation. I think I can probably have the music start at a different point each time you enter character creation, but unfortunately I think the music repetition is just the canary in the coal mine here. The real issue is that you have to actually leave and re-enter character creation for each character you want to level up, forcing you to hear the beginning of the music over and over, and in a way that puts a microscope on a very small section of a larger piece of music. I think the issue would be less obvious if you could simply stay in the character creation screen until you're done leveling up your party. I don't know if we'll ever add that feature though. I can agree with this. Combat music was not my favourite, but the rest was fantastic non the less. Thank you! I'm just a regular human like you! Thank you for your very kind words about Tyranny! It was a labor of love for many of us.

Thank you!!

Nice! Glad you like it Truth be told I was skeptical that people would like it, but I'm glad I was wrong.

Nice! Great to hear that! I tried to move in the current direction a bit more with Tyranny, but the tech we had was still relatively basic compared to Pillars 2. Pillars 2, as you correctly stated, definitely pushes into that direction further.

Right on BTW I love Dark Souls. It's my favorite game of all time, and I adore it's use of music in that you almost never hear it unless it's a boss, shrine, or cutscene (which there are very few of). It was very courageous of From Software to make that creative choice, I can almost guarantee there were people on the development and publishing side asking why there wasn't more music. Expertly crafted sonic experiences even though they are so simple.

You know, I *did* notice some cues seemingly responding to dialogue initiations and the likes, I thought it was a neat coincidence but I see that it's no coincidence at all now! That's some great stuff. I'll make sure to keep closer ear on these changes as I carry on playing. All in all, fantastic work, Justin! Nice! That was the intent! I almost didn't want to tell folks about it initially because if they knew it might be more obvious, but hey the cats out of the bag and I'm glad you enjoyed it :D

Oh I didn't take it as a knock at all Honestly I want to deliver something folks will enjoy. There's a learning curve there for sure, but I'll get there. Well, most of the time, you literally cannot win whatever you do, since you can garentee you will find people who want the diametrically opposite things. Or worse, the people who want you to make [the thing] magically better ("make it 20% cooler!") without being able to quantify in what manner...! It's a balancing act for sure! Hans Zimmer said once that "music is indefensible" , and I completely agree. I think he was talking about it in the context of the collaborative process, but he probably also means it in terms of people liking the music or not. Keeps things interesting! Anyway, didn't mean to hijack the thread, I just noticed the music discussion and wanted to chime in!

As much as I like the non-combat music, I'll have to agree on this one. The combat music sounds like it's a little bit subdued, afraid to go all out. To me, it seems like the idea was to have a sense of unity between the whole of the OST, so the combat music is kind of trying to stay in line with the non-combat music, which led it to having this neutral, almost relaxing vibe tonally. There's some darkness in combat #2, but that's about it. Another thing about the combat music is that the lacks track any remarkable progression in terms of form. They're all based on some sort of rhythmic motive that they keep up near-continuously throughout the track without much change. They're also tonally quite static, repeating the same ostinati, bass patterns, and chord progressions throughout, sometimes melodies dropping in and out. All of this leads to a lack of sense of progression and tension/release. The tracks sort of feel like intros that never go anywhere. Yes that was the intent, for better or worse. They're designed to fill the cracks of combat sound design and to be durable over 100 hours of potential gameplay. POE1 combat music was foreground music, PoE2 is decidedly background music. Well, from my (still limited, ain't got hear any shanties yet!) experience with the combat music, it completed it objective of being so much background that it completely bypassed my notice. It is also, I think, an approach a lot of games seem to take (especially 4X starship games). Now, whether that is necessarily really a good thing is a different question. Because while it achieves its objectives (i.e. not being very noticable in its absense), it also means that is pretty by definition not a good piece of music by itself. ('Cos it is, y'know, not designed to be, but to, as you sat, fill the gaps in the flashy explosions.) I think the other problem stuff like PoE has is that, unlike, say X-Com 2 (a soundtrack I very much listened to outside of the game!), you need to split your music-people-time among more things that are not fight music (like, y'know, all the ambient music). JRPGs seem to mange this well a fair bit of the time (Final Fantasy especially...) But, that said, their raises an interesting point that in FF (in the old ones that had good soundtracks, anyway), there was notably only one thing going on at a time. (Actually... Ditto X-Com and ditto Pokémon - though not C&C or TIE Fighter). Which begs a question that is the fact the music is more foreground-y because it has to compete with much less? Question is, then, has anyone ever (in like the dev team where you could do it internally), say, tried running a combat while running a track from I dunno, let's go with Don't Be Afraid (as someone mentioned, the music was the best part of FFVIII), but [whatever]? Just to see what it sounds like? (I 'spose anyone could do it, if you turned the music off and played it from a tablet or laptop or something!) I'm a 3D print CAD jockey, not a music person, so I lack the professional nouse to be able to make a useful judgement[1], but it'd be an interesting thing to hear about the results of. [1]And as a person whose musical tastes run almost exclusively to Soundtracks From Things With An Emphasis On The Fight Music, I'm probably not the best authority, since I probably WOULD think PoE2 combat to The Touch or the Pokémon Anime Kanto Gym Theme or something would be ridiculously cool, even if sane people wouldn't...! Fair enough You make a lot of very good points. By the next game I expect I'll have dialed in just the right balance in combat music. We shall see!

All fair points. Blending in was not the only objective. I should also add that I wanted to experiment with the percussion section as a soloist, hence the reason why melody has taken a back seat in many of the cues. You don't see a lot of percussion only action music - it's typically accompanied by strings, brass, choir/vocals, synths, guitar etc - and I wanted to appreciate the purity of percussion on it's own because I think it can be very powerful. We hired an amazing percussionist to perform for the soundtrack!

Well overall I think Deadfire was a huge improvement in sound design. Sound effects, music and the full VO made me play with my better headphones on the whole way. Only thing really on my personal wishlist is a more bombastic main theme, because I'm just a total sucker for the TES: Oblivion or BG2: SoA themes. I mean you can't listen to them for very long, but they do get you pumped and ready to slay some kobolds. Cool! Fair request for a more bombastic theme, many others have asked for this too. I'll keep at it

Understood and fair. I was trying to address criticism from the first game that combat music was too in your face, too repetitive, too attention grabbing. It's a process, maybe next game will strike the right balance. I haven't gotten to play deadfire yet because I'm still replaying the first game, with, uh, two different parties. But one thing that's stood out to me recently in playing pillars 1 is how jarring it is to be running around listening to the lovely ondra's gift theme and then suddenly get blasted with the combat music, which is waaaaay louder than the walkabout music. I usually have to change the music volume slider during and after every combat to rebalance the sound. I like the music itself, it's just too loud relative to the rest of the tracks, so thank you for addressing that. I'm interested to hear how it all turned out once I hit the deadfire. My apologies for you having to do that. I hope Deadfire is an improvement in this regard

Understood and fair. I was trying to address criticism from the first game that combat music was too in your face, too repetitive, too attention grabbing. It's a process, maybe next game will strike the right balance.I missed this comment before (also, I have no idea how to add a quote into an existing post with this interface, so excuse the double post.) Really? That's interesting, and then it makes perfect sense that you went for the more background type of approach for PoE2. I didn't feel that way at all about PoE1's music. I think it was perfectly fine in terms of how attention-grabbing it was, not much different in that sense from something like Baldur's Gate. I think there are two camps when it comes to POE1's music; those that like repetition and those that don't. Those that don't were very vocal after the first game was released, and I took that feedback to heart. Another thing that you might be hearing is that the combat sfx will "duck" the combat music to a degree, masking it out in various ways. It's just a way to make things sound more coherent at the expense of clarity in the music Well, can't fault you for listening to feedback and adhering to it in next iterations. That's a good thing. Things like this are problematic because they're divisive: please one crowd, and you'll end up displeasing the other. Then another thing with feedback is that sometimes even the people who demanded change may not be satisfied with the alternative and may end up complaining anyway. People don't always even know what they want. I appreciate that. It's a tricky balance for sure, all we can do is keep trying

Indeed! Gotta say it was a lot of fun singing those songs. Nils is a real powerhouse of a singer, it was hard not to get caught up in the moment!

Understood and fair. I was trying to address criticism from the first game that combat music was too in your face, too repetitive, too attention grabbing. It's a process, maybe next game will strike the right balance. I missed this comment before (also, I have no idea how to add a quote into an existing post with this interface, so excuse the double post.) Really? That's interesting, and then it makes perfect sense that you went for the more background type of approach for PoE2. I didn't feel that way at all about PoE1's music. I think it was perfectly fine in terms of how attention-grabbing it was, not much different in that sense from something like Baldur's Gate. I think there are two camps when it comes to POE1's music; those that like repetition and those that don't. Those that don't were very vocal after the first game was released, and I took that feedback to heart. Another thing that you might be hearing is that the combat sfx will "duck" the combat music to a degree, masking it out in various ways. It's just a way to make things sound more coherent at the expense of clarity in the music

Myself, I can perfectly understand that position. On one hand, I can agree on the point of FFVIII. For all the game's faults, Don't Be Afraid is a great battle theme. On the other hand, FFVII's battle theme makes me want to claw out my ear drums whenever I'm exposed to it for extended periods of time - and that's despite my heavy nostalgia goggles. To be fair, I'm not really an audio buff and I can't pinpoint the exact thing that wears me out in FFVII's theme. Perhaps it's just the inferior sound format/quality. Yes I think that was the impetus with Deadfire. I got a significant amount of community feedback about combat music from PoE1, many felt annoyed by its repetitive nature.

As much as I like the non-combat music, I'll have to agree on this one. The combat music sounds like it's a little bit subdued, afraid to go all out. To me, it seems like the idea was to have a sense of unity between the whole of the OST, so the combat music is kind of trying to stay in line with the non-combat music, which led it to having this neutral, almost relaxing vibe tonally. There's some darkness in combat #2, but that's about it. Another thing about the combat music is that the lacks track any remarkable progression in terms of form. They're all based on some sort of rhythmic motive that they keep up near-continuously throughout the track without much change. They're also tonally quite static, repeating the same ostinati, bass patterns, and chord progressions throughout, sometimes melodies dropping in and out. All of this leads to a lack of sense of progression and tension/release. The tracks sort of feel like intros that never go anywhere. Yes that was the intent, for better or worse. They're designed to fill the cracks of combat sound design and to be durable over 100 hours of potential gameplay. POE1 combat music was foreground music, PoE2 is decidedly background music. Yep. I'm of the opinion that that was a bad choice and that more conspicuous and intense combat music would've surely benefited the game more. Then again, I've never understood the position that having more prominent combat music will somehow wear out faster. I've heard Final Fantasy 7 and 8's battle themes thousands of times, and I still enjoy them. In any case, I'd rather have good, memorable music that I'll get sick of after 100 or 1000 hours than purposely colorless, dull, and repetitive music that I never enjoyed in the first place. To me, that's as good as silence because it doesn't affect me in any way. I'm sure many disagree, though. Speaking of PoE 2 sound design, that's some of the best I've heard in an isometric RPG, if not the best. Thank you! I'll pass this along to the sound team. They really out-did themselves. It was quite an intensive effort.

Hi Justin, just wanted to say that the music is absolutely fantastic! I have to admit, I was more excited for the soundtrack than the actual game, especially after hearing the music of Pillars 1 and Tyranny. I hope to hear your work in many games to come. Keep up the great work! Well, it's an honor to serve, thank you for your kind words of encouragement!

I'd asstimate anything from 20 to 50%. I'll just say a lot more than I thought, since the city is much larger than I expected. I binged the whole game and I think I spent the first two days only in Neketaka before jumping on my ship and going exploring. Even after that you always return there for quests for three factions and bounties and shops so yeah. A large portion of the game, so fortunately I personally loved Neketaka Makes perfect sense. A lot of effort was put into Neketaka across the board, including its exploration music. It was sort of top priority for the sound team and I.

You are most welcome. Curious, how much time percentage wise are you spending in Neketaka? Hmm. I'm rather slow when it comes to playing through games, and I'm still rather early into the game, so... I'd say it's been around half of the time logged on the save. Interesting! I mean it makes sense, Neketaka has tons of content. I wonder if that's a common experience?

As much as I like the non-combat music, I'll have to agree on this one. The combat music sounds like it's a little bit subdued, afraid to go all out. To me, it seems like the idea was to have a sense of unity between the whole of the OST, so the combat music is kind of trying to stay in line with the non-combat music, which led it to having this neutral, almost relaxing vibe tonally. There's some darkness in combat #2, but that's about it. Another thing about the combat music is that the lacks track any remarkable progression in terms of form. They're all based on some sort of rhythmic motive that they keep up near-continuously throughout the track without much change. They're also tonally quite static, repeating the same ostinati, bass patterns, and chord progressions throughout, sometimes melodies dropping in and out. All of this leads to a lack of sense of progression and tension/release. The tracks sort of feel like intros that never go anywhere. Yes that was the intent, for better or worse. They're designed to fill the cracks of combat sound design and to be durable over 100 hours of potential gameplay. POE1 combat music was foreground music, PoE2 is decidedly background music.

Understood and fair. I was trying to address criticism from the first game that combat music was too in your face, too repetitive, too attention grabbing. It's a process, maybe next game will strike the right balance. The shanties were excellent though :D And yeah hopefully it'll be more balanced in the next games (or even in the dlcs if there's different music there). Thanks! We even got one of the singers who performed the Black Flag shanties to coordinate our effort His name is Nils Brown. Even the shanties were a bit controversial though we knew folks would enjoy them. That's why we have the sea shanty option to disable them

You are most welcome. Curious, how much time percentage wise are you spending in Neketaka?

Understood and fair. I was trying to address criticism from the first game that combat music was too in your face, too repetitive, too attention grabbing. It's a process, maybe next game will strike the right balance.

Not at all, you're entitled to voice your observations. Some boil down to preference and are subjective, others are arguably objective. The former can be more difficult to address, if they're addressable at all. Just depends. But! Your feedback is valuable and you should feel free to express it.Good to know With all the fanboyism and gurd-dogging, it's nice that we can be honest with ourselves. Normally, it's "If you don't like what we like, you're a troll" so I definitely appreciate peeps who can roll with the punches and respect one another. Yeah, I don't think PoE has that much fanboyism around it, though. People have been expressing their criticisms quite freely, without rabid fanboys jumping at their throats. Now, if you try to criticize The Witcher 3 (other than the combat), you'll often experience the verbal equivalent of being stoned to death. Love witcher 3

Not at all, you're entitled to voice your observations. Some boil down to preference and are subjective, others are arguably objective. The former can be more difficult to address, if they're addressable at all. Just depends. But! Your feedback is valuable and you should feel free to express it.Good to know With all the fanboyism and gurd-dogging, it's nice that we can be honest with ourselves. Normally, it's "If you don't like what we like, you're a troll" so I definitely appreciate peeps who can roll with the punches and respect one another. As Elvis once said "A little less White Knighting, a little more intelligent conversation" this should be a rule for backers teehee Well said! Everyone's opinion matters, and here you have a right to be heard as long as folks aren't being mean spirited. Disagreement doesn't equate to disrespect, if that makes sense. Even outright distastefull disrespect can be redirected, imo, but there is a line. Couldbe wrong but I haven't detected anything like that in this conversation tbh!