Justin Bell

Thank you! Yes quite so. It is a matter of personal prefernce.

None taken! Music is a very personal thing to us all, not everyone will have the same tastes. But you bring up a good point. Both combat b and c play way too much in the first release. I rebalanced the music a bit so that d and e play more, so starting with patch 1.03 you will hopefully have less repetition of c.

While a small part of me dies inside by saying this, yes you can get rid of the combat music if you really want to, but I wouldn't delete or rename the files. Instead, replace them with a silent ogg of equal length that uses the same conversion settings. If you rename/delete, you WILL have music bugs.

I've known about this one for a while, makes me sad. We've looked into solutions but none of them are safe to do without lots of testing, so we decided to hold off until after the game shipped. We might be able to fix for the expansion, but honestly I can't say for sure. If we can find a safe and relatively easy solution that doesn't cause more bugs, we might be able to fix it.

Thank you everyone for the very kind words. It means a lot to me and I am so happy you enjoy the soundtrack. Apologies for the issues with numbering, tags, and the cut off files. I'll fix all of that today. Stand by!

Ok I can do that. Give me a day or so and I'll try to coordinate an updated version with track numbers.

Justin Bell chimes in! Any help on the liner notes for us? I haven't been able to play the game today cause of work, but have been enveloped with the awesome sounds of the soundtrack all day. Amazing work. That's awesome to hear, glad you enjoyed it! Didn't have time for liner notes unfortunately, but we've talked about a blog post or something that goes into the score some more. I guess if there's enough demand we might be able to do something, but like anything else its hard to predict if we'll be able too.

That was a typo, it's around 95 minutes.

I'll take a listen next week, see if there's something we can do to balance things out more. The fade in part is a bit trickier unfortunately. We use randomly triggered one shot sound effects and it takes a few seconds for that to develop.

Ugh, yes it does. That was an old version that sneaked into the build, it's fixed now. No problem experimenting a little wile it is still in beta, good to hear this particular song didnt make it into final game It's still in the game, just that one part the link goes to with the constant wind runs (flute sounds that sound like R2D2) is changed. No more R2D2. It's understandable that most backer beta folks are tired of this song. To most new players though it's probably not going to sound as annoying.

Ugh, yes it does. That was an old version that sneaked into the build, it's fixed now.

Should have clarified.... The crickets are still there at night! They just don't melt your brain with their loudness anymore.

I originally had the cool down at 7 minutes, but received some feedback from the team that it felt too long, particularly during lengthy dialog sequences. I'll mess around with the combat cool down and give larger values a try.

Yeah, but correct me if I'm wrong here... that was a bug. In both of the BG's. Ambient music, specifically, would simply stop playing after a while when you were exploring. If you quick saved, it came right back. Was it really? Didn't know that. Pillars definitely has many moments without music. There's a 4 minute cool down for area music, and it doesn't always restart when entering new scenes except where we force it to. I think it'd be kind of cool to expose those parameters in the options UI, but such a thing is VERY low priority right now. Maybe for future games.

Also, the crickets of eternity have been eradicated. Poor little fellas. We used some very strong insecticide on them and wiped out a few generations of the little buggers.

To those who commented on music, thanks for the kind words. I'm very happy to hear that you like the music you heard on the panel. Regarding sliders for command VO frequency, disabling them, etc we might get that in at a later date but I can't promise. As someone pointed out earlier, it's too risky to do right now. But rest assured it's on our list and if we can find time to get that in we'll do it. But with a game this complex, there are "bigger fish to fry" as they say. Regarding the duration between the end of combat and start of area music... You folks have any specific suggestions? I can tune that pretty easily. Right now I think the combat fade out is about .5 seconds, and the pause is about 3.

I've mentioned it a few times, I definitely agree. Hopefully we can get it patched in eventually.

Agreed. Mixing a big game like this in Unity is an extremely painful process, but we've come up with some hacky but "better" solutions to get around it. We'll make it so everything is in the right place!

We're looking into ways to address this.

Gairnulf, thanks for the link. Great example. Truth is we don't really need to be an expert of something to know we like it. That's especially true for music.

IMHO I love every track of Morrowind and the first time I listened to it, I got heavy vibes that I was listening to a more "civilization" Morrowind theme music. While Morrowind gives the feeling that ur going to travel wilderness, this gives off the same impression and vibe but with a feel that there's civilization where we are going to, places that are somewhat modern. I loved Jeremy's work in that game and this just gives me the same chills and vibes, BUT as something new and different. Bravo sir! This is a work of art and I LOVE it! Tyvm Quite a compliment, thank you! I'm humbled by the comparison.

It's very interesting to hear all of your responses. What I've done is create something that works against tradition and therefore some of your expectations. There are other amazing themes that don't come out of the gate swinging with the big percussion and brass. Morrowind has one of the greatest themes of all times imho, and it starts off low and slow. What about Final Fantasy? Just a solo arpeggiated harp, but it's a classic. I think though that its a given that some will like it and others won't. It's music after all, very few music is universally enjoyed! Here's my guess, some of you are going to play a lot of Pillars of Eternity. Hundreds of hours with multiple play throughs. Out of those who don't think the theme is thematic enough, about half of you are going to change your mind because you won't be able to disassociate the theme from your experience playing the game. Only time will tell, right? And that time is right around the corner!

Hmmm.... No comment I'll just say I think you're going to like what you hear then. They are going to be objects in the world that you purposefully interact with. Just the right amount! After listening to it a couple more times, it actually reminds me a little of Torment, more positive and with some hope, but the same kind of low end theme. And Torment's theme fit perfectly. I'm looking forward to see how this one fits to the game ^^, it's already growing on me. That was the idea yeah. My first draft was on the heavier side, and so I started from scratch and ended up with what you hear now. I like the positive and hopeful feelings it has. It really matches more with this concept of the game http://bit.ly/1Ffy6Dq than it does with this one http://bit.ly/1CBTPY2 I use an RME AIO my interface. That goes AES out to a Lavry Blue AD/DA. Speakers are Mackie HR 824 mk2s. Kind of I don't want to spoil too much

I disagree. I really like the idea of starting up the game and going through character creation with this. Now, to be sure, this requires that the game actually keeps playing this when going from the starting menu to character creation, which I just realized it may not, but I much prefer it to the ear-grating bombastic nature of the BG2 theme that hits you when booting up. I'd rather have something nice to listen to that lulls me into the game during my initial forays into the game, and then stays calmly out of the way when I feel like I'm just in a hurry to load my game or whatever. That was the idea yes. It's a different approach to be sure, but I think it works well. It grows on you too! I hear people humming the theme in the halls at work, for better or worse that's a good sign at least.

Hi! I believe it will yes! We had two cameras recording the session, so I imagine that it will have some footage.