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Hi Everyone! Jumped back on this game and forgot how much I love it. Unfortunately, on PC, I've been having some issues with it. PC Specs: Windows 11 32 GB DDR4 RAM AMD Ryzen 3900X Nvidia RTX 3090 (driver 528.49) I have a shared world with a few friends and recently, I've been having crashes. I'll play the game for like 10-15 mins then the game stutters and then quits out. I've checked Windows Event Viewer and noticed this error: What's weird is that file is not missing and I've confirmed with another friend who has a NVidia card in terms of the location of that file. I've uninstalled with DDU and reinstalled my nvidia drivers, ran memory checks on my machine, no issues. The other weird thing is that when I have a discord audio channel connected and playing, when I launch the game the audio in the discord chat drops by 50%. I have to disconnect and reconnect the call to have it back to where it was. Any and all help would be appreciated! My workaround at the moment is playing on Cloud gaming but it really strips all the prettiness of this game.

Is the new audio system in grounded 1.1 a bug or a feature. If it's a feature I think there should be a way to turn off the 3d audio

During multiplayer gameplay the host is unable to see the Side Effects audio log. However, the other player is able to see it but unable to pick it up.

Playing Grounded today with a friend, we both agree that the sound that the Grubs make when they are moving underground around you is way too loud. It overpowers the sound of the Wolf Spiders in the tree, even when they are chasing and attacking you. I feel that it should be slightly audible with controller vibration on console (like the ground moving beneath your feet, a tremor.) SUGGESTION: - Decrease the volume of the Grub as it moves under the ground. - Make controller vibrate when near a moving Grub, based on proximity.

[Verbose story first, brief summary at the end.] Hi! I've been playing this game since it was released, and I instantly fell in love with it. I started noticing after a while, however, that the game was too quiet. I didn't hear any kind of ambient sound while exploring, and it was especially noticeable in cities, which made them feel very empty. All I would hear was the music and bark conversations - without those, it was dead silent. I was preparing to ask around on the forums if anyone else had noticed it as well, when I read about others reporting other sound issues, among them a lack of surround sound. This got me thinking, and I started experimenting with my audio settings in Windows and in my headphones (no results), and then in the game itself. Lo and behold, when I turned the audio slider for Effects back up to 100% from 50% (I always lower this setting in games where there are lots of shooty-bang-bang noises), Byzantine suddenly burst into life with various sounds coming from everywhere and I could also hear the river flowing! I even noticed that the vending machines make noises, and that there out in the wilds were various creature sounds and what not filling the air. I now play with Effects set to 100% and it has made a huge difference in how I experience the worlds and settlements in the game. In short: The sound levels in the game appear overly sensitive. If I turn the Effects slider in the audio settings down below 90%, pretty much everything in the ambient sound department becomes completely inaudible to me. I hear nothing but the music and the voice barks - everything else is dead silent. It is possible that this might be related to other audio issues that players have reported, such as the missing surround sound, but I've no way to determine that myself.

When zooming constantly in/out (achieved by spinning the right stick) the background music cuts out. Not all sound effects, just the background music. Really strange.

I have an issue (which I'm not sure is an issue, but keeps on persisting), that at random times, there is a sound of "alarm" (like car alarm or house alarm) appearing in the middle of nowhere. The sound is repeated for 3 times and cut in the middle. I'm not sure if i heard the sound in-game before. It started to manifest itself in Edgewater, while exploring the Marauder outpost where the guy with the heavy armor and Zoe are. Not sure if the problem started when I wore his heavy armor or when I passed through some random door into the building there. I thought I triggered some alarm, but at that point it started to happen randomly and still does.

As of patch 1.1, whenever my characters talk or make sounds during battle, they seem to overwrite anyone else that was previously talking or casting a spell. This can happen with short lines like Pallegina's "Belfetto!" or even someone's groan for swinging a weapon. The vocals being interrupted seems to happen moreso to player created characters (my Watcher) than the companions like Eder or Pallegina. This didn't seem to happen at all before the latest patches. Also, for my Watcher (male Wizard), spell incantation sounds "Athek werthan roth!, etc." rarely play at all anymore for him during combat, but seem to function better for everyone else. Out of combat, the vocals play almost every time. I am using the male Kind voice, but I changed it a few other ones and the problem still happens with him in combat. The sounds are my favourite thing about the game and it really breaks immersion that this happens.

I got around to playing today, and I've noticed all my characters' speech gets cut off if I click on someone else or someone else says a battecry, "ouch", etc. The spell sounds, "moeth ixi anath" etc get cut off as well if anyone else makes a sound, interrupting it. Has anyone found a workaround for this? Is this ever going to be fixed? I've done some research and this bug seems like it's been going on for a while, but I have seen some YouTube videos where the game seems to work fine. I think this really ruins the immersion =/ Any advice or help would be truly welcome.

Hi all. When I backed the game on Fig during crowdfunding campaign, there was a possibility to add Audio CD physical soundtrack of the game as an add-on reward (not part of any tier, but added physical item, like those tin figurines of Aloth, Edér and Pallegina were). However, the reward was not delivered with the rest and I didn´t find any info about it anywhere. I contacted the support about this and got no answer at all. This add-on cost 20 USD. Any info about this? Thanks for help

Fixed.

System specs: Debian Buster, upgraded from Stretch (so the fixes should work for that version too). Platform: intel amd64 i5-4460/16gb ram, ASUS H81M-K board, built-in HD Audio, running a daemonized pulseaudio under an xorg/xfce4 environment, up to date Steam installation with current game patches pre-August 2018 DLC/patches. Logs: There are no logs for this issue, none whatsoever, and I have never seen an output log from PillarsOfEternityII. Not once. I have seen logs in ~/.xsession-errors and I include a cut and paste example log for when it can't find a library, in this case libpulse-simple. I wasn't allowed to attach the log so here it is: Found path: /home/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Pillars of Eternity II/PillarsOfEternityII Mono path[0] = '/home/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Pillars of Eternity II/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/Managed' Mono path[1] = '/home/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Pillars of Eternity II/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/Mono' Mono config path = '/home/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Pillars of Eternity II/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/Mono/etc' Preloaded 'libdiscord-rpc.so' Preloaded 'ScreenSelector.so' Preloaded 'libAkFlanger.so' Preloaded 'libAkHarmonizer.so' Preloaded 'libAkPitchShifter.so' Preloaded 'libAkSoundEngine.so' Preloaded 'libAkStereoDelay.so' Preloaded 'libAkTremolo.so' Preloaded 'libMcDSP.so' Preloaded 'libSDL2-2.0.so' Preloaded 'libsteam_api.so' Unable to preload the following plugins: libpulse-simple.so.0 Player data archive not found at `/home/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Pillars of Eternity II/PillarsOfEternityII_Data/data.unity3d`, using local filesystem Steps to reproduce: update steam. Links will disappear from the steam runtime and video and/or sound will again be broken. I also attempted to cut the runtime out, and it was still broken. This indicates to me that at least, the library preloading has no effect on the library path. Screenshots: screenshots are not useful for this bug. Savegames: also not useful for this bug. Discussion: There seem to be issues with the library path in PoE2 as already suggested. I don't understand why Obsidian didn't simply use SDL sound like everybody else does with Unity and threw FMOD into it which has also apparently has issues with later pulseaudio releases, including understanding what a library path is. In order to forestall issues with the 32bit side, the fix is copied to the 32bit runtime (this may seem unnecessary but it is harmless even if not, so do not neglect it), you should arrive at this: $ ls ~/.steam/ubuntu12_32/steam_runtime/pinned_libs_64/ has_pins libdbusmenu-glib.so.4@ libdbusmenu-gtk.so.4@ libGLU.so.1@ libpangox-1.0.so.0@ libpulsecommon-1.1.so@ libpulse-simple.so.0@ libpulse.so.0@ libSDL2-2.0.so.0@ system_libdbusmenu-glib.so.4 system_libdbusmenu-gtk.so.4 system_libGLU.so.1 system_libpangox-1.0.so.0 system_libpulsecommon-1.1.so system_libpulse-simple.so.0 system_libpulse.so.0 system_libSDL2-2.0.so.0 And the same should be true of pinned_libs_32/ . The directory by default does not include the SDL2 link or the pulse library links. All link back to the ../amd64/usr/lib/ versions of the libraries. The system_ versions link to the system libraries which will differ according to your distribution. Under Debian stretch/buster they will be found under /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ and two of the pulse libraries are in a further subdirectory, /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pulseaudio . All libraries are installed in Debian mutliarch for both i386 and amd64 versions. Be sure to check under /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ for each architecture and include the necessary subdirectory for pulseaudio and run ldconfig as root after you have edited. That is important, so read it again. In addition you may find that FMOD ex doesn't go with whatever output you select in pulseaudio. To make sure, run pavucontrol and run through the specific outputs of your output devices. For me it's Built-In Analog Audio/Line Out, it may well differ for you. As every update to Steam will wipe any changes to the pinned library directories, I strongly suggest you keep a copy somewhere to copy over to after an update/upgrade or PoE II will not work again. There are a lot of fixes that do not work for me. This idea doesn't work: LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH %command% the idea is to add a link to /dev/null for pulseaudio in the executables directory so that FMOD isn't confused but that will mean it can't find pulseaudio which is what you actually want. nor does this: SDL_DYNAMIC_API=/usr/lib64/libSDL2.so LC_ALL=C %command% Similarly, any other "fixes" like running the executable from it's home directory do not work. Whatever the executable preloads, including SDL2, gets lost somewhere and it needs those libraries above, they may well work for FMOD to do it's job but FMOD is not connected to the SDL side of things. I hope that clears some things up about the sound issues under Debian and probably Ubuntu and related distros.

I'm experiencing really scratchy audio issues when in game! It's not my headset as I tried it with other devices, my sound is totally fine when NOT in game but in game I can't hear the music or speech due to how bad it comes out. Anyone have ideas on how to fix this?!

I've been having a strange issue with some of the dialogue in the game, while I have had the issue where at the start of dialogue the audio is cut off, this is something different. I can hear all the audio being spoken but it's very...stuttery, starchy, quiet and cutting in and out every second. I don't know how to quite explain it but that's the best I can do. It only happens with dialogue, the background noises, music etc. are playing just fine while it's happening. I can ask them the same question to get the dialogue again but the 2nd time it'll play like it should. So far I've only encountered it with Durance and more often with Kana and 'so far' only when I've been asking them questions. I haven't heard people mention this issue before, only the dialogue getting cut off at the start but does anyone know what might be causing it or ways to try and alleviate the problem? Thanks.

Greetings, During combat when player characters play a sound from its voice-set files - like battle cry, spell incantations, status notifications or any other voice effort and then take any other action, take or deal damage, the previous sound playback is cut off instantly and is being replaced by next sound. For example: - When player character "A" cast a spell and play incantation sound and then player character "B" take damage in same time, then the incantation sound from character "A" is cut off instantly. - When player character is poisoned and play notification sound "I am poisoned ... babble " the poison deal damage at the same time which in turn cause character to play damage received effort sound file and cut of previous sound. In slow mode the sound plays for a little bit longer before it is cut off. - When player character cast a few spells in a row - only first one can be heard. Game version 2.03 + DLC 1 - Galaxy GOG auto installer. I'm not sure but if I recall correctly this bug was introduced in patch 1.03 - the one with new voice sets added and audio loop fix. There was similar bug in Neverwinter Nights 2 which has never been fixed. Pleas fix this bug. Thank you very much.

The most important part of POE II for me is the music, and since the audio stretch goal was met last February 2017, i.e. a year ago, it seems fitting we should hear some new music this month! What do you guys think? So, if you see this, Justin Bell, when can I hear some new tunes? Please and thanks!

https://streamable.com/c54p3 This happens all the time, it's really off-putting.

When I quit the game to Main Menu, sometimes I hear a very loud metal clashing sound. If I hear it once, I will keep hearing it for all my playthrough, every time I hit "Quit". Reload older save and quitting from there resolve this, sometimes.

My game's sound stopped completely. I don't seem to have done anything extraordinary for this to happen. No sound effects, no music; messing with iPad's or the game's volumes doesn't do anything. Other apps' sound is fine.

Heya, I'm having audio issues with Pillars of Eternity on Debian GNU/Linux kernel version 4.4.0-rc8. I am able to get POE running and play the game, but there is no audio. If I execute start.sh from command line using sudo then audio works. I don't generally have audio issues, all of my other programs and games work except for one: Bastion (on Steam). That game has the same issue, that audio only works when running sudo, so I think the two may be related. Do they both use the same engine? I noticed that both have folders with Mono. Is it possible that the sound issues are related to this: http://community.monogame.net/t/audio-playing-only-if-launched-from-terminal/1576 In any case, here are links to pastebin where I have placed the results of an alsa-info.sh test and my player.log file. http://pastebin.com/Z1bTwmGj http://pastebin.com/W8fihqVq The alsa log should have the relevant system specs. Any ideas?

Hello there! I am experiences very frequent game freezes that are about 0,5-3 sec long when the game loads up audio or dialogue assets (at least that is how it seems). Game runs very smoothly on high graphical, high strain settings and performs flawlessly when for example playing large multi-enemy fights were several high graphic settings spell animations are flung all over the screen. However, when doing simple tasks like talking to random NPC:s in town, the game very frequently gets these freezes. The screen freezes after clicking on an NPC and after the ''loading'' time is over, the dialogue pops up. This happens both during dialogues that are text-only and dialogues that include audio files for NPC speech, altough the freezes may be longer for those that include audio files and often happen between every click on the continue button in the dialogue menu then). Sometimes, the game even freezes when walking past random NPC:s in (any) towns that say som gossip when passing by, causing text to pop up over their heads (like ''Welcome stranger to our town!'' or similar). Note that audio does not stutter after loading, it just causes the game to freeze for a few secs and then runs. Never happens with atmospheric/environment sounds, only dialogues. It has been like this all the time I have had Pillars of eternity. Strangely enough, the issue seems to be much less obvious when creating a new char and running through Act 1 a second time, as if the game now knows where some assets are located and loads them faster or something. I am running the Steam version, latest update, on an ASUS G501JW-CN030H laptop. The laptop is less than a month old. It came preinstalled with windows 8,1 and I immediately updated to Windows 10 (64 bit) after purchase. Running on Windows 10 since then. Drivers for graphics card, sound card and network are updated to latest versions. I am, of course, running the game with power cable plugged in (not battery mode). Other speccs include: 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, Intel Core i7-4720HQ processor. My computer has 3 different save drives. The OS and I think PoE save files are on an C drive SSD (the user windows folder is there, where the save files are), while PoE and all other Steam files are on D drive HDD. I do not have and never had Hamachi installed. Here are some fixes I have tried already after googling on the issue, without success: Updating all relevant computer drivers Reinstalling the game, several times (always to D drive HDD) Running PoE in administrator mode Disabling anti-aliasing, both through the slider option all the way to the left and through NVIDIA control panel Lowering resolution significantly Deleting the player portrait folder (seemed to work for some people who have had similar issues previous game versions) Disabling all network devices through control panel and running Steam in offline mode All the above at the same time Attaching some files, as to the ''How to report an issue'' topic. Save files are too large to attach even after zipping, sadly, but it is the same everywhere in the game. Thankful for any help you can offer. Troubleshoot.zip

I'm trying another play-through, In gilded vale right after level 3 I speak to Eder after talking to the dead dwarf woman. His voice is gone in the middle of the conversation and doesn't come back. I have no expansion, playing on the newest patch 2.1

I can't find this issue on the forums - probably because I am not searching for the right tags. Anyway, I am playing a Priest, and I never knew there was audio for spells casting until hours into the game when I heard it for the first time, although it is quickly cut short. I've never heard it again. It's always cut off by something else or not even started again. The wizard in my party also makes no audio sound when casting. Has anyone else experienced this issue? Any workarounds? Thanks!

Description: The female player character voices have sibilance issues, meaning that all the S:s are clearly hissing. It is very frustrating and had me chose a voiceless player. Steps to Reproduce the Issue: - Start a new game. - During the character creation, go to the voice selection screen. - Listen to the female voices by repeatedly clicking them to hear different samples. The issue is most audible for the "Female - Feisty" voice. For example the "I've got this." line sounds like this: "I've got thisSSS.". It is also very audible for the Mystic voice.

Public Service Announcement by Darren Monahan, web guy Before we get started on this week’s update, we wanted to make all of you aware of a very serious website vulnerability called “Heartbleed” that was discovered since our last update. This bug affected a huge number of sites and services across the internet, potentially exposing passwords and other sensitive information to hackers that understood how to exploit it. Unfortunately, the Eternity website was running an affected version of this software, and as soon as we became aware of it, we took the appropriate steps to close the vulnerability. While we have no evidence or other reasons to believe any passwords or personal information was stolen, we do recommend you change your password if you have an account, especially if you reuse this same password on other sites. To change your password, visit your Account Profile, click on the E-mail & Password tab, enter your current password, and your new password twice and click Save Changes. Please leave the e-mail address boxes empty. Learn more about Heartbleed. xkcd comic: How the Heartbleed bug works. Update by Justin Bell, Audio Director Hello awesome backers. My name is Justin Bell and I’m the Audio Director at Obsidian, and the Audio Lead/Composer for Pillars of Eternity. I know a lot of you have been waiting patiently to hear some news about the game’s music. Thanks for waiting, I’m happy to say this update will focus entirely on music! In it we’ll cover the high level creative guidelines we’re using to write the score. I’ll also provide you with an in depth look into my music writing process. For those of you who are chomping at the bit for more info about the sound design for PoE, don’t worry... We’re going to do another update in the future that focuses on that as well. But for now, let’s talk about music! Our next update will be a look at the most recent art our talented team has put together for the game. Justin's every day workspace. Style Making Pillars of Eternity feel like a modern day Infinity Engine game is important to us, and music plays a big role in achieving that goal. But what does that actually mean in practice? Well if you were to loosely analyze the music from Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 for example, you would find a number of stylistic similarities between them. Without getting too technical, their music combines tropes found in European folk and pre-Renaissance modal music, and mashes that together with modern day orchestration techniques and film music aesthetics. You’re probably thinking... “Where’s the human side of all this? Where’s the emotion? The music for the IE games is so much more than simply a mash-up of musical elements!” Putting it in such cold and analytical terms doesn’t really give those soundtracks the justice they deserve, does it? Still it’s important for me as the composer to understand things in that way, and here’s why. An incredible teacher of mine used to say, “When in doubt, use a model”. Another incredible teacher would likewise say, “Never proceed without a plan”. What they were both saying is that if you’re going to take a journey, you need to understand the path and know your destination to the best of your ability. Even if the plan needs to change at some point down the path, always think it through first. Luckily for me both are pretty clear. In that sense the soundtracks for the IE games are both my model and my plan, at least to a point. I’ve made a couple minor structural modifications to the formula, which I’ll describe in greater depth further on. But first I’d like to give you an inside peek into the creative process I use to write music. The Commute Here’s some news that’ll undoubtedly shock each and every one of you... I commute to work. Every. Day. Exciting right?! Right... Don’t let the mundaneness of that description fool you, as this is actually one of the most important parts of my day. It’s one of the few times that I get to listen to music without interruption, and I use this time to get inspired to write. Things I’ve been putting on lately are the soundtracks for The Elder Scrolls (III, IV, and V), The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, anything by Basil Poledouris, and of course the IE soundtracks, just to name a few. As I’m driving and listening I stay on the lookout for small moments that inspire me in some way. When I come across something that attracts my attention, like an interesting harmony or nice orchestral combination, I document the track number, time range, and any observations I have using a little handheld recorder. By the time I get to work I usually have roughly 10 small voice memos recorded for myself. When I get in front of my computer at work I pull the tracks I noticed into my audio program, edit out the sections in question, and categorize them with my notes for future use. It’s a way of systematizing inspiration, which I’ll admit may sound counter intuitive to some. When working on a project with deadlines while simultaneously trying to keep things the creative juices flowing, being organized is critical to successfully balancing those two often competing requirements. The audio booth with noise making props. Daily Bach After I’m through categorizing the nuggets of inspiration, I sit in front of my keyboard and sight read a single chorale from J.S. Bach’s beautiful collection of 371 four part chorales. Each day I read a new one in sequence, and I do this for a couple reasons. I’m a musician, sight reading is fun, and this is an excuse to keep my chops up. But more importantly, I do it to get motivated by the master of modern tonal harmony himself. When I’m actually writing music and get stuck at a tricky voice leading spot, the fact that I have Bach in my ear and at my fingertips is often a lifesaver. Sketches I like to keep the actual writing process as simple as possible. To do that, I open up my writing program (Nuendo 6 + NEK for those who are interested) and compose with one piano patch and one full string patch only. This is pretty standard practice for some, and I do it too. It allows me to focus on just the melody, rhythm, and harmony alone (i.e. the Music, with a capital “M”) without concerning myself too much with instrumentation or the mix. Both of those things aren’t important now and I know I’ll get to them later. For now it’s all about the music. By keeping the writing process simple, I free up my ability to stay creative. Here I’ll write whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it’s entire pieces of music, other times it’s a small fragment. I don’t really try to do anything specific or limit myself in any way; I just let the ideas flow as freely as possible. The idea here is to write as much music as possible without concern for the end result. Again, it’s important to keep things loose. At the end of each day I may write up to an hour of sketches, about 90% of which will never see the light of day. It’s the remaining 10% that I’m really after. I liken this process to panning for gold. The way I look at it is that in order to succeed, you need to know how to fail. It doesn’t matter to me if I’ve deliberately crafted a piece of music through the sheer force of my will and divine creativity or whatever. Happy accidents can and do often yield the best creative results, and allowing them to happen is essential to remaining creative while working under tight deadlines. Now you may be wondering, “Where’s the artistry in that?!? Anyone can do that!” The artistry lies in the ability to recognize a great idea when it comes to you, regardless of where it comes from or how deliberate the process to create it was. Simple as that! Process of Elimination and Categorization Once I’ve run out of time sketching things out, it’s time to start identifying the material that actually has potential to be made into a larger piece of music. I do this by color coding each region (i.e. sketch) based on how good I think it is. By default all of my regions are blue because it’s soothing for me to look at. All segments that are halfway decent get turned purple, which means I may or may not have a use for it. Everything that sounds amazing and I’m confident in gets coded red. Once that’s done, I version off my session and delete all the remaining blue regions for them to go to unwanted sketch heaven. In Eternity we break music into four basic “types”: town, dungeon, wilderness, and combat. Each major area of the game will have its own unique set of these. The next step for me is to assign each sketch to one of those categories. A sketch in progress. Musical Quilt So I have all these little segments of music and cool little snippets, but I don’t exactly have what you’d consider to be a piece of music. Time to change that! The next step involves stitching all of those little fragments, expanding them where necessary, into a full-fledged piece of music. A lot of mixing and matching goes into this and the process takes me about a half day per 3-5 minute piece of music. I focus a lot on form, pacing, and musical trajectory. Once the form has taken a shape I’m happy with, I separate each voice out into individual track lanes so I can begin the process of digital orchestration. A Word About Templates Prior to working on Eternity I spent a couple of weeks creating what’s known in the digital composing world as template. A template is essentially a collection of sample based instruments that are preloaded into a massive audio project. In my template I have all of the most common instruments found in the orchestra (i.e. winds, brass, percussion, and strings), as well as some less common ones, all set up and mixed in advance. This is done to help minimize the steps I have to take between the spark of inspiration and manifesting that inspiration into music. All in all I have about 150 unique tracks for all the instruments and articulations that I’ll need to write the music for Eternity, though I’ll rarely use all 150 at one time. There are a couple of reasons why using a template is important and they all have to do with speed and convenience. When writing, the last thing you want is to get bogged down with technical issues. Doing so will often destroy the spark of inspiration, which can be a fickle thing. By creating a template in advance you separate the technical from the creative which allows you to focus purely on writing the music. Templates are also critical because modern day multi sample libraries eat up a lot of RAM and take a long time to load. Your average sampled instrument can require anywhere from a couple hundred to a few gigs of memory. (Fun fact: My computer at Obsidian has 32 gigs or RAM installed, and my template uses every last gig!) Needless to say, loading all those samples takes up precious time, and it’s a waste to have to do that over and over. Using all the RAM. Orchestral Colors Back to the music writing... Right now the form of the music has been fleshed out, but it’s still just using piano or string orchestra. This is where orchestration comes in. We often refer to the different ranges and combinations of instruments as having a certain “color”, which is really just a fancy way of saying sonic timbre. You can think of orchestration as being similar to taking a pencil sketch and filling it in with color. The way I like describe this stage of the writing process is that here I have the “bones” of the music all assembled like an archeologist assembles dinosaur bones; it just needs to be “skinned”. At this point I already have a good idea for what the general moment to moment feeling of the music will be, and ideas for orchestration are already beginning to take shape. This is where those references I mentioned earlier on come in handy. What I do is comb through my reference library looking for snippets that will inspire and inform me on how to approach the instrumentation. When I find something suitable I line appropriate reference(s) up against the sketch. A piece in the middle of development. Even though the actual harmonic and rhythmic content of music that I’ve written is quite different than the references I have, I can still use them to extract the orchestral colors the original composer used and apply them to what I’m doing. This helps me to produce the most realistic result possible (remember I’m using samples most of the time) and allows me to get through the orchestration process in the fastest way without spending too much time on R&D. At this stage in the project it’s less important for me to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with the most unique orchestration known to man, than it is for me to get 70% of the way there using a combination that I know will work. I don’t always need to do this for each musical phrase, but it sure comes in handy when I’m stuck. Once the references are all lined up, I start assigning the different layers of music to the instruments that are loaded in my template. Polish In its current state, the music sounds really static and pretty bad. Not ready for prime time. Even though I just assigned the music to different instruments, it’s not quite done yet. For example, phrases lack shape, the mix between instruments is unbalanced, and articulations are all wrong. To fix that, I hand sculpt each individual note and phrase to make it sound more convincing, trying my best to make it sound as if a real live musician were performing the piece (which is actually impossible to do, but that’s the subject for another conversation). This, my friends, is where the music really comes to life. It’s a painstakingly slow and highly detailed process but by the end of it, we’re left with something that actually sounds pretty good! Now I bet you’re wondering how that sounds? Well wonder no more because I’m about to show you! Drum Roll Please... The first region I focused on was Dyrford, and I’d like to share the music that I wrote for the town of Dyrford with you. I hope you enjoy it! Dyrford Village ambient music. Modifications to the Formula While we are following in the footsteps of the Infinity Engine soundtracks in terms of style and implementation, we have decided to tweak that formula a bit. Most of the in-game tracks for the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games are between 1-2 minutes in length, and in some cases those tracks loop immediately. There are some inherent risks and benefits to looping a short piece of music immediately. One of the risks is that the music could eventually become annoying to the player if heard too many times in a row. We call this “listener fatigue”, and from a usability perspective, it can negatively affect the way a gamer will feel about a game. It’s a psychological effect; the fact that the music is short and repetitious can make long playthroughs tedious. On the flip side, a benefit to having short loops is that we can write more unique pieces of music, which will by nature increase variety throughout the game. Approaching it this way would allow us to make specific areas feel “special” because they will have unique music. We’re going to balance those two considerations for Pillars of Eternity. Music will always loop, but it will be longer in areas where the player spends a lot of time (like quest hubs) and shorter in areas where the player doesn’t (like some dungeons).