Ok, guess i’m gonna have to be the unpopular one here, but hopefully by offering a little critique it will help what is a decent piece get better. It certainly is a great sounding track, sound wise and instrumentation wise, but it really doesn’t have anything really ‘memorable’ about it. It was really ‘meh’. It’s missing something. It’s great, atmospheric-wise, and that may have been what the composer was going for, but the title itself-‘They come’-sort of implies that it was meant to be a little more ominous sounding than it really is…something less “wandering around a creepy area while going from one town to the next” and more a “drums, drums…drums in the deep!” kind of sound would be more befitting a track with this sort of name.
Sorry if folks disagree, and maybe once i’ve heard more tracks and heard more of the soundtrack as a whole i’ll start to get into it more. That’s one of the bad things about getting game soundtracks in pieces, a lot of times they work best as a whole.
Well, in all fairness, this IS atmospheric music that is intended to just randomly play in the background while you “wander around a creepy area” and kill stuff. We don’t intend to have specific tracks coordinated to the events in scripted scenes as you would have in a movie, so a drums in the deep track wouldn’t necessarily suit our purposes.
The title “They Come” is just something I made up after listening to the track and trying to come up with a name that seemed a little more evocative than “GD Track002”. So, I wouldn’t think too much about whether the music perfectly fits the title since the title has no relation to any specific moment in the game.
One of our big goals with GD is to create a more atmospheric world and give combat a greater feeling of intensity. We think music is a really important part of creating atmosphere, pumping the player up, and driving the pace of gameplay. Much of the team at Iron Lore felt like the TQ ambient music system, which only played intermittently, really fell flat in accomplishing this. So, we have redesigned the music system so that it can stream continuous music during combat and change track lists between areas. So these tracks are not just set pieces that play at specific moments as you’re entering a village or what not, as they did in TQ, they’re intended to be continuous atmospheric music for an environment that plays in the background as you fight and explore to help create more atmosphere and intensity.
I think the new music works well in that capacity and, I personally really enjoy listening to the new tracks on repeat as I work. Some of the other tracks we will release soon may have more of a distinctive melody that I think you’re wanting. They are gameplay music though, so they’re not really intended to be as distinctive as say, the TQ main theme.
lol? were the people at iron lore on drugs?! i loved that titan quest music it was great there was nothing wrong with it! i even remember some of it! dooooooo noooo noooo nooodoooonoooonoooo
Not saying people didn’t like the music, just saying there wasn’t enough of it. You only got short themes triggered as you entered certain areas or encountered bosses and randomly generated ambient music that only kicked in once in a while. Many people wished that there was always some sort of music playing.
Like me … in TQ you can set how frequent background music is played in the options: less, standard or more frequent. But I want to hear it all the times. Another plus of GD.
@Zidders: I can´t agree with you.
Wanted to reply to this a few days ago, now Medierra has basically said what I would have.
Thing is - being critical is a good thing. It doesn´t do any of us any good if we “cushion” the developers comfortably when in reality the situation is grim.
But this doesn´t seem to be the case here.
For me ingame music should attract my attention only occasionally and a more memorable or distinctive soundtrack would probably mean more distraction for me.
If I can say anything negative about this track, it´s that it probably has too many drums in it. But then again I suppose that it will be used for fights or when enemies are near (I don´t know many distinguishing categories there are), and there most probably will be more than enough more quiet tracks.
Did some messing around with the tracks, trying them out while playing Fallout 3, and it works a lot better when listened to in game than by itself. Now that i’ve had a chance to really sit back and let it play in the right kind of setting, I think they’re fine as background music. I still would like to see wether or not you folks have anything planned as far as a main or signature theme, tho. I’m a huge fan of game soundtracks, and while I realize not every game is going to have a soundtrack that plays like a film score, or something like that, it’s nice to get one or two main themes from a game.
The first Diablo was pretty much along the lines of what i’m thinking. It had one signature track, Tristrams theme, and the rest of the soundtrack was all atmosphere.
EDIT:You were absolutely right to disagree, Space. I wasn’t listening to them with the right frame of mind. Same teensy gripe here tho, a bit heavy on the drums, but it’s a minor, teensy gripe.
