The
great interview up today on 'Zam with our audio lead Cat Neri reminds me of a conversation I had with her last month.
One of my very favorite features of RoK is the new adaptive combat music. For those of you who don't adventure at all, it's worth going out there and killing a grass snake or something just to hear. It's mentioned a bit in that interview link above. Basically, the music looks at your level compared to the enemy, at the difficulty (solo, heroic, epic, etc) and your relative life compared to his, and changes the music second-by-second accordingly. It makes each fight sound slightly different, and in those really close fights the exciting music has often had be on the edge of my seat! In fact, a couple times I've intentionally taken a lot more damage than I needed just to enjoy the music picking up, heh.
So anyway ... this led to a discussion of whether we could revamp the crafting music accordingly. I've spent so long in tradeskill instances that I just turn my sound off entirely or I'd go bananas from the music in there, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. What I'd like to see is for the instances to have no background music of their own, but for the crafting process itself to get adaptive music similar to the combat music. Each class also has sound effects for the buffs, which could either be removed or could be adapted to blend in better (some of the scholar ones are a bit abrasive at the moment - but perhaps they could be changed to chimes, or something percussion-y for example).
Now, I can't promise this will happen, because Cat's a very busy lady and works on more games than just EQ2. And if it does happen, I can't promise a timeline either - with other game releases coming up and our own next expansion to look forward to also, there will be a lot of other stuff on her plate.
However, here's an open question for discussion. What kind of music would you like an adaptive crafting-based music to be based on?
From my discussions with Cat I know the following:
- Very beat-based music that can change quickly is much easier (like the combat music) because it has to adapt on short notice. Something like Enya with long, drawn-out melodies just wouldn't work well because it couldn't change smoothly and fast.
- Something fairly unobtrusive and subtle is probably good - probably not so exciting and climactic as the combat music, since we spend hours crafting, while combat is much more isolated fights with pauses in between. It would have to be something that wouldn't drive us crazy listening to for hours.
- It can adapt based on key triggers, but what exactly those are is open to discussion. Examples of things that can affect the intensity and transitions in the music might be: your level relative to the recipe's (e.g. much quieter music if you're making greys; something more epic-sounding if you're attempting a recipe higher than your level); change of tempo or intensity if you lose pristine, or whenever you gain a new bar of progress, or when you successfully counter an event (or not); your power level; your health level. Stuff that can be actually numerically measured in the game, in other words, which code can then make the music react to.
Links to samples of sounds or names/artists of specific pieces would probably be the best way to let folks know what you're thinking. Just a random question which you can ignore if you like, but if you're interested, please feel free to comment!
LINK
(DominoDev) The sound of crafting!
