Notice that the instrumentation takes up the entire spectrum of sound at the beginning, but then right as the vocals enter at 18 seconds in, they part. The strings become higher, the bass gets a bit lower, and everything that was in between the two drops out. It’s a virtual parting of the waters to make room for the voices in their proper register. Just to show it’s not a fluke, it does the same thing at 0:43.
I can’t think of a single game that really nails this concept, which surprises me.
There. It’s not surprising if you understand how game audio works and worked on different platforms. To do what the author wants in a game means having individual control of each instrument in the music.
Technically, no problem. In a game though with constraints of I/O, RAM and CPU usage and things more important than music, it’s impossible to dynamically mix individual streams of audio. We’re talking about let’s say 8/16 minimum individual streams fading in/out, just for one track. It’s overkill. Sound is already taking so much space on install.
That’s why to introduce this much beloved dynamic in a technically much lighter way, we need MIDI. Like it or not, it solves all the issues at once if you’re willing to sacrifice some sound quality. The created dynamic is worth it.
We don’t solve that through discussions between composers and designers about emotional goals in a game and its music, we solve that early on by trying, iterating music over a custom audio system allowing the depth wanted while staying in line with the rest of the game development. It’s a fucking huge task that’s been solved in the past here and there but never spread. 3D graphics took the priority.
Looking forward to another article wondering why we don’t do game audio like we do audio for films on a website for professional game developers that I’ve been reading for ten years.