I’m playing Burnout Paradise. It’s an open world where you just drive and race. You can’t have a custom soundtrack. You have to navigate terrible menus to turn the music off and let your music player play in the background if you want your own music. You can’t escape the intro with Guns & Roses’ Paradise City playing loud. Ugh.
In game, when you go fast and jump with your car, the music is filtered like house music dynamically to the length of the jump. Neat. but of course and sadly, it doesn’t work with your music. It’s technically easy to do.
Open world games, especially the ones including using different types of machines to go around, should allow custom music. It is so satisfying to roam inside a world to your favorite beat or anthem. It’s personal, the game magically becomes a little more yours.
It looks like GTA V, is not going to allow custom playlists. As it was possible on previous hardware for the past ten years so, I wonder if it’s a business issue: labels make a deal with Rockstar and in return they have to cut any music competition out from the world of GTA. For music labels, GTA is a way to promote and sell albums so custom playlists are a threat.
In any case, it’s annoying but thanks to the PC, I can still manage to drive down a Burnout Paradise hill with this in my ears:
It changes everything.