Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General A music review meeting with Kirill

We had a meeting last Friday with our music composer Kirill Pokrovsky, reviewing his "sketches" (unfinished music, ideas). Here's four minutes of a five hour meeting ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gikmmFCPG2k

Sounds good !

Next time say to Kirill he really must compose such a great song as we can hear walking in the Wastelands ! Love that melody & rhythm !
I can listen to that song a whole day long without thinking:
"Now it's enough!"

O, and I'm 100% sure it's ALSO thanks to Kirills music I can't stop playing the Divnity games !

Thanks for sharing this video with us

I remember a lot of the music from the Divinity games. Music really is an amazing tool to set the mood of a scene or setpiece. Take for example "Festival of Immortals" when you're scaling the grand, epic Lovis Tower, or "War and Piece" when you're strolling the streets of Verdistis.

The big heavy action music may not be so good for when you have to give commands, but it would work well in an action-heavy cutscene - if not in this game, than in Original Sin.

Music is one of the more important things in games. Divine Divinity was so magicaly immersive because of the music...Ah, nostalgia

MGS games have fucking awesome music too, throwing that out here.

True. So why don't the tracks on DD at GOG have any track titles? They've just been given a number. It's a shame.

Personally, I don't need to hear 'yes sir' / 'no sir' / 'going for it sir' every time I select or give orders to troops. That kind of confirmation can easily be done with a visual status indicator (map flag, highlight colour, etc), or something. Save verbal cues for when troops are in trouble and need help, or are finished a task and can be given new orders (though based on relative strength, troops could default to either attacking the next nearest opponents or joining up with the nearest allies).

It sounded like you were disagreeing with that dude a lot.

Too bad we didn't get to hear much about the Raven's music (except maybe for that one track).

Also interesting you would mention Red Alert, the game that gave us the beloved Hell March - which is exactly the kind of song that would drown out your soldier's voice clips.
Although personally I liked Tiberian Sun's gloomy, relatively low-key music better. Then again, I'm assuming Dragon Commander won't be about the last remnants of civilization fighting a desperate war on a dying planet.

EDIT: No, seriously, upon thinking some more about it, you largely sounded like you were just arguing with that eccentric composer guy. It seemed you were only shooting down his ideas and nothing else. This kinda made you look like jerks. Surely there were some positive moments in those five hours you could have used?

Hm. If that is the case, we may have painted the wrong picture.

Our camera was also only on for like half an hour. I'm not kidding: this meeting took 5 hours. So this really is a very short representation of something that was way longer.

We listened to 100+ "sketches" and sometimes it only took 30 seconds to be able to say "yep, this is great". Other times, it took us two full listen-throughs to be able to say what was wrong with it or to think of a spot in one of the games where this would work.

I don't think there were lots of songs that we didn't choose. And knowing Kirill, he will keep the melodies or themes of those songs, re-use them and come up with a better composition that will work in a game.

So at the start of the meeting, which I think when this was filmed, we noticed one recurring theme: a lot of songs were actually SONGS. What I mean is: they would be on the forefront of the audio spectrum. Game music (apart from cutscene music) should be supportive, not demanding your attention. You are playing a game, so the music needs to allow the player to pay attention to what is happening on screen, and needs to allow sounds effects, voice, and ambient sound effects. That is for instance why Swen was saying the "yes sir no sir" things.

After we got that off our chest, we had a pretty normal meeting

So yeah, there were A LOT of songs that were f'ing great of course.

That's good to hear (and not that surprising - you wouldn't keep working with the guy if he didn't have good ideas).

Still, from a PR perspective I don't think it was the greatest video ever made. It could've used some more "oh yeah, this is awesome/has great potential" and a little less "I hate this kind of music" (in relative isolation that comment isn't so bad, but at the tail end of a video largely about how the music guy kept presenting the wrong kind of music for the game it came across as pretty bad).

Noted. Thanks

You could rather point out/stress that this is a) just a snippet of a much longer meeting, nd b) some sort of "personal insight into Larian". That brings imho the whole thing to a personal level.

It seems we will have mythic musics in both DC and D:OS !! I like the "jungle music" it could be fun (may be not for introducing the princess in DC, I was thinking more about fighting kind of locals, or forgot people coming from far away from Rivellon...)