The New World team is, once again, discussing their methods of storytelling, with a highlight on music and sounds. In prior videos, they’ve touched on the subject, particularly with Brimstone Sands, but now, after four seasonal releases and the first expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, there’s a lot more to talk about.
The latest Forged in Aeternum video covers a few different highlights. Featured team members in this discussion are audio lead Austin DeVries and soundtrack composer Edouard Brenneisen. Ed introduces himself and talks about how he was once a guitarist back in France, playing rock, jazz, and improvised music and is now working as a composer on media like the New World score.
When it comes to New World, the music of the Elysian Wilds is a jumping off point. The process of creating the music here, with the new setting, the mycelium, all the dryads, and the story arc that involves Artemis and the Beast Lords, was a challenge of how to take these ideas and all the new visual elements into music. In essence, to “give that all a shape, music supporting the narrative and also having it work with the other requirements of our gameplay systems”. The teams were working on different elements like narrative and 3D cinematics and they were trying to pinpoint the sounds of the expansion and what they should be.
The cinematic was key to them developing a theme for Elysian Wilds and the emotional trajectory of the expansion as a whole. With the music, they wanted to highlight that a character like Artemis might do bad things, but in their minds, and their motivations are not necessarily poorly intended.
“It's about safeguarding her view of the natural world. The Artemis theme, I think, is interesting. It's it's got a very simple melodic motif in there that is inverted and played with across the 3D cinematic, the 2.5 D cinematics and then again in the boss fight” culminating and using a sort of light via the instrumentation. They also discuss the track Rage of the Mammoth and their “feminine approach to sound” for the massive beast.
There's a whole lot more insight about the soundtrack (for which Ed won a Hollywood Music and Media Award) and how it is both inspired by the narrative storytelling elements and how it makes those elements richer and enhances the full multimedia experience that a game is.
