If you think New World's soundtrack has some familiarity to it, you're not alone. In fact, the inspiration for New World's soundtrack comes from one of the most popular fantasy franchises in TV history: Game of Thrones. So much so that the composer on the HBO epic helped create the sound of Amazon's Aeternum, collaborating with Brandon Campbell on the game's soundtrack.
The scoring process is documented in a nearly-seventeen minute long video where New World's audio director Jean-Edouard Miclot, as well as composers Ramin Djawadi and Brandon Campbell talk about how they came to score New World. Talking about approaches and inspirations, the collaborative audio team worked to make sure that the soundscapes of New World portray a "believeable world that you can lose yourself in."
According to Miclot, the conversations started long before there was even a game.
"So we started the conversation with them long before we had a game. Everything changed when Ramin and Brandon joined the team," Miclot states in the video. He goes on to talk about how the sound team was excited to work on New World because it was a "blank slate."
Ramin addresses this too, as the music team was tasked with creating the soundtrack for a game that reallly hadn't taken fruition just yet.
"The beginning is definitely the slowest part, right? You start from scratch, you try to figure out your tone, your instruments, your melodies," Ramin says.
Brandon, who has worked with Ramin on Game of Thrones, Westworld and more, also talked about starting out with the soundtrack:
"The first step is writing themes, and figuring out instrumentation and everything, in terms of process. And then we experiment more, maybe we record some solo instruments on our own in here, or maybe we'd bring in some soloists to really kind of figure out what the sound of the game is."
The video detailing the scoring process is one of the longer dev diaries by the Amazon team as they hurtle towards launch next week. It's definitely interesting and worth checking out in the embed above. If you want to listen to the soundtrack yourself as well to get ready for Aeternum, you can do so on Amazon Music, as well as via a YouTube playlist by New World, which we've embedded below.
