Chrisling said:
I almost always turn music off in RPG game mainly because I don't like the way music always changes so abruptly in response to events like combat or area change - I just always find it more irritating than atmospheric. My enjoyment is typically greater without music. Now - ambient sound is a different thing altogether - that always enhances if done well.
That saying a good theme such as the one illustrated here does help atmosphere but I wonder if it would be possible to have a setting that turns off looping so a player can hear such tunes upon entry to an area to create the mood but then have them fade out after a single play and rely on ambient noises to maintain that mood?
First, thanks everyone for contributing to this discussion! Its
great to hear your feedback.
Regarding loops, as Zeckul rightly pointed out, the IE games had silence in between loops. I could have phrased what I said in the update better. To clarify, we will implement the music in a similar way as the IE games so that the loops don't happen in rapid succession. So I suppose the answer to your question is both yes and no. Yes there will be some areas where you'll hear only ambient sounds (like birds) for a span of time, followed by ambient sounds and music etc. And there will also be places where there will be wall to wall music.
In most cases it will boil down to how much time the player spends in a given area. In areas like quest hubs, where you may spend a lot of time talking to quest givers, the music will have space in between each loop to de-emphasize any kind of temporal awareness imparted by looping music. For smaller areas that don't take a lot of time to clear, such as a small dungeon, looping is more of a viable option.
But ultimately it come downs to feel. If the music starts to feel overpowering and too repetitious in one area, we'll either modify the music if there's time to do so, or we'll tune the looping pattern to address the issue somehow. Nothing is worse (to me at least) than overpowering game music that saturates the senses. Of course there's always a time an place for that, but in a game like this, it would be a deliberate choice rather than the default position if that makes any sense.
