DevDiary 10 - Music and Audio of Rome
Hey Guys! Thomas here, the composer for Expeditions: Rome - I wanted to talk a little about the scoring of Rome, the process, the recording, and some cool and unique things we got to do with this score.
We recently recorded the entire score, around 75 minutes so we're all done, and I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you guys - I started writing the score in March 2020. It was clear from early conversations with Brad, Jonas and Justin that it's a hugely complex and challenging game. The initial conversations to do with score were centred around finding the tone for the four distinct regions and also the importance of finding our music for each of the characters we go on the journey with - having spent the last few years writing mostly for film it was pretty interesting transferring that that across to the gaming world. Aside from technicalities (not altering the BPM's of tracks, and the need for tracks that evolve and don't get repetitive when playing for hours) I treated it exactly the same as I would any film - I wanted to get under the skin of the characters, learning there life stories, work out why there where they were, and what makes them tick.
We decided early on that the player would have their own theme to take them on the journey: something we could morph and twist to fit their journey and that acted as a reference point for the player and evolved with them. I looked at the vivid colours of the game and had a lot of conversations with Jonas about the feel and tone we were going for, and essentially treated it as a film but one with thousands of possible journeys and endings. Our "Player's Theme" was the starting point for this: it was essentially a suite that I wrote at the beginning containing the player's theme, and two other themes relating to two other key characters.
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We hope you've enjoyed this deep dive into the music and audio of Expeditions: Rome: We have an exciting,
special stream this week where Senior Producer Brad Logston will be
in the London Studio with Composer Thomas Farnon. We'll be doing a longer stream where we release a new teaser trailer about the music, listen to various tracks on stream, and announce a unique special event that will be super exciting! We hope you join us on
Wednesday, November 17th at 1:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM GMT on the THQ Nordic Twitch Channel:
http://twitch.tv/thqnordic.
Share the word with all your music friends too; this is a unique treat and we hope you tune in for a fun, exciting stream. See you then, Valete!
