The Music in Witcher

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Yes, Believe.ogg is my favorite part of the soundtrack. The amb_sw_karczma_1.ogg is catchy too (that upbeat Irish music for the tavern in act IV)
 
I like the music of "The Witcher" very much. For me it's amazing. My favourites are:1. Amb.outdoor.dng2 (Only as ingame ogg, played often in Act IV)2. The Dike (= ingame ogg "amb dam 03", played at day in Act I)3. Believe (The Ending/Credit-Song) and last but not least4. Peaceful Moments (Played at day in Trade Quarter of Vizima, Act III)
 
I know we have talked about Adam in the past and his music, but I have to tell Adam if he still reads the boards, to this day even after the release of witcher so many months ago, on my I-tunes your music is right there with my daily listening. I have a replayed your music from the witcher at count of 82, I guess that makes me a fan lol. In this I really do hope when and if witcher 2 is made or any version there of, that you will be part of the wonderful experience!A definite huge fan of the game still and Adam's music!XnodePS> the expansion devs was great! Thank you for showing your praise to your fan base! It really takes you and us the fans to make a game successful and I am happy to see your success at Projekt Red Studios flourish from the release of such a well thought out and developed title such as the Witcher, thanks again! Can’t wait for your next installment :)Salu!
 
xnode said:
I know we have talked about Adam in the past and his music, but I have to tell Adam if he still reads the boards, to this day even after the release of witcher so many months ago, on my I-tunes your music is right there with my daily listening. I have a replayed your music from the witcher at count of 82, I guess that makes me a fan lol. In this I really do hope when and if witcher 2 is made or any version there of, that you will be part of the wonderful experience!A definite huge fan of the game still and Adam's music!
Hey hey! I'm so really happy after reading your honest opinion about my music! What can I say... opionion like yours really motivates me to compose more and more music...and ofcourse I wish (cos I feel SO obligated) to make it BETTER and BETTER! Hope that you will be satisifed of the results.. you will have chance to listen some more music soon!cheers,Adam
 
Scorpik said:
Hey hey! I'm so really happy after reading your honest opinion about my music! What can I say... opionion like yours really motivates me to compose more and more music...and ofcourse I wish (cos I feel SO obligated) to make it BETTER and BETTER! Hope that you will be satisifed of the results.. you will have chance to listen some more music soon!
Now that is something to look forward to :) That soundtrack is simply awesome, you captured the mood of the scenes perfectly. My favourite (besides the track that comes with the main menu) is the one you get at the lakeside during daytime. The scenery, the music - it's just so beautiful. Sad, too, but that's part of the beauty... And yes, the soundtrack lives on my portable player as well :) Many thanks for making it accessible!
 
Oh, yes, the music is a great complement to the game -- it wouldn't be the same experience without it. I love how the music for the load screens captures the mood of the area, getting the player in the right mood even while the game is loading.And I agree with Nimue about the Lakeside music -- that sweet but sad music is so atmospheric!
 
Scorpik said:
Scorpik said:
I know we have talked about Adam in the past and his music, but I have to tell Adam if he still reads the boards, to this day even after the release of witcher so many months ago, on my I-tunes your music is right there with my daily listening. I have a replayed your music from the witcher at count of 82, I guess that makes me a fan lol. In this I really do hope when and if witcher 2 is made or any version there of, that you will be part of the wonderful experience!A definite huge fan of the game still and Adam's music!
Hey hey! I'm so really happy after reading your honest opinion about my music! What can I say... opionion like yours really motivates me to compose more and more music...and ofcourse I wish (cos I feel SO obligated) to make it BETTER and BETTER! Hope that you will be satisifed of the results.. you will have chance to listen some more music soon!cheers,Adam
Yeah!!! I finally found a respectable DJ who's work is worth listening to. Keep going!!! :beer:
 
It seems nowadays it's a hard job to compose a theme for a game according to this dev blog. The Witcher's theme doesn't meet this fate. I love a game's theme when I can feel it. I get that many times in Witcher, in particular in Act IV and Act V... something like butterflies in my tummy (if this expression exists in English ;D ) ... or a swingy mood when Geralt enters a tavern.
 
PetraSilie said:
I love a game's theme when I can feel it. I get that many times in Witcher, in particular in Act IV and Act V... something like butterflies in my tummy (if this expression exists in English ;D ) ... or a swingy mood when Geralt enters a tavern.
That's exactly what I meant. The music is part of the setting, the game just wouldn't be the same without it.
 
I love the music very much, too, but I thought Adam Skorupa has composed with Pawel Blaszczak. Shoudn't we mention this person, too? In my eyes, it would be unfair if only Skorupa gets the commendation.
 
BarryTheChopper said:
I love the music very much, too, but I thought Adam Skorupa has composed with Pawel Blaszczak. Shoudn't we mention this person, too? In my eyes, it would be unfair if only Skorupa gets the commendation.
100% agreed!
 
Scorpik said:
Scorpik said:
I love the music very much, too, but I thought Adam Skorupa has composed with Pawel Blaszczak. Shoudn't we mention this person, too? In my eyes, it would be unfair if only Skorupa gets the commendation.
100% agreed!
Well, in that case I'll gladly give credit where credit is due ;) There's enough praise to go around. And after reading the article to which Petra Silie posted the link, I'm doubly glad that you guys were idealistic enough to give your best and create such a masterpiece.
 
Your music is stunningly gorgeous, Adam. Please, please, please continue to make more. Your tracks from The Witcher are present in many of my playlists. :)
 
Generally I neglect commenting on in-game soundtracks because, I suppose, most of them are adequate but few of them do real service to the mood and the general atmosphere of the game, imo. This is not to say that there aren't a lot of good game soundtracks created because there are. But The Witcher stands out for me, and the overall mood of the game entices me back again and again, and on reflection I have to say that's because the music in this game seems almost organically grown around the story and the characters--it's haunting but never too melodramatic; it's dark but never bleak and hopeless; it's frivolous but never whimsical; and it's powerful but never overbearing. In a word, it meshes so well with the movement of the game and the experiences of the characters that it carries my emotions along from chapter to chapter and event to event without distracting me from complete immersion inside Geralt's world. The music in this game is so good that it enhances my involvement in the game and *never* distracts me from the plot and the story lines I am pursuing.I mean, that's rare in a game! In many games what happens is that the music often distracts the player's attention away from character interaction and development of the story by saying "I'm here! Listen to me! Doesn't this sound great?" And often such music does indeed sound great but the problem with it when it's done like that is that it actually detracts from the experience of the game and lowers one's immersion inside the story--ie, you find yourself noticing the music to the point that you forget where you are in the game. You have avoided that trap wonderfully in The Witcher. In the Witcher, music and story work as equal partners with the fabulous graphic scenes to unfold an unforgettable story. It just doesn't get any better than this.What else can I say? Thank you for a superlative job. You've done such a great job of growing the music around the story that I have to think hard about it to remember the music, because what I remember is the power and the poignancy of the story itself, of playing the game itself, and your music is the glue that binds it all together into a memorable and highly enjoyable experience that I find myself drawn to again and again. The Witcher seeks to tell a fine tale and it doesn't resort to cheap thrills and tawdry gimmicks along the way, and I can't emphasize enough how important this is for creating a masterpiece as opposed to creating something that rudely shocks the player for a few moments but then is quickly forgotten. If I had to use but a single word to describe this game it would "memorable." Among the dozens and dozens of highly forgettable games in my library, spanning decades I might add, The Witcher stands among the ones that I will remember. And play, again and again.You folks have proven what good storytelling is all about and you are a credit to the computer gaming industry. Please keep up the fantastic work you are doing and never forget where you came from and I believe you will emerge on top of the crowded heap of would-be international game developers, because that is exactly where your talent belongs.Thanks again--OK, now...enough of my shameless gushing...;)
 
I allso do music for games and movies, and I really liked the Witchers soundtrack. Very skilfully created atmospheres and nice themes. Hope the composer received a good pay for the good work he did ;)
 
I definitely agree...The Witcher's music is awesome...i love it...it's so intense...kind of the Lord of the Rings' one, but more melancholic...and of course i was glad to see that the music is in .ogg file that i can listen simply using winamp :D
 
Long, long ago i was a bit of a specialist at writing natural language parsers. OK, they depended on ELIZA-like tricks and didn't really understand natural language, but they were pretty good and most of the users could just use them without having to know the vocabulary they understood. Also, in the games I worked on with these parsers, we had a system where all the characters were non-player characters, but the user could take control of any of the characters. All the non-player characters also used the same natural language parser as the main command line, so you could do things like 'say to Corvin 'pick up that sword and come here'', and the command parser would pass 'pick up that sword and come here' to Corvin's parser. Corvin would either act on it or not depending on things like his attitude to the character you were playing as, and any other short term goals the AI agent driving his character had.I've been thinking about similar algorithms this afternoon, concerning the spread of knowledge. In Neverwinter Nights and related games, knowledge spreads instantaneously - a non-player character's attitude to you changes the instant you do something without any obvious mechanism for the character to have learned the news. This just seems wrong.I've also been thinking about how interesting it would be to be able to 'turn The Witcher around' and play the same story as Shani or Tris or Yaevin or Siegfried; I'm currently jotting notes for a game plot which can be played as either the male or the female lead.And what this all stumbles against is voice acting.One of the few things I dislike about the Witcher is that the choices of what you can say are so limited. But the choices of what non-player characters can say is limited, too; every single thing that any character says to Geralt has to be pre-recorded, so you can't just have non-player characters constructing speech acts from their internal state on the fly. I mean, obviously,you could feed 'made up on the fly' speeches through a voice synthesiser.... but I have a feeling the results would be funny in the short term and really irritating in the medium term.Voice acting is - obviously - one of the things which helps to make The Witcher so immersive and successful. But how important is it actually? Would richer choices and more intelligent, responsive non-player characters compensate for the lack of voice acting?Is there any possible 'middle way'?
 
I'm not tech savvy enough to offer any insights about a 'middle way'. However, I agree with you that some mechanism of information spreading would add realism to a game. In many games, things like the player character's alignment influence the reaction of NPCs, and I can't help but wonder - how does an average person determine another's alignment? It's not like people walk around with a sign "I'm chaotic evil!". If they're smart, evil characters will do their best to act all nice and friendly as long as that's the easiest way to get what they want. Concerning the voice acting, I'm not altogether sure whether more realistic reactions of NPCs would make up for the lack of voices. When I first started "Price of Neutrality", I was really irritated when everybody was mute. Voice acting is something I expect in a game as a matter of course, and I don't think you can get the same level of realism without it. Still, with a good story and intelligent NPCs, I'd give a game without it at least a try :)
 
I find the voice acting to be a major factor for my personal immersion into the game. Although text sub-titles work for me the FIRST time I play the game, they do not work on subsequent playthrus because - I don't read them as diligently or as slowly, and by the third or fourth playthru, I doubt I read them at all. So, I kind of depend on the voices to keep me "in character".I also agree that Voices produced by AI are synthetic and in most cases take away from the mood. However, there is technology that would take Geralt's recorded voice overs and modify those voice overs so that they would sound like a different character. For example, by manipulating the sound waves in the recordings, (say a 25% increase in pitch, a 25% decrease in volume, and 20-25% increase in pace for example) the male actor playing Geralt could be made to sound female, albeit, a Marlane Dietrich or a Tahlula Bankhead female, but still female enough to allow one actor and one recording session to effectively play as two characters of different genders. If you imagine the recorded voice overs as a continuous sine wave on Rod Serling's ocilloscope, then you can imagine how a program could change the characteristics of that digitally recorded voice just like the adustment knobs on an ocilloscope can adjust the characteristics (wave length, hieght, volume, frequency) of that analog sine wave. Personally, I think playing this game with a Siegfried character that sounds more like Alvin the Chipmunk would be a rip.As for the "instantaneous spread of knowledge", that is a LOT tougher. The mechanism used for NPC attitude adjustments in response to a given action in most games is "time". News travels quicker than you can run from point "a" to point "b" and this "instantaneous spread" you are addressing uses this phenomena to simulate NPC involvement. Everybody knows the NPC's attitude changes immediately, with no actual passage of time, but it is easy to pretend that the "grapevine" spreads gossip faster than we can actually travel. Even the most primitive cultures generally have some sort of "long distance" communications medium. Smoke signals, drums, carrier pigeons, and flag semaphore to name a few. It only "seems wrong" because most gaming companies do not display animations of the "behind-the-scenes" information systems that would make most of the "wrongness" appear at least somewhat plausible.This has the makings of an interesting thread, Simon. Thanks for posting it.
 
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