Topic: Lords of Shadow Opinions (has Spoilers)

[Valtiel]

heavenly doorway in symphony of the night has the feeling of both a dreadful atmosphere and pulsating action/exploration, and many songs follow in this vein.

The problem is having them work on a 3D game. Suspension of disbelief again is the problem. It's most a subconscious process, but the visual approach of a game can seriously alter your perception of the represented action.

When playing SotN, you're constantly aware that you're playing a game, and that what you're seeing doesn't (wouldn't?) actually look like that "for real". Your imagination transforms the world in 3D, Alucard in a flesh and blood being, the hallways in stone and mortar and so on. The audiovisuals stimulate your imagination that translates (actively or in your subconscious, or if you chose so, not at all) what you experience in something you "believe" in.

In a 3D game of this generation, with this kind of visual style, the game tasks itself of not requiring you to use your imagination. These games strive to look like the thing would look like if it existed. Don't focus on how far they get - point being, you get characters with digital stubs and wrinkles. Heck, Gabe has some chest hair popping out of his shirt. The music goes in the backseat. It doesn't "need" to describe the mood because you're expected to feel there, to see things as close as they are as possible, and to notice things on your own. It becomes texture - while in the classic 2D games, music was often in the forefront of the narrative impact.

When everything is painted in bright colours and your palette is fundamentally limited to saturated, pastel tones, how do you tell the player that hallway is ominous and scary? Sure, some visual aids help but it's the music that brings it home. You can easily notice that in the BGM audio balance and how it changed over time. In the 2D era of games, the music was the loudest part of the audio; in the 3D era, it feels disruptive if it goes over the clashing and grunting and the sound effects.

I feel that's a very important thing to be aware of: music is one of the most artistic aspects of a videogame. It doesn't scale with technology as much as everything else does - a tune is good in midi form too, if it's good. As such, its importance changed over time. On weaker hardware, music takes easily the front seat because it's the most expressive tool the game designer has.
With top end hardware that strives for photorealism, more and more you get moments of absolute silence because the game is trying to make you feel there, and you may end up wondering where that music is coming from. It's about suspension of disbelief - and before you ask, I'm not entirely sure it's a desireable evolution of the medium. I don't see a photorealistic 3D game working with an OST approach similar to that of older CV games, but I definitely do not want to think the future has no more room for more traditionally designed games.

[Joachim]

When everything is painted in bright colours and your palette is fundamentally limited to saturated, pastel tones, how do you tell the player that hallway is ominous and scary?

fundamentally limited to bright colors and saturated pastel tones? that was an artistic decision on the behalf of the pixel artists, not something that was ultimately required (exception: the NES titles). nosferatu for the snes, for example, uses a very muted and dark color scheme:

and even so, there were still quite a few grays and a wide spectrum of colors similar to this; it was more than possible to create something using dull and muted colors, even on the super nintendo.

On weaker hardware, music takes easily the front seat because it's the most expressive tool the game designer has.

that's... purely your own opinion, your own perspective; objectively speaking that isn't really substantiated. you're approaching the matter from a musical bias; you can easily approach those games from a visual standpoint and find much to delight over: you say that the weaker hardware "doesn't matter" in regards to music, but the exact same argument could be made for pixel art.

It's about suspension of disbelief - and before you ask, I'm not entirely sure it's a desireable evolution of the medium. I don't see a photorealistic 3D game working with an OST approach similar to that of older CV games, but I definitely do not want to think the future has no more room for more traditionally designed games.

it doesn't have to be similar to the "older" CV titles, or at least most of them; legacy of darkness had a much more ambient and subdued tone and yet it worked well. Similarly, there are games like Demon's Souls which use a more 'modern' approach to music (there is a lot of silence, with most of the music centering around boss themes), but unlike Lords, it works fantastically in all circumstances and the songs themselves are well-composed, fitting, expressive and memorable.

arguably, shadow of the colossus could also fit here; it has environmental themes, but they are appear rarely and more as an interesting introduction; its music is driven by context, but this has no qualitative effect on the music itself.

[Valtiel]

and even so, there were still quite a few grays and a wide spectrum of colors similar to this; it was more than possible to create something using dull and muted colors, even on the super nintendo.

I wouldn't rank the SNES as the kind of hardware I'm pointing at, tho. It was basically the pinnacle of 2D art in many ways (once put into context); most hardware past it was built with 3D in mind and wasn't tapped much into as far as 2D art goes... in CV's case.

Here I'm making an argument about 2D art AND Castlevania: if you look at games like Legend of Mana on the PS1 you'll find muted colors and incredible pixel art (and a soundtrack much closer to LoS than SCIV, incidentally). But for CV, muted tones never came to be: mostly because the golden age of the saga is set before the last days of the SNES and then moved to handhelds. Handhelds are one of the problems: the screen is tiny, and as such objects need to be bright to be identifiable and contrast is necessarily stark. There's no pixel-space to draw shades in.

As far as the screenshot you posted goes, I'll point out it's still incredibly bright by today's standards. The gremlin-creature is light blue, for god's sake. The main character sticks out like a lollipop too. On that kind of hardware, 2D pixel art just doesn't have the flexibility to deliver the kind of image I speak of.

Even taking stuff like this:




into account, you see that it's very hard to make a "dark" 2D image because being a piece of flat pixel art... it's flat. It risks ending up being just a black screen, or hard to tell apart. Keep in mind, hard doesn't mean impossible, but there's a reason if SotN (a remarkably dark CV title) was so bright coloured.

that's... purely your own opinion, your own perspective; objectively speaking that isn't really substantiated. you're approaching the matter from a musical bias; you can easily approach those games from a visual standpoint and find much to delight over: you say that the weaker hardware "doesn't matter" in regards to music, but the exact same argument could be made for pixel art.

No, it's not subjective. Music is always at its full breath of expression; quality of delivery is the only aspect affected by hardware.
Visuals are absolutely limited by hardware; the inability to use, say, camera pans or zooming or dynamic lighting directly affect the way you can interwine the narrative in your visuals. Besides, few tools are as flexible as music as far as mood-expression goes: taking your screen again, music could make that environment feel scary or simply unsettling or weave in desperation instead of panic.

it doesn't have to be similar to the "older" CV titles, or at least most of them; legacy of darkness had a much more ambient and subdued tone and yet it worked well. Similarly, there are games like Demon's Souls which use a more 'modern' approach to music (there is a lot of silence, with most of the music centering around boss themes), but unlike Lords, it works fantastically in all circumstances and the songs themselves are well-composed, fitting, expressive and memorable.

arguably, shadow of the colossus could also fit here; it has environmental themes, but they are appear rarely and more as an interesting introduction; its music is driven by context, but this has no qualitative effect on the music itself.

I agree on SotC, but not on Demon's Souls. Demon's Souls share the LoS musical approach but I honestly find most of the soundtrack to be sensibly worse than LoS - as in, miles behind. It's borderline shovelware. The game is amazing, tho.

[Sindra]

I would have a terrible time thinking of any of my favourite CV tunes as "cohesively representing the atmosphere and feeling of an entire area". What does Vampire Killer or Bloody Tears represent? The Land of Exciting Combat™   ?

Yes! Duh!  

In my case, a soundtrack like SCVIV took admittedly a lot long to grow on me because it didn't have the strong upbeat catchy tunes and relied more on atmosphere. I feel like this is something that is probably more easy for the composer to modify future soundtrack towards, because he's got the atmosphere, but still lacks more of the melody in my opinion.

One thing that irked me outright about the music in-game, though.
- During the Stone Idol Titan fight, you can hear one of the more famous riffs from God of War in there. I thought I was hearing things at first because it was only a uber-short  instance, but then it kept popping up and I was like "Really, guys?".

[thernz]

I think in this case "harmonic" is a very generous way to say "flat". Besides, it's not like in most 2D games the music always fits what's happening on screen - it basically never does. It doesn't even try.

bro, I wasn't saying that harmonic game elements required the use of a single tune across a level. SoTC handles its different elements very cohesively and uses contextual music still. I was just saying that your division between 2D and 3D games was generalized. The whole trend between segregating platforming and action only happened recently in 3D action games. Back on the PS1, there were games like Blasto that were better at merging its elements of platforming and shooting into cohesive level design. Besides, LoI and CoD aren't really harmonic in their game elements either. The slow exploration in LoI completely clashes with the fast paced combat.  I wasn't really talking about the music in that second paragraph heh.

Though in the case of the older Vanias like the first, the music was mostly related to the rhythm of the player's own movement, whipping candles and enemies. You could say it tied more with the environment because the candles and enemies were far more a part of the level design than any instance of enemy in LoS. Well, besides Titans.

also i dont really get the whole point on the suspension of belief thing because i dont think los or any of the castlevanias should really care to strive for DARK REALISM, because you know, they're about whipping goblins apparently. I mean, immersion totally matters but immersion isn't just directed by REALISM otherwise the best immersive games would be gritty shooters with physics. The whole thing about 2D games not having more muted palettes and being unable to have them is also just silly. LoS itself doesn't even sport that muted of a palette. It's a very vibrant game color wise. It really sports of a lot of saturated teals and oranges in the lighting too. It's less darker than that Nosferatu screenshot. It also makes sense that the gremlin is blue because you know in real life, gray and black tend to actually be more shades of purple and blue than actually completely desaturated. If anything even the darker shades of blue in LoS's screenshot are just lightly muted.


They also share pretty similar palettes in this shot! I tried to find the darkest, then the middle brown value, then the lightest, then i took the medium values of blue and red from both shots. I could've better chose the last two colors but it's pretty evident from Gabriel's garb that the reds are fairly in the same range and the blue of the player and the distant fog in LoS are around the same values as well.
Notice how also you can call Nosferatu much darker because it uses the darkest color much more often, it contrasts greatly with the bold red of Gabriel. I mean, it's to make the player stand out in both cases. The architecture in Nosferatu is much more quaint and slim rather than grand and intricate, which I would consider darker as well! The value range in LoS is greater too, incorporating that little bit of sunbathed steps and even the ambient lighting in the distance is a pretty light and not muted shade of blue. Overall, LoS's palette here is really just a little step duller than Nosferatu's!
Well in any case, it isn't the individual colors used that matter, but how they relate to each other. The simple fact that the Nosferatu shot utilizes its duller colors more often and throughout its composition just makes it "darker" than LoS.

[Harrycombs]

Valtiel, the music doesn't need to choose between being atmospheric and still be strong, classic like songs. Look at the game Nier (a 3D game by the way), they used great, melodic music that is constantly playing, but they also add and remove tracks in order to make it fit the scene. For instance, in the shrine near the beginning of the game, there is a constant, memorable choir. When enemies approach the percussion fades in, and when you finished killing them, they fade out. The simple use of adding or subtracting the percussion did wonders for the games atmosphere, and they still kept a strong, defining melody for every area. The game also used a unique, memorable track for every area, that still fit perfectly in every environment and situation, and used similar tricks to make sure the songs always projected the correct atmosphere. Melody driven music absolutely can work in 3D.

Lords of Shadow doesn't have anything memorable about it. There really is nothing good I can say about it, it was generic orchestral music that, admittedly, fit its generic fantasy environments. But there was never any track that I identified with an area. In fact, I cannot remember a single track from the game. The game had no strong melodies what so ever, and the music was not well composed in general. On top of that, SCV4 was able to have a soundtrack that changed tracks frequently in order to fit their environments. Just look at the level where you are approaching the castle, then the change in music once you enter it, and then the change again when you get to the chandeliers. Each of those tracks were highly memorable and defining of their location, and were great songs that are actually worth listening to on their own.

Also, CV64 had the same atmospheric soundtrack style, but was still able to perfectly blend in the classic tunes. It struck a perfect balance between ambiance and the series classic melody driven style.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Indeed.  In the N64 games there was even different versions of the same tune to 'blend' with the cutscene that might be happening right around the corner.  They also had tunes that would match an event happening.

For example:
-When the heroes first enter the Castle Wall, "Bloody Tears" plays, then degrades are the Portcullis locks you in the place.
-When Reinhardt/Carrie enters the Castle Annex past the wall, the stages goes dark and a battle tune happens as you fight the Cerberus Hounds, then the stage gets darker still and you get an even more eerie tune playing as you fight the firebreathing Cerberus.  Then, silence.
-In the Villa, there's "Silent Madness" playing as you go around the dwelling, but there's a different tune that place at the cutscene with the mirror.  There's also another slight variation on a tune when you meet Vincent.
-The Maze garden itself has no music, just sfx.  However, upon meeting Malus you get a tune, when running from Chainsaw Frankie you get another, and you get yet another in Henry's mission, all different, all decisive 'mission' tunes that are both memorable and relevant.
-Upon meeting the Vampire, there's sfx built into the tune playing while he's munching on his 'meal'.  There's a separate tune for when that 'meal' attacks you.
...and many, many, many more instances (I'm only on stage 3).

Again, these are standards set a decade to fifteen years ago.  Of course, the IGA games don't really do this (the 3D ones or the 2D ones), but it doesn't mean it hasn't been done successfully before.

[The Silverlord]

Probably also worth remarking that where Lords' is concerned, the at-times torturous narrative and length of game did the score few favours.  Oscar's work was under heavy duress, all the more easily pooh-poohed for the fact that you're suddenly concentrating on it a bit more when the storyline gets a tad bland and tedious.  What do I hear . . . it's that track again!  It's Patrick Stewart saying the same thing over and over again . . .

In the end, you don't really suspend much of anything . . . the music ends up compounding the monotony of the story, rather than helping to alleviate and unburden it . . . there's the dread that it's never . . . going . . . to . . . move . . . on!

Hence, I do think the score could have contributed more to proceedings had it stood up and made itself magnificent.  It didn't.  Perhaps it couldn't.  But it was a disappointment overall, maybe not in entirety the fault, in-and-of-itself, the score.

[Sindra]

That's a good point that totally has merit. I love me some Patrick Stewart, but damn did they make the narrative daunting.

[SIRHardle]

The music in LOS was definitely the weakest point in my whole experience with it. For the first time in my life I was playing a CV with no love for its soundtrack and that hurt. ='(

And it's not only because it's orchestral, atmospheric-centric or anything like that. Other games did the same style with much more success and critical success. Since I can't find a better word for it, like its main character, LOS' OST lacks life. And to do it further harm throughout the extend of a long game it spreads out thin and it repeats the same selection of songs. The waterfall remix plays on Agharta, the tower level, the titan level just to name a few, that's one of the best scores of the game and even so it lacks appeal.

Clever arrangements of any song on SOTN or LOI would have much more power, personality and atmospheric feeling than any song I found in LOS. There's a proper place for detached music more fit for the background and music to enhance the experience of the player as a player.

All I know is that by the time I reached chapter 5 I decided to mount my own OST to listen while playing LOS. It made places like the Chromatic Laboratory and boss battles much more enjoyable, to wander and square, square, roll on it. o_O   

[Joachim]

Music is always at its full breath of expression; quality of delivery is the only aspect affected by hardware.

Limited color palettes and sizes are the same as limited sound channels and limited available instruments. They are no different: just as 'a tune' is good in midi form, an image, a reaction, is good in sprite or pixel form as well. You're tricking yourself if you're thinking that somehow it isn't. *

Visuals are absolutely limited by hardware; the inability to use, say, camera pans or zooming or dynamic lighting directly affect the way you can interwine the narrative in your visuals.

inability? you keep speaking of all these things as if they are absolutes, impossible: i don't think you understand what is and what is not possible in regards pixel art. You're acting as if the fact that things were done a specific way means it was not possible to do it any other way; this is a fallacy. It is possible to create relatively dynamic lighting in pixel art or 2D games - the issue being that it would be incredibly monotonous and time-consuming to do so, and there may be issues with memory depending on the console and the intended scope of the system. Camera pans are a matter of cinematography, not necessarily the same thing as the visuals themselves but rather a matter of the way these visuals progress.

Castlevania could have been "darker" (literally being darker is not the only, or even most important, element in whether or not something is "spooky" or "ominous") if it wanted to be, but it never chose to be: even on the NES.

the opening hall of Castlevania in Dracula's Curse. It's colors are bright and almost gaudy; but, I've replaced the colors with other colors from the NES palette. (nes palette: http://doomlaser.com/images/nes-spec.gif )



It was technically possible, even on the NES; the more advanced the consoles became, the more capable they were of utilizing darker or more muted colors and yet Castlevania intentionally abstained from taking such a route: because it was not the point.

I feel I should revisit a point I made in passing: "literally being darker is not the only, or even most important, element in whether or not something is "spooky" or "ominous". I should explain this - dark colors do not make something spooky or ominous, it is the way these colors are combined and the subject matter of the image in question.

http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/metroid64.png
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/gbmock__r1177205021.png

the first image uses the C64 palette (c64 palette: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/upload/features/05_arne/c64pal.png ), which has approximately 16 colors to choose from. Despite being slightly more muted than most palettes at the time, its colors are still fairly bright. But the image created above (created entirely within c64 specifications) still manages to create an uneasy, "spooky" and vaguely ominous atmosphere.

into account, you see that it's very hard to make a "dark" 2D image because being a piece of flat pixel art... it's flat.

...everything displayed on a monitor is innately flat; it doesn't matter if it's "rendered" in 3D, it's still nothing more than an illusion; an illusion which is perfectly capable of being copied with traditional art.


Here's another screenshot of Nosferatu for you to ponder over.

I honestly find most of the soundtrack to be sensibly worse than LoS - as in, miles behind.

Demon's Souls OST 06 - Phalanx If you say so~


*
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/dev0id_final.png
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/tyrion.gif
http://www.pixeljoint.com/files/icons/full/wip42.png
the first piece is c64 style, the second uses only 16 colors and the third uses 21 colors.

[RichterB]

Wow, we are getting uber-technical about music and color palette here. Interesting in a way...but I think that LoS' problems were bigger than these points. I beat the game the other day for the first time; I guess I'm going to have to join in on that poll about the status of "Coxlevania." To sum up my thoughts briefly at the moment, I think in trying to "relaunch" Castlevania, even in making a competent game with a notable amount of quality and fun, they kind of missed the point, and accidentally made a new franchise ala Dante's Inferno or what have you. It's to the point where, by the end, more than ever, I basically had no idea what game it was I was playing.

[Vrakanox]

Valtiel, the music doesn't need to choose between being atmospheric and still be strong, classic like songs. Look at the game Nier (a 3D game by the way), they used great, melodic music that is constantly playing, but they also add and remove tracks in order to make it fit the scene. For instance, in the shrine near the beginning of the game, there is a constant, memorable choir. When enemies approach the percussion fades in, and when you finished killing them, they fade out. The simple use of adding or subtracting the percussion did wonders for the games atmosphere, and they still kept a strong, defining melody for every area. The game also used a unique, memorable track for every area, that still fit perfectly in every environment and situation, and used similar tricks to make sure the songs always projected the correct atmosphere. Melody driven music absolutely can work in 3D.

Man I loved Nier so much and I think one of the best things about it was the music. Yeah it definately was. This post made me nostalgia and the game isn't even old.

[Valtiel]

Good god, 3000 things to answer to and an extremely busy workday. But I'll get to it!

[Ahasverus]

@Joachim: Gabriel's theme.
Nuff said.