Such an essential and powerful part of the experience, to the point that the game wouldn’t be the same without it. That is what Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi’s music for Ghost of Tsushima feels like. That’s not to say that a composer who’s not well-versed in interactive music systems will automatically do a bad job, as not every game requires a deeply interactive score, but it’s more often the case that a composer who’s experienced working in games will be better able to take advantage of what the medium can do that no others, like film or TV, can.īut every now and again, and increasingly more so when it comes to AAA studios that can afford having sizeable audio teams, a composer who comes from outside of the bubble can knock it out of the park with a score that feels so attuned to the game that it’s almost inseparable. In the case of music systems, a composer who’s more familiar with the ins and outs of audio engines, such as Wwise and FMOD, will be better able to write music that plays to their strengths. In that regard, interactive music is closer in mindset to improvisation, where a musician has the flexibility to take a piece of music in whatever direction they feel like on the spot. Sure, it sounds fine just mentioning it like that, but writing music that can behave in that way is actually pretty tough when, for the past… well, hundreds of years, music has been written with a linear approach– a pre-established beginning, middle and ending. Musically, it means having to think about music as a non-linear entity that can begin and end at any moment, and which can go in any number of directions at any point. All in all, it’s a complex subject, one that requires an understanding of music in ways that are pretty complicated, even more so when it comes to the creation of the systems that will allow an interactive score to function within a game.

Everyone seems to have different opinions on why this is the case. Game music interactivity is one of those terribly under-discussed subjects within the game audio community. Interactive music can be incredibly empowering when done well, and it’s an absolute treat when it feels like the music is responding to you. It often doesn’t feel like the score is really saying anything about what the player is doing, and is relegated to setting the mood in the background.

Variation is only one of the issues with non-interactive music, though, as its most important one is exactly that lack of interaction. And while it’s true that there’s no force on this planet that can make a score not feel repetitive after fifty hours, there’s a world of difference in the player noticing that repetition early in the game, as opposed to much later, maybe even near the end of the experience. This problem is magnified tenfold when dealing with an open-world game that is meant to be played for upwards to fifty hours. But it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem– it’s the exact same piece of music playing over and over again. Even more so if it’s done the way most games approach combat music– a simple loop that plays out for as long as the player is fighting, and then it fades to silence when the fight is over at best, the majority of games nowadays have traded the fade-to-silence for proper outro stingers. It can be very repetitive, as action games tend to feature a lot of it. For those of us that care about interactivity in game scores, combat music implementation can often be a source of frustration.

Ghost of tsushima interactive map