by Towards the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, widely considered to be the greatest video game released this year, you can literally go to hell. If you do, you’ll struggle with the game’s equivalent of the devil, an energetic but demonic trickster who calls himself Raphael.
It’s one of the hardest, most dramatic encounters in the game, completing 150 hours of play. Of course, the developer Larian Studios wanted it to feel memorable. So they decided that the battle should be accompanied by a song, and Raphael would sing it. “The idea for a song that Raphael will sing himself came from our director Swen Vincke about six months before the game’s release,” says Borislav Slavov, music director of Baldur’s Gate 3. “The team immediately liked it.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a large orchestral score, as you would expect to accompany an epic fantasy story. But Raphael is more than a powerful enemy. He is wry, cunning, narcissistic, and has a taste for theatrics. Slavov, a lover of West End theatre, began to wonder if there was another way to approach this particular part of the soundtrack. “The moment the lyrics landed on my desk, I knew there was only one exciting way to go – a full-blown musical number.”
The result was Raphael’s Final Act, a two-minute ode to Raphael’s power and the player’s impending doom, one that mixes a creeping pipe-organ melody with big orchestral swells, and imperious, mocking lyrics sung in part by Raphael’s voice actor. . (Oddly, if you cast a silence spell on Raphael during the fight, his lyrics are removed from the music.)
In a game designed to generate memorable moments, Raphael’s Final Act stands out. And oddly enough, Larian isn’t the only developer taking inspiration from musicals this year. Many major games have used musical numbers to punctuate key moments. It’s a very interesting trend, one that highlights the confidence of the developers – because of all the narrative methods, musical theater leaves the smallest space for its creators to hide.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion is an espionage thriller set in the Night City fortified area of Dogtown, and asks the player to rescue an agent of the President from the clutches of a military dictator. The signature mission story is a glittering party at the top of a skyscraper, which the player must infiltrate. The centerpiece is Delicate Weapon, a song sung on stage by fictional Cyberpunk pop star Lizzy Wizzy, written and performed by real-life musician Grimes.
“When designing this quest, our references included costume classics of the spy-thriller genre. That was the atmosphere we wanted to recreate – posh parties full of beautiful people mingling, discussing important topics in bored voices,” says Konrad Chlasta, quest design coordinator at CD Projekt Red. “We knew that the music is really important, because each song in these iconic scenes is a story in itself.”
CD Projekt wanted to create a musical number that would draw players in, bringing into view the dangerous reality of their situation as invaders. But creating a “live” musical act in a video game is no easy feat. Not only does the song have to be convincing, the performance also has to be believable, which is difficult to pull off with real-time animation. “Film clips are one thing, but it’s very easy to see unnatural movement in dance and out-of-sync vocal lines during songs and it immediately breaks the immersion,” says Clasta.
Putting together the Precision Weapons sequel required input from nearly every game design discipline: artists, animators, level designers, quest designers, cinematographers, writers, programmers, not to mention the music itself. But timing was the most important element in making the show work. “There was one iteration [the song] starting right as we entered the party, but that didn’t allow the player to actually interact with the guests or experience all the conversations,” says Clasta. “We felt the perfect moment was right after the tone change – the moment the plan changes; when an agent is caught inside a larger number than they thought.”
In the final version, Lizzy’s performance starts immediately after you contact the agent you are looking for. At this point, your preconceptions about where loyalty lies and what exactly it means suddenly change, and you’re left to ponder what it all means amidst the dancing lights of Lizzie’s hologram. “I’ve noticed that most people watch the show and just jump right into the plot, which means the concert works the way it’s supposed to,” says Clasta. “It’s a break before the next thing.”
Perhaps the most outrageous use of song as storytelling comes from Remedy Entertainment, the Finnish studio behind Alan Wake 2, where a real Finnish band called Poets of The Fall composed many songs as the fictional rock trio. -music of Old Gods of Asgard – and who showed them in the game.
“It’s a long process for us, using music and songs as part of the storytelling.” says Sam Lake, Remedy’s creative director. “For a long time now, I’ve wanted a music sequence in our games.” In Alan Wake 2, Alan, a professional author, is trapped in the Dark Place, an alternate dimension where anything he writes can come to life. “The dreamlike nature of the Dark Place gave us a beautiful opportunity to create [a musical moment]because the whole Dark Place can be seen as a mad fever dream of Alan Wake,” says Lake.
Lake devised a sequence in which Alan’s life story would be told through a spectacular four-part musical number. “I did what I usually do in our collaboration with Poets of the Fall and wrote a rough poem that could have the lyrics, from which Marko Saaresto [Poets’ lead vocalist and songwriter] created the lyrics themselves.”
The resulting song is a nine-minute musical biography titled Herald of Darkness. Medicine decided to blend live-action recordings of the performance with the in-game world, having the player walk through a series of stages while the song plays on large screens in the background. The game’s team performed it live at the LA Game Awards in December; Poets of the Fall, as Old Gods of Asgard, spent a week at No. 18 in the album charts, meaning that the game’s fiction changed reality.
Lake describes putting together Alan Wake 2’s musical numbers as “a huge and complex technical effort” that involved not only performing the song and choreographed dance performed by key members of the game’s cast, but also building the level through them. the player releases the music. . However We Sing is undoubtedly the highlight of the game. Not only is it completely unexpected in a survival horror game, but it also tackles the inherent silliness of the story, turning a potential strength into a weakness. “It felt like the perfect way to capture the character and story of Alan Wake back to this point,” says Lake. “An exciting idea to surprise the player and show how crazy the Dark Place is as a setting.”
It’s amazing that this is an even more ambitious example of a game being made in 2023. In August, Summerfall Studios released its first title Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. As the title suggests, Stray Gods is a fully interactive West End show, where the choices you make affect not only the trajectory of the story, but the direction of the songs.
“I loved interactive background music when I was still working for BioWare on Dragon Age: Inquisition,” says David Gaider, creative director and co-founder of Summerfall Studios. “It really plays to our strengths … dialogue, character, narrative – and building on that in a way that I found interesting. After all, how hard could it be to take cheesy dialogue and add music and timers? The answer, as it turned out, was ‘very’.
Stray Gods puts players in the role of Grace, a young singer who inherits the power of ancient Greece, which allows her to compel people to express their feelings and desires through song. But through this, she attracts the attention of the ancient Greek Gods, who accuse her of having previously murdered the muse. To prove her innocence, Grace must find out the truth about what happened. In short, it’s a perfect story for a musical.
Unlike traditional music, players can make choices that affect the story of Stray God. Players can decide how a number should follow at various points during the performance. “Building the branch tracks was a big challenge, both creatively and design-wise,” says Gaider. Part of this was simply telling the story of a video game mainly through song. “There were so many differences when it came to making a song, rules about what really made it a song rather than conversations with music.”
Having a protagonist feel consistent while giving the player freedom to make choices is a familiar problem in game design, but Gaider says the musical element exacerbated it. “Traditional music relies on the main character having a clear arc, with dreams and hopes of their own. Once player agency is introduced, however, things become more complicated.” Gaider points to Once More With Feeling, the famous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as a guide during the development of Stray Gods, because of “how it fundamentally changed the way the story of the episode was constructed. Ultimately though, it was all a learning process. “We didn’t fully discover it until we were almost done making the game.”
Stray Gods may have been, in Gaider’s own words, “a five-year investment of sweat and blood,” but the result is a truly unique blend of narrative role-playing and musical theater. The project also showed Gaider the power that music can have as a narrative device. “I had this theory, going in, that I could do the same thing with music in a much shorter amount of time for all the romances I’d written before in games that took hours and hours of dialogue,” he says he. “Can I make the player fall in love with a character in the space of one song? As it turned out, the answer was a resounding yes.”
Video games have long understood the importance of music as an accompaniment to play, how it can set the mood for a particular level or encounter. But what these projects show is the potential of music when it is integrated more directly into the story, when it becomes an active participant in the story, rather than a passive one. “I believe that integrating songs into storytelling games is a very effective way to increase the impact of the story and take it to the next level,” concludes Slavov. “We, as humans, have the chance to connect key moments of our lives with songs we used to listen to at that time. I believe it’s the same for songs in video games.”
