Vital Hit
Welcome to Vital Hit (previously often called Soundtrack Sunday), the place I have a good time and lament all issues videogame music, audio design, and the methods our favorite video games make our ears tingle.
I like Neverwinter Nights. I’d depend myself among the many high 100, perhaps even high 50 followers on this planet of this joint BioWare-Obsidian, Forgotten Realms and D&D-based CRPG collection. Whereas not tremendous obscure—we’re not speaking Brigand: Oaxaca or The Sum: Nous Aurons—NwN 1 and a pair of aren’t RPG A-listers. They are not horny. They do not sit on the cool children desk with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Disco Elysium.
Neverwinter Nights 2’s first enlargement is a quiet all-timer, a realheads know CRPG with a surprisingly mature tackle the Forgotten Realms and a uniquely haunting environment—it is just like the Warmth to Planescape: Torment’s Manhunter. A giant a part of MotB’s unforgettable environment is its music, a very underrated side of this already-underrated RPG.
The observe above, “Loss of life God’s Vault,” is killer by itself, however one of many scenes it accompanies nonetheless flooring me all these years later. I believe the dialogue writing and Fred Tatasciore’s (Saren in Mass Impact, amongst many different roles) supply lands even when you do not know what the hell’s happening.
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When PCG senior editor Wes Fenlon informed me he’d be talking to its composer, Alexander Brandon, who’s a lot better recognized for the techno Y2K banger OSTs of Deus Ex and Unreal, I begged him to ship a query from me on behalf of all CRPG goblins.
Sadly, the most effective I might give you was, “Hey, keep in mind Neverwinter Nights 2: Masks of the Betrayer?” However even this elicited some in-depth recollections from Brandon. And I might by no means clocked earlier than that MotB’s soundtrack was a collaboration between Brandon and one other all-time nice videogame composer.
Darkish flip
“Alpha Protocol was in improvement, and, on the time, Obsidian’s mannequin was one and a half initiatives or two and a half initiatives [at a time],” Brandon informed Wes. “It was like, we’ve got a full-on recreation in improvement with both a DLC add-on pack or the beginning of one other full-on challenge.”
Brandon was full-time audio director at Obsidian on the finish of the 2000s, and his credit with the studio embrace MotB, Neverwinter Nights 2’s different enlargement, Storm of Zehir, and the killer spy RPG, Alpha Protocol.
He fondly recalled the Obsidian group on the time, together with certainly one of his hires, Scott Lawlor, who’s now audio lead on Overwatch. Brandon had sturdy reward for MotB inventive lead George Ziets, who’s credited with the enlargement’s singular story—Ziets based his personal studio, Digimancy Leisure, in 2019.
I hadn’t realized till now that Brandon additionally labored on the soundtrack with Womb Music, the prolific audio duo of Rik Schaffer and Margaret Tang who, amongst many different initiatives, have been behind the efficiency path and unforgettable soundtrack of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. The vary on show right here is especially spectacular to me: VtMB’s dreamy ’90s grunge is about as far faraway from MotB’s atmospheric darkish fantasy because the synthy beats of Unreal and Deus Ex.
Womb Music was already contracted for MotB’s soundtrack earlier than Brandon was employed in-house at Obsidian, however he described a fruitful collaboration with Schaffer on the music.
“If you happen to’re gonna audio direct a challenge, and you are a composer, you selfishly write some tracks your self,” mentioned Brandon. “And I used to be identical to, ‘I want to do that.’ And I did. So there was the observe from the unique Neverwinter Nights 2 which was finished by [Heavy Melody Music]. We took that, we took the theme that Rik Schaffer initially wrote, after which I added to that for what ended up within the recreation.”
Base Sport NwN2 principally reused the primary recreation’s soundtrack, but it surely additionally had a number of new tracks offered by David Fraser and Neil Goldberg of Heavy Melody. The primary theme is nice in its personal proper: Mysterious, but stirringly epic. Schaffer and Brandon’s spin on it for the DLC is a darker, extra foreboding reprise that turns frantic and propulsive. It actually units the temper: “This ain’t your daddy’s Neverwinter Nights 2.”
“Rik didn’t say, ‘Oh, you ruined my observe,’ which is nice,” recalled Brandon. “And the [Heavy Melody] folks did not care. I wrote one other couple of themes that I actually preferred, like Mulsantir, one of many central cities.”
These have been the magic phrases for me: Mulsantir’s theme is perhaps my favourite in the entire soundtrack. This small metropolis is an entrepôt for The Forgotten Realms’ distant Rashemen (the place Minsc from Baldur’s Gate hails from), and Mulsantir is a particular place, stuffed with stress and contradiction.
It is each cosmopolitan and reclusive. Urbane retailers rub shoulders with masked witches, and the town boasts a theater, a berserker lodge, a temple for the god of demise, and a second, secret temple for the lifeless god of demise. Mulsantir is a welcome reminder of civilization after MotB’s creepy dungeon crawl intro, weirdly cozy but additionally deeply sinister.
That is a troublesome tangle of vibes to get throughout in a single, looping, ambient audio observe, but Brandon nailed it. The Mulsantir theme is reassuring and nostalgic, with a contact of sophistication, but it surely additionally has this darkish undercurrent. It sounds mournful and defeated to me, reflecting the city’s grim historical past, and the opening notes particularly converse to Mulsantir’s mysteries and secrets and techniques.
“I used to be like, Okay, what’s a quintessential sounding, D&D medieval-ish factor? I do know that the kinds have gone in many various instructions,” recalled Brandon. “Baldur’s Gate does its personal factor. However [MotB] was enjoyable. It was nice working in a reasonably antiquated Bioware software and the story was actually enjoyable.
“Man, like that bizarre factor that simply attaches to your again and whips its tentacles out. It had some actually neat concepts that set kind of a darker D&D temper. And I loved that.”
Hey, so did I, man.
