Immersing with Music: Approaches to Musical Storytelling in 'Cyberpunk 2077'

[Music] hello this is martinovich music director at CD project red and I'm P adamic senior composer at CD project red and this is immersing with music approaches to musical storytelling in cyberp Punk 2077 we have to do this one virtually but hopefully next year we're going to hang out with you guys now let's jump into our presentation so first of all spoiler alert and now without further Ado let's jump right into it so as we speak to a group of audio professionals and game developers you are all probably familiar with the term immersion for those who are not immersion according to the Cambridge Dictionary is the fact of being completely lost in something now you know why would we even want to have that in our book immersion is engagement and engagement is fun it makes combat more exciting if the player cares about the character character it makes story more

intriguing if the choices and consequences that the player makes resemble some sort of reality and it makes exploration more intriguing if the player's curiosity is fed back by the design of the world and this concept is not a New Concept it has been known since Aristotle through Shakespeare and into tolin that in order to truly appreciate a work of art you have to either suspense this belief or or create secondary belief into in the present presented reality now how we try to immerse players in night City in cyberp Punk we were dealing with four different types of music we had original score we had Source cues and diagetic music we had radio tracks and media music now we would like to talk about about each of those groups how they all fit together and and what challenges and

possibilities they presented I give the floor to Martin so first of all how cyber Punk sounds the most important question we had to ask ourselves there are already several examples of what people have been considering as cyber Punk sound for years in movies video games and music in general we knew we wanted to find our own recipe to have our own t on how cyberp punk music can sound also the IP itself pushed us to explore new territories our game is an adaptation of pen and paper cyberpunk 2020 after all and it draws heavily from World Mike Pon Smith has created night city is a fast over stimulated and dangerous place also the story it's not it's not a one dimensional Journey focusing only for on metaphysical elements or any other for that matter it touches on several tropes

of the genre so it's obvious music needs to answer that call and fit the world narrative Arc character development and so on okay so what to do our way out was pretty simple let's D ditch the80s and go with 90s instead for us that 80s sound people are so familiar with didn't have what it takes to illustrate brutality and intransigence of night City 90s on the other hand that's a completely different story from our own perspective we grew up listening to 9in Nails raced Against the Machine The Prodigy Beasty Boys and so on bands representing different musical styles but having that attitude in common okay custom scoring and implementation of quest music that was a huge part of our approach to scoring cyberp Punk 2077 you know since Witcher we were aware that system-driven music or generative music is not really our

Forte wichard free was Notorious for having the music on all the time and this time we wanted to try a different approach and maybe introduce silence into the mix also there's a lot of attention given to story and cinematic storytelling at cdpr so we wanted our score to feel bespoke to score the many different possibilities many different playthroughs of each Quest and we wanted to feel that our score supports V throughout her journey also minimal amount of typical cutscenes was a design feature that at first we didn't feel like we have to change our approach that much but once you give the control of camera to the player and for example you can't see the protagonist face a lot of things change especially mood-wise and pacing wise music had to support scenes even

more so conclusion for us was simple we have to spot and score every main quest and every side quest with custom assets and that was a huge undertaking for a game the size of cyberpunk but you know having two in-house composers capable of producing assets and implementing them and having Paul leard Morgan as our Outsource composer it felt doable and in exchange we got a lot of control over the playback of the cues and our Unwritten motto became if a player hears a piece of music in the game it was hand placed there for a reason and whether it's score or cut or whether it's score or Source cues or diagetic music or radio tracks whatever we wanted to make sure that the queue that's Audible for the player is the one that we intended it to

be but we started the gargantuan task by spotting the whole game and here you can see a bird's eye view on our spotting document uh we would get videos from QA and based on those videos we we would prepare the first set of assets then we would Implement them play test them and if we maybe missed something or the design changed we would then reiterate on those assets and the list you saw it could be more detailed but each of the line actually represents like a whole family of cues rather than just one piece of music and to further illustrate how we divided those scenes I would like to play you two examples this one is the is the scene where the relationship between Johnny silverhand and V is established this is sort of their first of many quarrels and

I would like to play you this one to show you our approach to narrative scenes need a smoke where'd you stash yours so the scene starts with a fairly soft Moody dark drone and it's played on a loop where did you even come from how are we even even talking how the [ __ ] should I know now we introduce a one shot Cube the [ __ ] kind of dry toy are you supposed to be that explain Johnny silver hen's theme in a very transgressive weird way who you work for start talking [ __ ] and because of the design of the scene this que has a very long tail

and when we cut to Black we actually play one more few on top of the already playing one on a different St the reason behind it is we wanted to time the end of this queue with the cut to [Music] Black I'll take control I'll find a way you hear me now we play another queue which is again a fairly soft drone just to kind of keep the tension up but also try to sell the idea that the scene is over but it's actually not here we start another loop see you never [ __ ] now like that stick some iron in your that Lo will play till the end of

I can feel it our minds touching I'm like mold on fruit creeping into you nothing I can do about it you hear me I'd puke if I [ __ ] could it's just a copy of the engram I'm out there somewhere got to be [ __ ] another scene I would like to play you is from one of the Nomad quests and here V is becoming one of the Al calos and similar approach was taken we divided the scenes into many different segments and whe whenever the player is in control of the action we basically Loop the piece of music and when there is a more scripted segment the approach is more free are you going

somewhere all right V so the first CU starts simp matter we all gets on the truck owe you and it's a great debt but in spite of that and the music that is playing is a version of Pan's theme what might as well be another world so it's about time we fix that you're going to be an alalo which means this family will go to hell and B now this CU is actually a one shot que do your work and if you take your time answering Soul you're an Al the it will actually fake to silence great to have you with us which makes seem weird but it actually adds a pretty cool tension to the scene welcome to the family but now we reintroduce pan did they say easier to gain a cobra's trust than an alos so I know how much this

means do you to me and now we play a segment that's also Loop and actually this segment comes of one of the tracks that a nomad guitar player was playing in some other as Bobby tells it and I won't even mention PanAm go to hell Saul's right though I mean let's face it V my life was in a million pieces you broke it into a million more but sometimes it's only then that you can piece it together again now the sound effects here all right are actually done by our sound Department Shing up and they are sort of underscoring the fact that is developing you know it's almost like about this and ruined all the fun you when she gets are you all right down from the truck we introduce a subtle drone to also support the fact that you know her disease is developing

not too tight miss this and here once again we reintroduce Pan's theme this time in a very subtle way to help support the dialogue and help this scene and this fragment of this scene tell the idea that PanAm and V are now very close friends feels like I'm part of something important so you are where you need to be themes were the glue we used to illustrate narrative arc our goal was to take the advantage of the first person perspective and find the way it immerses players into the story line even in the early stages of development the game even with no music whatsoever felt already very cinematic after a few months of experiments We've Ended up with a number of themes short flexible motives that can be easily adapted to narrative Arc and serve their purpose in a number of ways also their short duration nicely corresponded with the

genre choices we've made regarding overall musical Direction we've ended up with two main themes and few secondary themes V and Johnny's themes our main motifs and several secondary themes illustrating arasaka obviously but also transgression theme which is a big part of the story line death and a number of smaller smaller themes or reefs or patterns tied to specific spefic locations gangs and so on I'd like to present now an example of how we've been using our themes throughout the whole game we''re going to listen to V's theme and a few of its variations from various parts of the story line [Music]

[Music] that's the main menu queue first thing players hear when they launch the game so the music doesn't waste much time and within two and a half minutes of duration uh the music presents the general Vibe emotional pallette and some punch in B part we are listening to right now this queue plays when Johnny manifests his presence for the first time B it's important you get all this you'll fix me up right Vic if I could I would V believe me but this is It's Way Beyond what I know how to do you're the best of the best Vic why can't you help me [Music]

you want the long story or the short this one plays during tape War Quest which is stretched over the length of several other quests [ __ ] if it's a two-way street I'll somehow have to live with the fact that I leted Deshawn best me [ __ ] me over can you just tell me what you want what you really want help me settle my score against arasaka that's it not having control you can't stand it seeing some things are out of your hands don't be ridiculous V cyberspace near end of the game where the player has to decide who's going to take control over V's body V or Johnny on V's behalf thanks as for me I'm sorry

[Music] [Music] and finally one of the endings back to upt open world music using a whiter brush so we scored all quests all side quests and we were ready to congratulate each other in high five because we

delivered all quests way before the deadline and then we got feedback from one of our designers who spent most of their time in the open world asking us why there's no music in the game well it turned out we were so focused on scoring quests and V story and we kind of underestimated the amount of gameplay we need to cover with our score we initially thought that street noise that you know media music and radio tracks will create enough of audio distraction that exploration music would be Superfluous also one more comment that we got was that combat felt underwhelming compared to scripted Quest events not having music in combat Encounters in the open world kind of feel lame and we tried a few different

things like placing radio amers with Source music next to possible combat encounters but it all just didn't feel right so our solution to that was produce even more assets and we you know we had to be smart about it we didn't have the time to basically write everything from scratch and that would be impossible that would be that wouldn't be practical but we also didn't want open world content to feel less polished than Quest events or or side quest so we once again went back to our spotting document and we diligently went through all minor quests and all Street stories and we identified their needs for more narrative moments or dialogues we music edited already existing cues especially the one that didn't have one of the

already established themes and here once again you can check the the birds ey view on our spotting document this is all the minor Quest and this is all the street [Music] stories so for each of the in-game factions we had to produce a specific Combat music group we call them Combos and every single faction got one com one combo some of them were already produced for quests or side quest but ones like Valentinos or six Street had to be written from scratch each set consisted of stealth alerted and combat state it was mostly driven by AI but it was also frequently triggered from Quest For example when a combat started when an when a alarm goes off it would be weird

to start with stealth so we would start with alerted then and we tried adding more states to combat but again it kind of got in the way of the groove and just didn't seem right and as you can see we kind of prefer horizontal inter interactivity over vertical one there's various reasons for that but I think the main one is the type of music we were producing hasn't really work well with vertical interactivity because what you would really want to have is a track that's compressed that's well produced and put together because then you really get the kind of energy we were looking for now I would like to play you an example of the combo for Valentinos so we start with combat

we go to stealth for a brief moment [Music] this is what alerted sounded like [Music]

[Music] back to combat [Music] and out so we had combat encounters covered but there was still a question of what we going to do with exploration ambiances so again we had to be smart about it and cover a lot of game play so

the technique we used we decided to take stems from already existing cues record record them back to cassette tapes at half speed and then play them back through a for track cassette recorder with delay and Reverb tweaking some eqs and playing even more with the VAR speed control and recorded them as stereo tracks and into the door and did very little post processing after that and that you know that technique felt right for the world it also felt right for the fact that we were trying to evoke the '90s as much as possible so that tape his added an extra level of 90s into the project and also thanks to that Technique we were able to produce a lot of assets over one hour of Assets in in one day so it it was a great technique and also those ambiances weren't that Interactive active they were basically just kind of playing in the background

so it all seemed to work and I'd like to play you an example of what it sounded [Music] like and the way all those types of music fitted together is we had a fairly simple yet powerful busing system created and the quest music was the most important music so it would basically block any other music that was trying to play then the next level of importance was Combat music which would mute car radio or radio that was pumped through speakers on the level and in those two car radio was more important for us so it would mute all the radio emitter and the ambiances were the the very bottom of this uh of this chart right here and

it was basically played only outdoors and only if there was no other music playing around the player so all those things combined as exploration ambiances the ReUse and music editing of existing cues and Combat music design was a compromise between our handcrafted approach and a more systemic one so Source music or diagetic music played an important role in cyber P it was not not only treated as some kind of audio fluff uh but we tried to use it narratively and what it gave us is that it Brader our stylistic net or emotional net and also one more thing that it created an interesting musical fourth wall breaker which I'll talk about in a in a minute this scene is is a pretty important scene this happens right after Jackie guys in the prologue and you try

to honor him during an ofenda down and we could have scored this scene maybe with you know V theme or a queue that we used when Jackie actually died but we decided to go with sorc and basically scor this scene with that scors and just B me playing the guitar and you could see that going to tell you what kind of it makes the scene special it's not yet another scene when you have some Cy drone playing around it actually you know creates an interesting lore building because we we don't really say what this track is you know maybe this track is a is Jackie's favorite tune so there's actually also a bit of you know exploring to be done on the players side here they told me he got shot okay on occasion Source music was actually played in 2D from the same sort of virtual and the score is play through and once again it added variety

it prevented us from using the same cues too many times and most importantly in this particular moment it's actually CU by one of our madeup bands tainted Overlord so it kind of fits well with the NAD Vibe and with the overall lore of the world and this queue happens right after you rescue soul in one of the side quests so we found that breaking the musical for will added variety and extra level of immersion and but it worked intriguingly well when those Both Worlds the diagetic and non- diagetic were actually played together at the same time this is an example of how we did that in one of the early C early quests in the prologue if you choose to take the corpo paath you end up in Li Le bar and once you get into Le bar there's a source playing which is actually created

by gazelle twin for us and once the arasaka guys come to be we introduced a drone that's played as part of the score while we keep the gazelle twin track playing in the backr is there a problem are you here about Frankfurt we're here for you J now there's subtle but audible filter on the source Cube no don't and we're all in score now that's between me and Jenkins and as the scene ends we actually go back to a different Source Cube one there and here's an example also from the prologue when you're infiltrating scavengers base we and here we have the scavenger combo and on top of that we have with the same Temple same signature playing

uh you know A variation of the Scavengers theme and a very hardcore Rave sort of vibe fix UPS [Music] off but the biggest four-fold breaker was this guy right here Johnny silverhand we wanted to introduce Johnny's theme and first of all we wanted Johnny to have a theme because he was such a prominent character and we also wanted to introduce that theme as one of the Samurai songs but we didn't want this to be introduced and chipping in or Never Fade Away no we wanted it to be like a cool bside you know so we had to create a theme or a motif that was simple that could work in many different contexts and mostly

because it had to work both as a samurai song and also as part of our score and the othered difficulty was that at the time of writing you know the story was actually still in development although we knew who Johnny silverhand is and we knew you know how this story will go the specifics that would be required to create a bespoke asset sort of the assets I showed you during the custom scoring bit that was another difficulty so here you can see the very simple rendition of the of the theme that this is basically how this Motif looks like I mean looks nothing on on the page but it was actually surprisingly flexible it could score a whole bunch of different scenes [Laughter]

so this is uh the first time the theme is introduced uh Johnny is basically once again going to kick arasaka ass we also used it in an emotional context when Johnny is talking to Alt [Music] [Music]

and it was also part of our combat cues [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] now we had to drop it from a because a was the key that most of our score was was written in we had to drop it to D to really make use of that drop D tunic that refused is playing in and so the whole riff and the whole Motif is now in D and it became a part of the one of the Samurai songs the ballet and I'm going to play you a fragment that's actually the very beginning of

the [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] track another day and also there's a development section when the the the rift in the way I just played you is actually concered with again the same riff but played in a slightly different [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Rhythm don't know why it began but I was once to a man promises I was made or made to keep me a

slave cor K on a wage come the worst of my reach one day the curtain Falls time comes for all time comes for all let feel time comes for oh now you going to be time comes for oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh so it wasn't the only theme that we actually used in our score other Johnny silveren songs like chipping in or Never Fade Away were also modula and reimagined as qes in our

score for instance this is chipping in you [Music] [Applause] feel can you touch it get and this is a rave version of chiping in and also Never Fade Away got a similar treatment never away what it me [Applause] I and it this is was used in this this way as the ending queue in a lot of the

corpo quest or the epilog Quest for Johnny [Music] [Applause] [Music] radio playlists are a big part of source music too they play primarily in cars and other vehicles as well as in number of clubs but also everywhere else where we felt adding some extra musical layer would improve the scene or location the main idea behind them was to come up with a variety of genr CI citizens of night City would listen to It's a tiny but still important role music has to uh

contribute into the World building process teenagers after all would listen to different music than mmers uh hence the uh presence of Pop jazz in 2077 is considered as new classical music and it's listened to uh the cultural Elite uh snobs corpos and other people so how do you populate 11 playlists with enough songs we've commissioned over 150 original or unreleased tracks plus we've licensed several Jazz pieces recorded in 1970s by mik Davis stanus mon Chad Baker and other Jazz icons why not going with licensed song in general though for the whole thing first of all our game director Adam badowski didn't want to create any unnecessary connections between the real world our world and the reality of cyberp punk 2077 to a degree he once said to me it wouldn't make sense to

listen to The Prodigy in 2077 they would be so old after all second reason is the license eventually expires which forces the developers to issu an update to the game which removes expired trucks we really wanted to make sure playing our game even a few years after the release will deliver the same experience and the music will remain unchanged we've invited dozens of artists to contribute to to the soundrack and to make sure we do not break the immersion of having 2020s artists existing in dystopian futuristic World everyone get their own Alter Ego lots of bands appear in quests not only Samurai but also kri urine asra pictured here with v and Kerry Lizzy wizy and others uh we took great care to make sure every Quest a particular band or artist may be a part of is suited with a fitting tracks by this artist not

only from the World building perspective but also from a musical point of view retrospective part of Johnny silver hand's past as a rock legend SL terrorist car's storyline about his beef with ass cracks are just a few example of that approach of course since since it's an RPG game V can differently interact with all these musicians with results which results in different outcomes so for example krie finds out there's this band that stole his son he wants V to take care of the problem it's up to player though to decide how this should be played out in the result it may happen V manages to end the beef between Curry and as trucks and have them work together on a new Tru together the truck we obviously would produce okay so what we've learned throughout the process of scoring cyberpunk so first of all repetition repetition repetition in order for teams to work and for players to be able to identify

which Motif belongs to which carer you have to basically repeat them a lot but you can't do it Hazard you can't put V theme in every single combat queue you have to pick your spots and then go with it also spotting was key in identifying the needs of the game in order to you know try to create the illusion of having a very linear story we basically had to custom score an implement everything so identifying what you need and what the player is going to hear from SC to scene was absolutely essential also performance and interpretation in order to for the music to come off the page and actually create an emotional response you have to either take your time or give the right instructions to the players and it doesn't matter whether you're using instruments or synthesizers performance and interpretation of the material is absolutely

key also context creates emotions you know don't try to put a hat on a hat sometimes you just have to let the already established relationships between the characters kind of speak for themselves and not every scene is a terribly emotional music sometimes you just want the things to be gently pushed Along on a more production related side in housee music team is a pretty cool thing to have we can make a lot of music a lot of assets quickly Implement them and kind of take ownership of our work and it doesn't matter if it's score or custom source music it's a good thing to have also we still sack at systems and generative music but you try to make up for it by producing a lot of bespoke assets and we think we're getting better at it one more thing to add is that features like the dynamic to 2D 3 3D switch or other things that we talked

about shouldn't be gimmicks I mean there should be used just in the right spot to be as effective as possible and on a final note be both and don't be afraid of using music you know don't mix your music too too too low it can be a great asset it can enhance immersion and essentially and hopefully make the game better so this is our presentation thank you for being with us we hope you've enjoyed it and hopefully see you next year and if you want to message us you can reach us out on our social media [Music] [Music]