Scoring the Open World Samurai Epic 'Ghost of Tsushima'

[Music] hi all and welcome to our talk about the music for ghost of tsushima i'm peter scutturo i'm one of the score producers and i'll be taking you through the process of creating the score for this game we'll also hear from two other leads on the project bill hemstepat who is going to cover the details that went into the musical arrangement choices and you'll also hear from andrew baresh who will cover the development of the music system this was a big production for our team and at times this felt like as epic a journey as our lead character jin sakai we recorded on three different continents we had two composers had some unplanned last minute recording needs and made some interesting advancements in the open world music system so excited to get into all of this these topics and show also how the recording

editing and implementation of the music are related so let's get into uh let's get into this the way that most all of our projects start and that is with a kickoff meeting with the developer so in this case that was done of course with sucker punch so um a lot of good information uh we got during our initial meeting with them uh and this is what the creative leads there so nate fox and also jason connell and brad meyer they gave us uh what was a really inspiring presentation and we covered the plot of the story and for those of you who may have not played the game uh it's about uh the mongol invasion of sushima so this this happened in the uh i believe the 13th century and there's some historical basis for this um what happens is the mongols invade sushima and uh the island is uh

being run by uh 80 samurai there they all get slaughtered except for one of them and that one that survived is our hero jin sakai and uh during the story jin goes through a struggle and some transformation he's got a conflict and the conflict is this he's he's struggling to uh adhere to uh his samurai code and his samurai code is a way of of fighting or way of engaging enemies that was he was taught uh by his uh surrogate father lord shimura but in order to uh be able to defend the island and also protect his people he devised uh he developed some other fighting techniques along the way that are considered dishonorable now we also find out that lord shimura has survived as well and has been taken captive and that kind of you know sets up the story so

a lot of a lot of emotional stuff in there and that was a great takeaway for us to know that um the other thing that we learned during this meeting was uh the what the look of the game and what the environment uh was was how that was going to appear so you can see from some of the pictures that are in the slide here the world is absolutely gorgeous and for those of you who've played the game you know this and a lot of detail or time went into the detail of how these environments look uh they're really stunning um they also have a bit of a stylized look to them which was something that kind of stuck in our brain as well and we just thought well based on this look uh what would be the right music for this um soccer punch also came to this this meeting with some ideas about what they wanted from the score and uh what style they were aiming for they of course wanted something that is going to reflect the the time and place

so and that is feudal japan so we immediately knew that this was going to be a score that is going to have uh quite a lot of japanese influence particularly japanese solo instruments and uh all the things that are idiosyncratic about that um we uh also knew that uh or they they let us know that they wanted the score to um for the most part be very minimalist and be very sparse at times and they were not afraid of that at all in fact they they were really looking for that kind of execution from the music now we also knew from the story though that there's going to be some emotional moments there's some big battle scenes and all of that so we wanted to of course have music that's going to support that uh epic portion of of the story so armed with all of this we got on to what the next phase of uh our work is

and that's to look for a composer or in this case composers that would be right for for this project um initially we went for uh we we talked to shigeru umebayashi or ume how uh he likes to be uh known now ume seemed like an obvious choice for us at the time and that's just be based on his impressive body of work and his experience with both japanese and chinese films ume wrote some really really beautiful music for a ghost we eventually settled on five fairly lengthy pieces that he delivered to us and they had various moods we call them the tsushima suites you can hear them on the soundtrack they're they're really gorgeous now this music you can really hear when you're exploring the island so if you're just walking around and you want to just enjoy the environment there a lot of times what you're going to hear is

umai's music is going to come up and he did just an outstanding job of giving us a sound for sushima um we also uh well there's there's some of uh uma's goumese films we also uh reached out to elon iscari and and we had uh while ume wrote some beautiful music for us for the island we also knew that we needed some character themes and we also needed some combat music and elan for the most part wound up taking charge of that territory um he is known for his score to 47 ronan which uh which you know convinced us that he he he has some experience with japanese instruments so he knows about that um he is just a terrific melodic composer and he really captured the conf the jinn's inner conflict and his

struggles with lord shimura so you can also hear those themes on the soundtrack um one of the things that really stood out to us about elan when we were doing this composer search was this um this indie film that he wrote the score to and it's uh corey alanis and you know it really has very little to do with this particular project except for one aspect of it and that is that it has a minimalist sound uh it's very sparse but also has a very stylized sound to it it's like when you when you're listening to the score the percussion in particular just sounds uh very arresting it's like it feels like it's just coming off of the edge of the speakers and it just it's got that um i know just sort of catches your ear in a very interesting way and we thought if we could take some of that sensibility and use that in the

production of the music for ghosts that we would have something that would reflect uh the environment of the game and of course support the story and support uh the the setting um after getting the composers on board uh we uh set out to create a recording plan uh for this and as i mentioned earlier we recorded on three continents um initially we went to london and the uk this is a place that we're accustomed to recording we use the studios there a lot the orchestral musicians are absolutely fantastic in london and the studios are brilliant uh the engineering staff is familiar with some of the technical requirements that we have for video game production so we went there initially for the orchestral recording um air studios uh some of you might be

familiar with that if you recorded in london it's just a brilliant location um converted church here are some pictures of the control room uh i'm sorry the the recording room this is in the hall and you know you can clearly see here from the inside that this is a converted church it has a really interesting sound to it it's reverberant but um it's kind of has this sparkle to it it really lives up to its name uh air and it uh it it just is a very very very pleasant sound inside the hall especially when you've got a full string section of brass section playing here is a view of inside the control room there you can see ume sort of center stage we also recorded at uh abbey road which is one of the other uh really well-known

famous studios that's in london and i believe there was uh a week this was probably uh fall of uh 2019 where we were recording with ume at air and simultaneously we were recording at abbey road with elan so that was just sort of an exciting thing for us to have all of that action happening at once um here's another uh photo this is from one of the other studios of smaller rooms at air this is a taiko ensemble that that we recorded there these are some japanese musicians obviously living in london and a lot of this particular ensemble which was a three-person ensemble we use for a lot of the combat music um now one of the things that uh you know at the same time that we're recording this we're of course you know learning things uh during our journey about uh japanese music and about in this

particular case learning about taiko ensembles so we wanted to have the sound of a larger ensemble you know there's just something about that that you can't achieve by doing individual overdubs so we decided to look into recording in japan and this was one of the reasons that we wound up recording uh globally was that we felt like we we needed to go to japan and we needed to go to the source and find a taiko ensemble that we thought would be reflective of the really really big parts of the game most of the the battles so while we were there uh we also um recorded some japanese soloists there playing some uh japanese instruments and uh and some of the performances there were absolutely incredible and really made the score this is uh or yamasan uh playing the shamisen which is a like a as you can

see you know kind of like a japanese sort of guitar sounds a little bit like a banjo um it's got its own unique sound though and you you know it when you hear it um this is uh sogawasan who was just a master shakuhachi player and uh just could not play a bad note it was just absolutely thrilling just to hear him play he was he was incredible this is uh yamada-san who played uh the kodo and also the bass kodo and again you know uh all of these masters at japanese instruments this uh we also had a scene in the game uh where it was a funeral scene and we wanted to have some monks singing uh during this this funeral scene so we were very lucky to have uh these these two monks uh who

chant did some chanting uh for us they were actually from a buddhist sec called uh ichiren and there's historically this this sect actually connects uh to the place in japan where the mongols originally invaded so it was interesting to get you know that kind of uh level of of authenticity uh there so really really happy and delighted about that this is a tyco ensemble as i i mentioned that we had this was an eight-person ensemble and this the sound in the studio for this was really thunderous um and really really terrific really like kind of captured that power that you hear in a lot of uh japanese music or that that use a taiko ensemble of this size so that's uh just a little bit about the recording process and what we did i want to hand it over now to bill and he's

going to do a deeper dive into some of the creative and technical arranging that we did and how that relates to our music system so over to you bill cool thank you so much pete um hi everyone my name is bill thank you for watching this video today um now that we have talked about how the music was created and pete gave a really great run through of our recording process and it was it was really actually one of my once in a lifetime experience that i got to be a part of those recordings definitely something that i won't forget anytime soon but now that we've talked about that let's look at in general what we have to do with them afterwards as an arranger of the project i'm mostly going to focus on the creative and technical arranging aspect of it and i will elaborate as to why i have to be so specific to call out the creative and technical terms separately we'll understand that um soon but there's a huge bulk of work

that our team myself and a few other folks on our team that is kind of the bread and butter of what we do and there's a big bulk of work here that we do before the music even gets implemented into the game but first let's explain a little bit about where somebody like myself kind of sits into the production here as you can see i'm kind of slotted somewhere in the middle of music production and implementation and testing the role that i play is to kind of act as a bridge between the composers of the game and the game itself making sure to adapt what's written and recorded and making sure that to see the composer's vision through in the game but at the same time the reverse is always is also true as well where um i'm constantly coordinating backwards about the feedback from our early implementation and the prototypes which

help inform what needs to get produced and recorded further this is very very important actually in especially in creating system systemic music um we have designed this system and directed a composer to write a specific way and then we put that in the game realize that oh it's not working quite as well as we thought it should what what do we do then the musics are written and and um recorded but well like this is kind of what game development is right there's a lot of iteration iterative process and a lot of iterations it's bound to happen but really it's how we tackle the iteration process that's really key to success here and we'll talk about that specifically in this talk all right um so first off let's actually talk about the three main pillars of the experience that makes up ghosts of tsushima as a whole and i

think more specifically we want to focus on the golden path which is what we call for like the critical path storyline essentially and it's okay by the way if you're not getting the picture right away there are some examples that will come in after this but i just want i want to walk through these and then we'll explain more of them as we go so first off is the cinematics and a lot of people call these cutscenes right there these are very non-linear it plays like a film from top to bottom and our main approach here like what pete said earlier is there we tried to execute sucker punches brief on creating a minimalistic japanese aesthetic as well as providing some epic story moment and this is something that that we we want to infuse into every part of it but cinematics are one part that where i think we did this very well um this the second approach we took was

using a little bit of a free tempo approach that's inspired by traditional japanese music um in traditional japanese music from kind of my study and my interest in in it that i find there there is kind of this play of fluctuation of time and space that is very much a part of their music and this also includes using silence as a musical device as well so we had really incorporated that into the level that is even even more macro than that and that is picking where not to play music and this has become equally as critical to to use as a device to set up big epic moments is to have moments without music that come before that um the next pillar is the custom gameplay arrangements and these are kind of being they they're kind of being talked about internally for us as

kind of semi uh non-linear moments and with this it's it's kind of like players have control but you're not actively going outside of this mission there's not kind of this free agency that you could go do anything anywhere um there's it's somewhat a little bit on rails like you're you're in the middle of this big battle or a duel or something like that so these things will like i said will include special combat scenarios duels and then uh special stingers which in this case is something like oh you see a house getting burned down and we want to play some reaction music to that and there's kind of a framework for these things and we want to make something that's tailored to that experience and lastly we have the systemic music and this is one of the most important experience in ghost of tsushima um since this is an open world game there's a lot

of things that are happening systemically with a large degree of variables like a player's progression strength and play style so now we're talking about a true non-linear experience and this includes the music and counter system which andrew is going to touch upon this is one of the very deep subjects of this um the music encounter system takes care of how we score combat in ghost of tsushima and combat is a really large part of ghost of tsushima next up we also have the exploration mood system and this is something that the players will hear as they walk through the game and this is something that we spent a lot of time on as well to make sure that throughout the 30 hours to see even 60 hours of experience that you would never get tired of what this is we'll show you some examples for this and lastly are just little stingers that are specifically tied to mechanics in

the game like the fox shrines the haiku mechanics um the onsen the shrines pillars of honors and stuff like that so we won't dive into every little stingers today but just know that this is something that we use to score the game as well so first off what's what's one of the most important thing that we need to get right right away in order to execute all those three main pillars and the first thing is some really wide stemming and this this is partly why i attended all the recording sessions um because we not only want to split as many instruments as we could but we also want to make it make sense musically for example if the strings are playing something in unison and they sound really good and big together um they should play together by all means it's not that like oh violins have to be split violas have to be split this is split musically by the musical

devices that they play and the different colors that we have in the score um as you can see in red there's some tycos there in blue there is some japanese soloist instruments and in green and yellow there we have orchestras as strings and brass there but if you look closely at the bottom there are stems that are muted um there's actually a label here that is too small you can't see but it's it's actually called the additional soloist stem so what what are these really let's talk about that for a little bit and this is the last continent of recording that we did actually which is in our home soil in in the u.s and completes the three continental recording thing so what first of all why did that need to be done um like i said earlier the iterative process and how we tackle the iteration is very important

as we played the game we realized that the game is way bigger than we thought um there's more content and with the player's free agency to go do anything you you end up spending more time in the game in general which is a great thing but we find that um systemically it's it's getting tiring after a while we don't have enough content to provide variety in the music especially in the japanese instruments next thing is also that the game's minimalistic approach also means that the orchestra has to be used sparingly and we'll show the example of this in a second but essentially if we use the orchestra all the time it becomes a wall of sound and noise at some point so because we pick and choose our moments we ended up using more japanese solos than the orchestras and that means we run out of content really quickly

now how we tackle that was we needed to get this done kind of quickly and in very specific ways because um we were running against the deadline and we really needed to do something functional so we couldn't go really go back to japan again so we utilize first and second generation japanese talents in los angeles and that is uh kozui matsumoto on kodo um ko umezaki koji omizaki on shakuhashi shoji kameda on taiko and then not japanese but mike penny is a shamisen player who's competed in japan has become one of the very few non-japanese to have won shamisen competitions over there he's very much involved within that community can speak japanese as well and lastly we have a solo cello recording as well and if you can see this this group really quickly you're starting to see like a really functional quintet almost like a band that can kind of play their own music

and with this i have decided that we're gonna build upon existing pieces of music and by existing pieces of music this is specifically elanish gary's combat music um we know what we're missing now from play testing um the the music in the game and we've done a few iterations of the implementation try different ways and we know now that what kind of content was missing which is that kind of the medium intensity level of combat where like you we can go really light we go really big with the orchestra but what's going to be there in the middle and with this we employ kind of the combination of written parts of improvisation by written parts i mean that we might be literally doubling the orchestral parts of this quintet and at the same time making kind of almost like an alternate arrangement instead of playing the full orchestra we'll now play using this um

this small five piece band that we put together to play and execute that arrangement and that with some improvisation we've really we really provided even more japanese colors um that can play with the track or play on its own as well so um with this we came up with a very targeted recording plans there are some parts that are written there are some free form improvisation that's set to be played with a certain track um let's look at how the recording went down here's ko kozue and then mike penny they we did it all here at playstation studios um we brought them in and then each of them spent a day with us and then we also went to capital studios in hollywood to record some tycos we ended up using a lot of this for legends mode which is um the multiplayer expansion that came out a few months after the game released

all right now that you've heard a lot a lot of ncaa wall of text and a lot of what i did let's actually hear what i did um so first example here is i want to play a minimalistic scoring cinematic that i've been talking about about how we're saving the orchestra and we have just very few japanese instruments we use um a free time approach and we use some silence to create some tension let's see what this sounds like [Music] [Music]

that's that's really great you can see that with so little there are probably only like five six musical gestures in there here's some chakras to use some kodo but with so little we can create so much tension and focus as well as immersing the players in the japanese aesthetic this is something that we used a lot throughout the game but now let's look at the stark contrast of that here we have a scene a very important story moment where um jin is announcing that he's embracing and fully becoming the ghost rather than being adopted as shimura's son and this is one of the really really bigger moments where we've used the orchestras to really give some weight to the scene and make it even more gut wrenching than it was let's hear that renounce the ghost

you must blame her for this outrage [Music] tell them my hair my son i am not your son i am the ghost [Music] and you will be judged for it [Music]

go [Music] you can just see how much weight the orchestra can actually give the scene like this and what a stark contrast it is to a previous scene and how effective it is to not hear this so often but when it comes in you really do feel um that this story moment is very special and a lot of the game is this balancing act between having the the minimalistic japanese aesthetic just like how the sucker punch brief um came to us as well as having an epic grand tale of the samurai story that is very emotional to the player

up next is some custom arrangements and this is really interesting because it's utilizing um the additional soloists that we talked about earlier uh here in this ronin duo you will hear elon's combat music but arranged slightly differently where we have thinned down the taiko's to use a smaller taiko as well as instead of using the orchestra we use the solo cello to play um the asunado groove along with the shamisen and the shakuhashi peppering on top and the special thing about this is you can hear uh mike penny is shredding on the shamisen which we did not plan for when we were recording but he was just kind of playing doing one of the breaks and we were just like let's record that and this became um this ronin duo here let's watch that now [Music]

we use those stories don't do you justice they never did [Music] oh [Music] [Music] hmm [Music]

if you play the game you notice that this is somewhat like you hear something that's kind of familiar because you've heard this combat music elsewhere in in your normal combat with the mongol but because of this different custom arrangement it has really made this duo have a life of its own and really feels special to the player now lastly i want to give a little bit of an intro on the systemic music before i hand it over to andrew and this is the exploration mood system that i was talking about earlier but the exploration itself it is one state out of the many state of our much larger open world system but i will be focusing on just the

exploration part for now and then like i said andrew will take us through the rest um so we've gone through a lot of iterations of what how do we want the players to feel if they're just walking in exploration in exploration mode and explore the world there's got to be a little bit of this tranquility and serenity of the tsushima island but as well as immersing you in in this japanese samurai fantasy making you really feel like you're in feudal japan again just trying to execute a sucker punches brief um so what we came up with was kind of these um multiple players of short musical segments that will play depending on your location time of day and progression um let's actually just look go ahead and look at this video which will help demonstrate this even further

[Music] so [Music] [Music] so you can hear there there's kind of these paddy strings that have been time stretched and have been processed with reverb in such a way that

they sound like their own thing then peppered in with some japanese soloists like what we recorded earlier with the additional soloist stems and then with the variety of the states we have you could walk around in this world for 30 hours 60 hours and you'll never get tired of this exploration music it's really become one of one of the things i personally really enjoy playing the game just to hear this explore music and that wraps up my section of it like i said this is a much bigger system and the next up part of it which is what we call the music encounter system will be touched upon by andrew buresh uh thanks bill so uh we've heard a little bit about how the music for ghost and sushima was conceived and recorded uh we've heard about you know some of the cool custom arrangements that we put together for some of the story based content in the game but what about the open world ghost of sushima is an open world game after all

and while we would like to go through and hand score every single encounter you can possibly get into in the game you just can't do it there's not enough hours in the in the world to do that so we need to build a system that can understand what's happening at any point in the game and scale the music appropriately for the action that's on screen uh so the ghost of tsushima that we call that system the the music encounter system it's on by default it can be overridden when necessary and it's responsible for scoring the bulk of the open world experiences you're having in the game and even a lot of the story based experiences as well so how does this system work well it consists of a number of different states these states are changed based on a couple of different criteria from the game namely the distance between gin and any nearby enemies and the awareness states of those enemies now looking at this flowchart on screen

if we read it from left to right explore would be the least intense music in the system combat would be the most intense and as you go from left and right through the flow chart the music increases in intensity on the way to combat each of these states has a playlist associated with it in wise and each playlist consists of a number of chunks what we call musical chunks that can be played back in any order and are edited in a way to where that can play seamlessly without you ever knowing and we can get these variety of arrangements as as we hear the music play back in game and this is super important because we only have four music encounter system cues that were written for the game and we need to make sure that we have enough variety in here along with the help of the soloist material that bill was talking about earlier uh so we're not hearing things repeating too often and that the player isn't getting bored of what they're hearing in the background uh so let's walk through these states

here one by one uh first aid is explore uh bill touched on this earlier it's the default state of the system it's what plays when you're just exploring around the island unencumbered by any uh enemy encounters uh the next state uh approach is our first state uh that's changed based on distance so if any enemy comes within 50 meters of gin we'll change to approach and we don't play any specific music in approach it's really more of a buffer state between explore and the more combat oriented states in the system any explore music that was playing will allow to play out and maybe more importantly we make sure no new explorer music starts playing this fixes the problem i've wrestled with on previous systems i've built for other games where we know we're near some enemy encounter but not close enough to trigger the music for that encounter and just as you're about to enter this beautiful piece of explorer music starts playing and just as it's welling up it gets interrupted by the combat music and i

just wanted a way to control that from happening so we implemented this approach state in between before we go on i want to take a closer look at how we are measuring these distances in game and deciding when to change between approach and infiltrate which is another distance based state so on screen here is a screen capture from the game with our debug display up i've highlighted some of the debug circles so they're a little more visible on screen but you can see we have gin here in the middle and then he has four concentric circles drawn out around him and these are the radii the the distances at which we are choosing to change states for approach and infiltrate so here's just another view of it uh so you might be asking yourself well why are there four circles here shouldn't there just be one you just need the one line to know whether we're in the state or out of the state and this solves an issue i'm sure we've all run into playing other open world games you're sneaking up to an enemy area the

tense encounter music starts playing you sneak away a little bit it stops playing you sneak a little closer it starts playing again and you can sort of play with the system turning it on and off listening as it's ping-ponging back and forth between states in this case there's one invisible line that's saying on this side we're playing the music on this side we're not playing the music um and we wanted to avoid this for for ghost to sushima so we ended up implementing two different uh radii for each of the state's infiltrate and approach one sets the state and a different one removes the state so let's take a look at this in the case of approach as i said we set approach if an enemy comes within 50 meters of gin so we see we have our mongol enemy there in the bottom left he's outside of the outer circles so we're in explore if he moves within 50 meters of gin so inside that inner yellow circle that's when we'll change to approach now to change back from approach to

explore that same mongol would have to move 60 meters away from gin so we have this 10 meter buffer uh between the radii and we've we've now eliminated that that ping-ponging issue where somebody could find that line and walk back and forth across it uh changing the music really quickly and we really feel like this helps smooth out any musical anomalies in our music system so back to our flow chart here we're in approach um the next state in the system would be infiltrate so that's another distance based change so an uh mongol enemy has to come within 20 meters of gin to change to infiltrate so back to our visual representation here we've got our mongol he's outside the zone he would have to move inside the innermost circle 20 meters from jim to change to infiltrate now content wise for infiltrate we're really stan trying to stay true to that minimalistic scoring approach bill mentioned earlier there's you're really

only going to hear a couple of elements at any one time and infiltrate they're going to be tense and sneaky we've got lots of space built into this playlist and that's all to stay with that minimal approach we really don't want to beat the player over the head with musical material here you're going to be hearing the state very often so we try and keep things rather sparse and i've got an audio example here for infiltrate so let's listen to what that sounds like [Music] so [Music] so that's infiltrate you know really

sort of sets that mood of of sneaky infiltration as mongols are nearby um so the next state uh well actually before i go there there's there's two places where infiltrate can go from here uh first would be standoff this would be if a player uh entered into a standoff with a nearby enemy um we're not gonna dive too much into this today suffice to say that it exists it has its own music but we're going to move on to the next state in the system itself which is alarmed now this state changes based on the awareness level of the enemies in the encounter area an enemy will go into an alarm state if they have a sense that there's a threat nearby but they haven't really identified where it is yet maybe they've heard gin running around through a camp maybe they found a body in a yurt somewhere or you fired an arrow and missed your shot they know somebody's around but they want to go and search and find where they are this heightened level of search that an enemy might go into causes a change in

the music as well content-wise we're still staying rather sparse here but we will add a few more elements uh remove some of that space that might have been an infiltrate add some more rhythmic elements just to up the excitement for this change in awareness of the mongols that are in the area so i've got an audio example here of alarm that we can listen to [Music] [Music] cool so ups the excitement just a little bit but still that sparse minimal approach um so the next state in our system would be combat uh we changed combat when the

enemies are fully aware of jinn they are actively engaged in combat with him now combat is a fair bit more uh complex than the rest of the states in the system right off the bat you can see we have it divided into two intensities combat hard and combat easy now we're picking which intensity of combat to play based on the perceived uh difficulty of the encounter that gin's in i'm going to talk a little more about this in a few slides but if the encounter is less difficult we'll play combat easy if it's more difficult we'll play combat hard and a big goal we had for combat was to have very smooth and musical transitions between the states and we achieved this a number of different ways first off we have specific transitions for going between easy and hard whether you're going up from easy too hard or down from hard to easy additionally we have special combat easy chunks that we call easy plus that will play after a combat hard down

transition and this just gives a really smooth transition when coming down we want the player to feel the difference in the music but we don't want it to be that hard ping pong change addition in addition to those special transitions we're also using custom cue markers and y's so instead of saying okay transition on the next beat or the next bar we've actually gone through each combat chunk in the game and hand picked where we think the most musically opportune places are to transition the big goals here we don't want to interrupt any big sweeping melodies especially in the hard combat chunks uh and we also want to make sure any grooves that we leave are left at the most opportune moments so i have a musical example here to play for combat hard and easy it's a little bit longer i can walk you through now and i'll annotate while we play through but we start in alarms we move up to combat easy transition up to combat hard and then

transition back down and i'll try and call out those changes as they happen so we'll start an alarm here now we're transitioning to combat easy [Music] up to combat heart [Music]

great uh and i did want to touch on the the content that we have in each of these playlists so uh combat easy is more of that minimal minimalist approach we're kind of falling back on that quintet bill was talking about of the more japanese traditional instruments maybe the smaller taiko ensembles perhaps solo cello instead of a full full string section whereas combat hard will be a little denser we'll have those full orchestral sections playing together the large taiko ensembles all

the big drums which really gives us that difference in intensity to play with when playing in combat so we're not just hitting the player with the same combat music every time just gives us that variety to play with and finally uh rather self-explanatory we've got our combat end tag this will transition us out of our combat material into one of the lower states depending on how you've exited if it's if you've killed all the enemies we'll go back to explore if you've just snuck away we might go back to infiltrator alarmed if their enemies still around and i wanted to circle back we saw a slide earlier in bill's presentation of the wide stems of screenshot from pro tools this is what that same pro tools session looks like after our editors have edited everything for one of these music encounter systems so this has all of the infiltrate chunks all the alarm chunks all the combat easy and hard all the transitions and you can really see the level of detail we're going to we're using every one of those stems

making all sorts of different alt arrangements again just really trying to make as much variety as we can to make it an interesting listening experience for the player so i wanted to talk more about uh encounter difficulty in ghost tsushima how we are calculating it and even how it's changing as you play through the game being an open world game the player has free agency to go wherever they want engage with content however they want and there can be a specific issue inherent in this that we've noticed on the playstation music team and we were able to fix on ghost to sushima and that is that you know somebody might play three quarters of the way through the game and then come back to an area around where they started fighting some easier enemies well they're all leveled up they have all sorts of weapon upgrades more xp they just know the game better those early encounters that you might run into are going to be a lot easier for those

players they're not going to take as long they're not going to feel as dangerous and we wanted to be able to scale the combat music that would play for those situations so we asked ourselves how do we tell how difficult a particular encounter is for one player versus another depending on where they're at in the game and we came up with this equation that i'm going to walk through here so the the first uh the first part of the equation the sum of the encounter enemy values well we started out by asking sucker punch for a list of the enemy types that were in the game and we got this roughly this list back uh you can see we have a number of different tribes essentially those tribes from one to five that denotes difficulty you would have seen this as the color of outfits that the mongols were wearing in the game uh tribe one uh mongols were much easier to defeat than tribe five and then within those tribes we've got different enemy types melees are your grunt enemies ranged or your archers or enemies who throw things

the heavy enemies were the big brutes who were a lot harder to take out we also have bandits ronin samurai animals and we wanted to go through and assign a number value to each one of these enemy types and you can see we've done that here in this table and roughly as the tribes get more uh difficult that number goes up and what happens when you get into an encounter is we look at how many uh enemies are involved we compare against this list okay we look at the intensity values for those enemies and we add those together to give a sense of you know how how difficult or what's going on in this encounter enemy wise uh you can see next we then divide by a number we call the hero factor now the hero factor is the key to this equation um we we did a lot of work trying to figure out how we were going to track how strong or how powerful jin was to give us this idea of like how easy or hard a an encounter might be and we landed on this hero factor now the hero factor is a number

we only use for the the music system itself but it's based on a parameter from the game that we got from sucker punch called hero level now this is an under the hood uh number uh in ghost sushima i don't think you the player ever see this anywhere in the game but roughly it tracks along with the xp that you're gaining as you are completing missions completing side content getting different upgrades different armor so it gives us a sense of how strong jin might be as he progresses um but you'll see hero level it starts at zero and it goes up to up to 10 so there's 11 levels there and that zero to 10 split just made the math really difficult to work with and really unwieldy and kind of hard to hone things into a place that made sense so right off the bat we knew we'd have to convert this into some other set of numbers and that's how we ended up with the hero factor so you see hero level goes from zero to ten our hero factor actually goes from one to two much simpler to deal with

um in this equation especially so we have our enemy encounter values our we divide by our hero factor and that gives us a rough sense of the encounter difficulty if we compare that to some combat thresholds that we've set we can tell okay is this a hard encounter for this player or is this an easy one and then play specific combat music based on that result so let's walk through an example here we've got our equation let's imagine we're early in the game we're just fighting a few tribe one mongols on the road say two tribe one melee enemies who have an intensity value of twelve two tribe one ranged enemies who have an intensity value of eight so uh two and two of each of those we have 12 plus 12 plus 8 plus 8 gives us an enemy value of 40. now like i said we are early in the game imagine we're just starting out so we haven't really done anything we're here at level zero

we can see this uh pertains to hero factor of one so we plug that in we now have enemy value 40 divided by hero factor of one gives us an encounter difficulty of 40. okay that's cool but what what does this mean we need to compare it against something against our combat thresholds so we see we have our thresholds here anything from 10 to 29 would be easy combat and it's worth saying anything that is below 10 would uh get no combat music we do have that option in our system anything 30 and above would be hard combat so in this example we have here as a player just starting out this encounter of 40 would trigger hard combat and rightfully so you're just starting out you're not as leveled up that encounter is going to be more difficult it's going to take you longer and it warrants that more bombastic arrangement of combat how does this change if we were somebody who finished the game and then came back

to the same area to clear out some content well the math changes drastically if we imagine that you're here at level 10 the highest level you can be that turns into a hero factor of two so now we're taking that enemy value of 40 and we're cutting it in half now the encounter difficulty is 20 instead of 40. well comparing to our thresholds we're only getting above that easy threshold now so this same encounter being engaged by a player who's spent more time in the game is more powerful is only going to trigger easy combat and this differentiation of easy and hard and the way it changes as you play the game i think is a real powerful tool in in our our tool chest for ghost to sushima and it really helps i think immerse the player into the world when the music really changes along with the action on screen i think it really helps sell that that feeling of immersion for the player and we're really proud of the system we've

put together here for uh ghost to sushima and that is it in a nutshell um so i will hand it off to pete uh to close us out here thanks thanks andrew and thanks bill um and thanks everyone it's been great to be here and to talk about the music for the ghost of sashima this is a project that was we really enjoyed it was huge for us and it was really really rewarding i also want to mention uh before we leave that um while uh it's been a privilege for the three of us to be here and to talk about the score that there were many many other folks uh within our department at sony playstation and outside of our department that contributed to this score um like to thank my co-producer keith leary uh all the musicians engineers uh the orchestrators uh particularly chad cannon who

contributed uh to the score just some absolutely beautiful playing and some excellent work thanks of course to sucker punch they were a brilliant partner in this and we really appreciate the opportunity to work together and collaborate on this and of course um last and certainly not least to alan and to ume for having written some absolutely beautiful music really inspiring and helped us to do our job at this level so we're really grateful for that and we really appreciate how truly special this project was and the music for it was so thanks everyone and appreciate you watching our presentation thank you [Music]