Slavic Adaptation of Music in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

[Music] okay I think we could start so thank you very much for coming over hello everyone it is our real honor to be here and talking with you about musica of The Witcher 3 so who are we we have very complicated names yeah so my name is marcin Shibu of each I'll try not to pronounce my name because that may be really difficult for you so let's just agree that I'm marching not Marcin marching like marching so that's easy to remember I music director and composer at CD Projekt RED I am working on Witcher series for over 5 years now before that I scored number of mobile and indie games and this is my kawaii yes I'm Nikolay Troitsky I go by Mick if it's easier and if you have a problems if you have problem pronouncing my my family name is basically sounds like

strong whiskey so yeah I'm a freelance as as you see I have to read this I'm a freelance video game composer and before The Witcher 3 I worked on the game have you heard the vanishing of Ethan Carter and I wrote a lot of TV before that and the project that was pivotal for me to move to video games was trailer for Dark Souls 2 so we want to show you our creative process behind composing and producing The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt soundtrack we want to analyze and show or wide gain so much attention among critics and players and treat that as kind of post mortem to our work and to tell you more about The Witcher we would like to we would like to tell you more about where it came from about the French franchise lineage and how it all affected our work it all started with

yeah with The Witcher book hero in the first story was written in 1988 by a very prolific Polish polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski in 1988 he wrote a story which was then followed by two volumes of two short volumes of stories and then and then couple more books just to remind you witchers are professional monster slayers which is our mutants with super humour superhuman abilities and the most important one most famous one is Geralt now after after the books people in Poland decided to film to make a movie about The Witcher and I hope you will never see it because it's it it's a terrible one disastrous I've heard I chose not to see it and you should do the same in order not to spoil the view

you have on Geralt but I heard marching sorry yeah I have this privilege of say to see in this movie actually we bought the tickets for cinematic premiere one time and the saddest part of that story is that right before screening of the movie they showed our trailer to Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring and so basically we did swatch kick-ass three minutes long trailer of awesome stuff and then we were presented with almost two hours long movie with Robert dragons so you can imagine how shocked we were after dieted actually the subtitle of this of this movie was The Witcher and Robert dragon so after that TV series really I didn't know about TV series because I was already in America but if it was one then it just shows that Polish people don't give up they fight even even if even if they know they'll die but

luckily they fought and which are the first video game came to the surface in 2007 then there was 2011 which I believe much in had already physical musical contribution and has little bit and finally happy year of 2015 were The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt came about which we're here to talk about now as you see The Witcher has already been present in film TV books comics and video games and the fan base of Witcher had already certain expectations like certain expectations about what they what the soundtrack should sound like and we had to meet them we had to choose whether we're going to go the easy route with you know generic music which could have been done but we chose not to we chose to go challenging route to take risk and it paid off the in our case was

similar to to this of Batman Superman or other you know heroes that that already existed in other media and we needed to decide what we're going to do with the music because of that so what did we do we decided to redefine musical style for The Witcher 3 the following point that you see in the picture all affected our soundtrack The Witcher universe is heavily grounded in Slavic folklore yes a lot of characters a lot of stories and sub stories present president the game are directly taken from from legends from that from that region it's a it's a fantasy game so that's which is naturally which is a genre directly connected to two specific kind of music as well games main main feature the long engaging story with

with its sub stories as well that also had to be reflected in our soundtrack nothing is good or bad in in the game as well even if something evil happens even if there's an evil character there always seems to be some sort of justification of his or her actions and therefore everything is kept in a gray zone again another element that had to be kept in mind while doing the music there's a lot of choices and a lot of consequences that players are exposed to and there is the element of nominal knowledge RIT sorry difficult work for me which which is connected with the fact that is an open world you know player can go whatever players can go whatever they want and but everything had to be done under the linear music the umbrella under the umbrella of film like music which which help tell the story we're

going to continue on that later on that and now margin will tell you more about the pre-production process yeah so once we know what we are up with we are ready to actually start working on the game itself so first stage of production is obviously pre-production we have to figure out how to deal with issues and challenges that were ahead of us the most important thing was to do as much preparations as possible to basically save time and so production phase would be as easy as possible obviously not every time happens that a lot of planning translates to complete success and something didn't work out quite good along the way we're going to address that issues also but basically all those sets of all those words you can see here on the slide basically can give you some impression of what we aimed for with planning our soundtracks so first of all we decided to mix Slavic folk with big contemporary sounds normally in fantasy

games people expect big broad orchestral sounds with choirs percussion strings and so on because of The Witcher franchise is so heavily grounded in Slavic folklore slavic mythology that was kind of obvious for us we would have to also reflect that somehow in music so Slavic folk then that was when we started working on witcher 3 that was a really important moment for us regarding technical stuff because we were just finished with the witcher 2 we decided to leave earth mode came out the middle word too wise so that opened up quite new possibilities for us regarding how we would deal with game audio systems and stuff like that and that also goes to another thing that Nicolai already talked about briefly so our main focus on on soundtrack was to make music feel like it was composed for every

single player separately so we wanted to achieve that effect that when someone plays the game it he or she can feel that music was you know tailored to just for him so one thing - one way to achieve that was to make sure that music would feel like basically a film like a long story so linear in nonlinear environment we need to remember that we're not also only dealing with a video game but that particular one was very complex one that was open-world RPG with nonlinear story which was branching on multiple levels so music system had to also address those issues and handle the music itself in a way that basically that could be done another thing is obviously budgets and costs of like recordings we knew we had a very big game ahead of us to score and doing this with the like Orchestra would cost tons

of money and we knew we wouldn't probably get as much budget as we wanted to so we had to think how to be clever about that and how to basically do what we aim for but you know make it cost less right so if the game was big amount of music was big another question pops in how to not kill ourselves with that big amount of music so again we would have to come up with some clever approach to composition process than implementation production phase and so on one of the ways we decided to do that was to have a greatly greater use of lighting tips compared to our previous games and the next slide briefly shows you how much of those time attic work we actually did throughout the whole game obviously we have our main theme along with two other themes that are from previous games these are our legacy themes and apart from that we you can see we have bunch of

specially composed custom-made themes just for The Witcher 3 those things obviously served as a bridge and help the vast amounts of music sound cohesive because that was one of the exactly challenges and one of the most important things we wanted to maintain so okay we know what we're gonna do now we have to answer the question how are we gonna do it since we are about to do some Slavic folk music we need to think okay how we can approach that we had a really big database of folk music from Poland Ukraine Hungary Germany Slovakia Russia you name it at some point we just it's tracked us actually that maybe we shouldn't just read it as a point of reference maybe we should you know reach out for some bands some performers maybe and get in touch with them invite them

to cooperation not to work for us but work with us and try to work on something completely new and original our choice was the banter civil and I'm sure most of you are already familiar with them of course other great musicians as well we're gonna introduce them later on and about these things that didn't work out there will I need to admit that the beginning of our work was quite difficult because it turned out that we didn't get along actually at the very beginning why is that I'm a trained musician trained composer just like nikooei and it so happened that we were about to deal with people who are self-taught what does it mean that means they do not know how to read musical notation that means they taught themselves how to play instruments so they playing techniques

would be much different than for example playing techniques I was learning when I was at musical Academy that meant also there are they quite didn't Stan's what I was talking to them because I was using musical terminology so to be honest the first day of the recording session we were basically wasting money learning money because you know time flies time is money and we didn't get any stuff recorded we just struggled we tried we discussed and won one thing I discovered they weren't even able to record the click track which is pretty standard procedure when you go to waste recording studio and you are about to do music right so at some point we realize we have to figure out a way to basically communicate with each other to find some common ground some common line of communication and follow the client so at some point I decided to just ditch

this whole you know stuff I prepared and I was prepared very very well I presented them sheet music mock-ups spreadsheets with themes written down broken down to tempos time signatures key signatures I was really really well prepared and believe me I wasted so much time on that too to basically not start during the process that's all went to trash and we had to figure out what to do so we thought okay so maybe if we cannot communicate with each other on you know language level maybe we can communicate on musical levels so instead of just doing recording sharing sessions maybe we should organize a jam session let's improvise a bit so pick that instrument pick that instruments just plain me four chords just play me some riff on top of that maybe we could try improvising some vocals on it and suddenly magic happened they started to play and they started to play with the way I wanted them to play

they started to be happy about it I started to be happy about it because you know we were progressing and I could say the rest is history because we end up having kick-ass material after what seven or eight days of recordings and that was 12 hours a day so you know pretty long time and then we were able to actually take away this material go 2 hours do edit it and work on it so once you know that story maybe we can now talk you through the process of selection of instruments we we pick since the core of our soundtrack would be on solo performances we picked our instruments very carefully we looked for unique sound obviously but also what we cared about was the history behind each instrument because we believed that if you pull a lot of soul into the music people will hear it and basically love it so the first one [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so this is bug llama or cold sauce if you are if you like this is basically the same same instruments this is our primary plucked instruments for the whole musical palette of The Witcher 3 soundtrack and the fun fact is that's not even Slovak instruments the country of origin is Turkey so and you're gonna see that we have a lot more examples of that later on same good one also as I could say a signature instrument to The Witcher sounds that's one also not Slavic that

comes from eastern Mediterranean so Greece and Turkey an interesting story behind it is that first evil actually built that instrument themselves the design was based on original medieval iconography so they looked for proper wood proper strings proper materials and proper craftsmen basically to do to make that instrument the next one is really interesting [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is hurdy gurdy and this is to spice up things a little bit this is the most

Slovak instruments we can get that instrument comes from Eastern Europe's its origins are in Poland Hungary Belarus and Ukraine that particular one is very very special because it was custom built for Robert Jaworski full-view also for Poland regular hurdy-gurdy has three strings that one has seven thanks to that the instrument has much broader scale compared to regular ones and also the sound of the category that one particular is much more darker grittier and probably you could say more devilish if I may say something it's worth worth noting that the name hurdy gurdy was invented by Swedish cook from Muppet Show next one yeah Renaissance fiddle so as you can hear I can hear it very well for a reason yeah the quality of this recording is very

crappy when I took that clipper I didn't know I would be presenting my stuff on GDC so you have to forgive me that but basically this is another custom-built instrument adjust for Robert it's based on original Renaissance design and the special thing about it is that it has a pickup like a guitar or a bass guitar so you can basically plug a cable into it and provide with the speaker's apply some guitar effects and and achieve really really crazy sound and how does it sound well I have a short clip for you [Music] sorry [Music] yeah next one is also very special

so basically piece of wood with few strings attached to it with a big hole in it and you can have another instrument it's a bow but goose knee and the Polish name is games like danske another very difficult word for you so don't bother with that I'm just mentioning that because basically this is a replica built especially for Robert based on archaeological remains found in Gdansk Poland hence the name change mechdyne scale in 1940's original designs experts say works from 12 centuries so probably that's the only instrument from from from 12 century built with the original design so that's also very special thing for us that we were able to you know incorporate depth of the instruments into our pallet another ones yeah yeah so while while marching recorded Percival and Warsaw I took care

of some recordings in Los Angeles and recorded some wonderful musicians one of them was a myriad my he's multi-instrumentalist from Iran or from Iran I should say and he plays guitar he plays violin he plays wood he plays he plays this wonderful instrument which is called Yali Tambor it it originates from Turkey and and its basic what it means is basically it's Turkish guitar but in Yali be in front of it it makes it Turkish bass guitar it can be ball it can be plucked it has a bright bright sound and the semitones are on the frets and the threats are movable yeah it sounds really cool I'll show you in a minute now this particular one doesn't have any any amazing story behind it however the next one being a combination of the violin and a zombie it looks great it sounds more or less the way it looks

it's it originates from India made its way to Nepal in Iran and this particular one was found by a Mears grandfather 50 years ago in some forgotten village in the south of Iran and it served as a decoration on the tavern tavern wall back then it was hundred years old so you know now it's even older than that fun fact about it that it's carved out of one piece of wood and as you see it has two hollow chambers I'm going to show you the example of how both of them sound there is a call-and-response coming the call comes from Jolly Tambor being boat I think it's a great sound and the response is coming from guide Chuck yeah it's guy tech guy Jack and I'm not sure there's probably a wrong way to pronounce it but yeah here it comes one more time yeah sure

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right so those are the two instruments one more instrument that I want to tell you about is viola that's not any viola because this one was made in 1610 so actually very close to when when girl'd was alive it's makini which is the Buell equivalent of Stradivari Stradivarius and it was discovered in a closet in Germany in bombed down Dresden City and it was in pieces torn to pieces I'm not sure how the player andrea duxelles got hold of it but he did and he restored it

in Los Angeles to clear it took a whole year to restore it a lot of money as well guy named Michael Fisher restored it he had to find exact kind of wood that was originally in the instrument so it turned out to be you know like a Frankenstein viola it's very large back in 17 back in 17th century people didn't play viola like this they play it on lap like like a cello vertically it was much bigger now and Rudolph is a big guy and he can play it like this he's a virtuoso so but and it sounds amazing I don't have an example here but it's in the soundtrack so yeah that's that's Andrews viola there are more instruments one more time okay more instruments as you see that we will not have time to talk about there were life recorded thank you for that and this yeah this is - okay so to check

you briefly bouzouki Lehrer vocals electric cello cello and vocals love of them yes a lot of them so yeah the stuff we recorded has influenced our approach to music composition and our implementation choices so one thing you need to be aware of if you are dealing with medieval or period instruments is that their natural tunings can basically set the tone for your work most of our instruments were in D natural so that was some clue for what to do with them as you know already my story with Percival in recording sessions you already know that great amount of improvised performances happened along the way we did it a lot and because of that also partially we as you already also know decided to focus our soundtrack on more and more of those full solo performances instead of

standard standard pallet so if you take the two choices you also have to deal with requesters yeah and the consequences are yes five hours of d-minor after that after that it was really challenging to me to compose another any other key even C major even C major was a challenge but you know is nice it has a nice typography it has a nice sound so yes so that's what that's one consequence of those recorded instrument another one is improvised staff transform into great tavern cues now it's probably worth mentioning that when marching was doing gem sessions with with Perceval I'm sure there was a lot of alcohol and cigarettes involved but there are no photos proved up though but it's for a good reason you know it's for tavern cues so you know I have my own clique truck so it worked he had to

he had to edit it all so you know it's not to serve the out right yes yes yes worth the pain and yeah those solemn you see those solo parts became the core of the soundtrack and the songs songs turns out that songs happen to be important part of our soundtrack we had three brilliant vocalists from Perceval and we used their talents a lot and I think the most bright and shining example of how much love and care we we took about songs is a Priscilla song case if you played The Witcher you already know that at some point of the game Geralt is ending a pretty awkward concert for him because Priscilla is singing song about his loft yennefer interesting musical story behind it is that this song has

been translated to all seven languages we did so polish English German Russian French Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese that was kind of a technical challenge for us to not only compose the beautiful song beautiful ballad but also to make it work in all those seven languages to translate that song to you know feed the number of syllables within the phrase sync it perfectly with the loop track that took us some time to figure it out how to do it and I think that's the good example to actually prove that basically we care about sounds very much yes my turn yeah musical direction don't focus on the game do you yes good okay set of mechanics under players disposal what this complicated sense means sentence means is that some other games have implementation done down to almost every step of the player this approach

however might not serve best in terms of telling this story and their overall narration of the game so well yeah so if you take the music away from any medium that accompanies it it has its own emotions it has its own it has its own pacing and and we really loved how the the natural pacing of music dances and intertwines with natural with with the pacing of the game how it kind of dictates it rather than the other way around and so yes we could have done the implementation in more detail very in more detail way there are games that have the implosion implementation done more more technically however we chose not to do that we chose to let the music sing and that was a risk and I think it paid off well like I said the the story in its pacing comes from music as well it this

approach also makes the music matter it gives it an own voice and story to tell and it let the emotions shine as well from the music not being interrupted by you know little little sync points that that go to the sound engine and scoring with songs yes songs is just you know everything on it's on top of everything I'll just make just this approaches makes the music even more important yeah as you probably know we use a lot of songs throughout the whole game and obviously one might ask the question okay but what about the correlation between songs and spoken dialogue for example so we don't obviously want to draw the players attention out of the dialogue because of you know some chick is saying some words with some right so

we decided that we would basically use sounds in gameplay situations what gameplay situations it turned out once we started to test our game at our headquarters with with the music that slang monsters and casting spells feels much more awesome when you have kicking rock riffs and wailing vocals basically you know supporting you you you can actually feel like kickass monster slayers so that was really no-brainer for us to decide that okay so our combat encounters would be scored with songs and no matter if the song would be sang in polish Ukrainian Hungarian because we have all of those really doesn't matter it's all about emotions and the way the song makes you feel about yourself and feel you as Geralt a monster slayers so that's why I think our songs shine in

the soundtrack shine in the game and are one of the ways we are actually pushing the music the front four player just to summarize that part of the presentation we have short video clip for you which I hope presents all of those thoughts we presented for you so take a look and here we need someone special was to arrive needed beasts entrails omens [Music] the newest school [Music] spoke [Music] a child of the elder blood the sons healed that were burst into flame

[Music] elder blood mmm embryos of the traitorous [Music] yes not the kind of Briarwood see on fox TV okay so we're gonna tell you few words about implementation so how did we make it all work you already know we decided to pick wise game audio

middleware to handle all the old physics stuff and within wise we decided to build our own adaptive music system the goal was simple we wanted to have responsible fast adaptive music system that would would work in nonlinear quest structures obviously we use layers parameters and States but I guess that's abuse for all of you here the important thing regarding our system is that it's based on two pillars first one is location-based exploration and combat music so whatever Geralt is visiting someplace novigrad some forests swamps whatever that particular location has its own okay I thought I vanished for a second a set of exploration music and paired combat pieces with that second pillar also also important is all the tailor music we did for quests so

that means all the cutscenes music dialogue quest specific segments or some custom gameplay situations like for example when we have to chase someone or stuff like that one of the aim that mokou I already briefly talked about when we designed our music system was not to sacrifice music artistic value and essence to perfect implementation solutions we decided to at first be at first try to how do I say that think about narration of music and what's kind of storing music has to tell itself rather than just you know thinking about it as a set of assets and just divide it mathematically this is one of the examples of one of the location in Prague by tortured and each of those green blocks represents one cue these are

standard exploration and combat cues here as well as that tailored music I mentioned for quest events and cutscenes and this is how they work together so even though we did try to maintain this artistic beauty of music and have the music its own voice we try to do as sophisticated system as possible and that will stop little spider web this is showing you how basically that translates to the technical side don't be confused about the visuals this is F mode and I just used that to two sketching because I like sketching and F mode but we are still unwise okay so to summarize briefly what we just told you yes so how did our music turn out exactly our players seem to like it a lot but why one of the reasons we believe is peach tuning imperfections as

you heard in examples that we showed you a lot of music was very was quite out of tune for this particular for this particular project it worked out very well but in general imperfections are what what make music beautiful you we qu you know you can you you can you can try to make the sound perfect down to the beat and but we believe it would happen at the at the cut at certain cost very important sentence today is the second one don't be afraid to experiment go wild with ideas and this is this is what we want you to take away from this from this from this from this lecture today we chose to we chose to go while we chose to risk and the risk paid back and vocals as marching set are very important pushed the music towards the foreground and our formula is to its it

it's generally good good good to take something that people are accustomed to and on top of that introduce something that they don't expect that's that's good in in that's good on every level we think so yeah yeah closing thoughts for you we have read numerous amount of reviews for our game and almost everyone highlighted music as a strong part of the game that means a lot to us do me read a lot of those so that's I think also represents the correlation between pouring your soul into a project and you know having the the log back from the players as we described before witcher 3 soundtrack has found lots of fun covers including YouTube celebrities like maluka [ __ ] Taylor Davis I think that's another

example of how our music turned out to be and how likable it ought to be we would like to encourage you if there are composers out there in the room to do not be afraid of experiment and sometimes take controversial decisions because in the end if you are really dedicated to your work and you love what you are doing that can really paid off and basically you can receive lots of love from people I know that the second to last sentence about staying through yourself and loving who your world is the most cliche thing you will probably hear today but it kind of summarizes our journey through through through through The Witcher soundtrack and and basically tells everything you need to know about our work and but not least don't be afraid of vocals because I personally believe that today's nowadays in video games music we could use local vocals a

lot more let me just add to this cliche sentence that marching that when when you work on a project for a long time and after after a couple of weeks it's easy to stop to really stop loving it but so but the longer you maintain this loving attitude to your art to your you know musical child the better we'll turn out for everybody that's it people into thank you [Applause] are there questions microphone or shout very loudly hi there my name is Isabella Ness I'm a compliance and designer and I have one quick question about your theming specifically with song of the sword dancer in the Vagabond the melodic theme is the same in those but the rhythm is very different and did you pay very careful attention to how you made

it out the rhythmic displacement and did you have any ideas about how you wanted that to affect the player experience vagabond and second song of the sword dancer okay oh wow I haven't expected that yes yes we had to experiment with rhythm a lot because we were in the same key that's one reason you because there are very very different species because the Vagabond is a exploration piece and expression piece and the song of this sort of--sort d'azyr is shining example of wailing vocals during combat right so damn it I don't even know how to respond to your question really I'm confused they have the same melody the theme is exactly the same between them yes that's because we tried to recycle water oh

that doesn't sound good it was very effective there was this slide about thematic work so that was important for us to basically use themes as some sort of glue with the so-called soundtrack because of the distribution of regions and other ends and musical influences we had among those so that was pretty obvious for us we had to or we wanted to use some pre-existing themes or themes we composed throughout the whole game but regarding arrangement and rhythms I don't think there is that much of a theory or ideology behind it I think it just happened by itself during the process of composition and yeah basically that's it thank you hi you talked about how you tried to look into the history of each instrument in order to work with it and create this sort of Slavic experience but then you

described how all these instruments come from Italy and Greece and Turkey and Iran were you surprised by how multicultural your instrumentation that you use this kind of the core of this was but also the Slavic part came from the performances as well yeah yeah it's not only the instrument is obviously the important part of the process but if you just trip it out of the you know the awesomeness is just a tool right yeah just the object you are using to create music so it's all about the way you use that instrument so when you for example you listen to traditional Turkish performances of kamancheh subduct little visual thing right the kasha played the red haired girl it sounds very different compared to what we did with with kamancheh in our soundtracks so it's how you use it what kind of sounds you produce out of that

instruments what kind of scales you use for example so that I think also influences influences the way the music sounds in the end okay thank you hi guys really really enjoyed the talk especially the f2f no music illogical overview of all the instruments it's really cool to just see the variety of Tambor's and styles and that are all associated with that my question regards when you're working with musicians like as you're saying that come from very different backgrounds they come from a sort of a self-taught or a by ear route and you're trying to work with them you're working to develop certain types of motivic material that you can then use you're coordinating with musicians in Poland musicians in Los Angeles all of what you're kind of working in different

spheres I guess like how do you how do you bring that all together for the final product or did you find it did what kinds of difficulties did you find as you were doing that did we find difficulties well you did at the beginning I didn't it was with you know partially the improvisation and both on both continents and and partially it was you know playing with the themes that were precomposed already I don't know how much and by the way how you how you made these guys from personal to play the themes if they didn't did you sing la la la i was actually trained in singing so just don't ask me to sing okay no I'm not and then we swapped files and that's what made it cohesive yeah the bottom line was that with those all those recording sessions in LA in Poland the plan was to build our own musical

library we would use to build our son Jack around it so we ended up with hours of recordings we added up we edit it up we chopped - you know Lakes musical sequences riffs loops drum patterns because we also did record channels but we forgot about that wedding when we did presentation so think about it as you new sample library you you buy for example so that that was our base set of sounds we wanted to use in that project and whenever we felt that for example all that that baglama part or the a little group that we are example a coral reef would would feel useful in that piece we just used that so it was all about having additional firearms under our Steve's basically cool thanks hey guys great talk and also amazing music in the game

thank you very much for thank you thank you giving me hours of enjoyment I have two quick questions and the first one is what kind of direction did you give the musicians to get the best results in terms of did you say this is a battle scene just be angry with your instruments what kinds of direction or you know this is a romantic scene of this romantic piece what kind of direction did you give your musicians well I believe that and I also worked with my supervisors in the same way that if you are well briefed you're going to deliver the best possible work so my responsibility as music director was to brief them as much as possible and to provide them all the necessary information they had so when we did recording session we had already working game so we were able to present them some gameplay videos some concept art vendors game art and also tons of scripts spoken dialogue lines and and

just you know my imagination working with for example saying then okay now we're going to play tavern peace so imagine that we're in this food in medieval tavern there are lots of dwarves you know kicking to each other asses for example there is some bomb in the corner drunk and sleeping there's some some cool design or procedures for example you know looking for customers so imagine that thing and we need to come up with some musical mood for death so also you can put the players into into certain modes by I tell them how how to feel like you've got to make this more angry feel more anger right now you cannot really put this on paper you even though you'll describe a certain situation like I'm sorry to say but maybe you know imagine like someone died in your family you know this so it's it's horrible but it's this evokes extreme emotions you know which which you want to catch that also worked in my

case that surroundings so if you are in the studio environment you have very limited options of adjusting your space but even small things like for example toning down the light can do wonders with you know adjusting them toning them into right emotional mood you want to achieve so Dufton also work wonderful and great job on that in getting the emotion out the second question is in the the wise implementation of your adaptive music system how long did that take and how many people did you have working on it it took us I guess half a year to finally figure out what do we want and what do we need for The Witcher 3 and regarding the manpower we did a prototype the system with two guys so audio programmer and in your quest designer my friend but all the implementation was done by me so just one-man army Wow good job thank

you very much thanks hello thank you very much for the talk I had two quick questions as well the first one is about percussion because you talked a lot about your melodic instruments and voices but what about percussion did you record them as well did you record performances or maybe more individual strokes and then put them in contact instrument and how did you handle the fact that probably some performances weren't really like very very regular in terms of temper cushon yeah for position well two ways I guess when first of all was recorded they were recorded in queues you know one like songs so there was already like a natural accompaniment from from some sort of a drum to the song so both files would naturally go well together however the majority however the maturity of sounds would come from samples I'm afraid okay yeah for that amount of music you want to you

want to have flexibility which which is which we didn't get from those recordings I guess interpretive percussion instrument yeah yeah that's why they didn't talk about that by the way yeah and so that at least my second question is that how did you manage to handle well the mixing between all these recordings which have lots of imperfections I would say in that what makes them so so great with more super produced elements that we usually use nerve dolls with virtual instruments and so how did you man to really mix that and come out with a successful music I think that begins with the very first stage so setting up the right microphones and picking up the right recording studio I was fortunate enough to have brilliant recording engineer as my friend so the moment I knew I'm going to have you know several

days recording session I just found him asked if he asked if he's available fortunately he was and I need to admit that he basically did most of the hard work so proper microphone setup was the very important process because I didn't even know their instruments could sound in the raw unedited form that good so later on when we took those recordings we had a very good source material we could work on so that was obviously much much easier for us to you know apply all those effects compressors and under stuff we we are using during the process of mixing and producing music okay this stuff was also mastered in Los Angeles which helped okay thank you very much sure I really quickly I remember you guys mentioned that the the initial

onset of your success in this was allowing the musicians to kind of have a jam session instead of going strictly off of what you what you wrote I imagine that might create some mess with intellectual property is that something you guys had to deal with or how did you deal with it well they sold it all to CD Projekt okay I guess thank you very much for that [Music] [Applause]