In the upcoming MMO shooter Tom Clancy’s “The Division,” chaos in a collapsing situation will take center stage, including the music.
The developers at Massive give us another glimpse into their work. In the latest dev blog, a sound artist talks about his daily work on the sound and music of “The Division.” Six months before E3 2013, he started working on the soundtrack and is still at it. It’s not about overwhelming players with a full orchestra, but rather supporting what can be seen and experienced as effectively as possible through music and sounds. The soundtrack that accompanies the game is sometimes reduced to percussion only, as he says.
The focus of the video, however, revolves around the “sound sources” in the game itself, as survivors play on improvised instruments. This has particularly moved Ola Strandh: “What do we retreat to when civilization fails?” he asks at the end. How would we then make music?
Apparently, these thought experiments dominate the team. The aesthetics are geared towards exactly this question. It’s no coincidence that they chose a high-tech, densely populated metropolis like New York and wonder: What if everything here were to collapse?
Many other games and works that tell their stories in a post-apocalyptic setting are located in the countryside. Players, as we know, are meant to act as a kind of “last bastion against chaos” and in this world try to protect the weak and prevent the worst. And what they hear in that process is up to Ola Strandh. You can find out more about his work in this article.
Tom Clancy’s The Division is set to be released in 2015 for PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. You can find more about the game on our The Division topic page.
