So...where 're all the "Danger is near" music ?

[Thomas]

This is a very interesting topic really and we have discussed it internally a bunch. There are two stances:

A: Music that "syncs" to creature encounters make the encounters feel better. It helps emphasize the mood and put the player in the right mind state. It is also annoying to constantly hide in the game, and if music tells you when things are starting to get dangerous you can engage in behavior only when needed. (Why annoying? Because if 99% of your hiding is not needed, it will become mundane and repetitive and the scariness is decreased).

B: That music is not realistic and makes the world feel more player-centered and therefore lose some immersion. Also, it gives a sort of 6th sense that takes away some immersion. If music tells you when a creature is near, then you will quickly learn this and you will miss out on the player imagining creatures that never existed in the first place, and some of the proper horror experience is lost.

It is possible to argue for both of these stances and what we did first in SOMA was to go with mostly B. But there was one major issue with this:

- Encounter specific music makes the game scarier!

Pretty late in development (actually just a few months back) we added some subtle low-freq music that came a little bit before a monster was near the player, and it made the experience so much better. It was a big difference. This is not really that surprising, I mean, we all know music is super important in horror movies.

But still interesting to see that having a certain kind of music that was used to highlight a certain happening could have a much bigger effect than you sorta intuitively expect. Because, we had creepy music in these encounters, it was just that the music was more global to the level and not specific to the encounter. And when we just tweaked a bit it made a lot of difference.

So, some "realism" has to go out the window. But we will had the problem of the player predicting when encounters would happen. And there are a few ways we tackle this:

- First thing to note is that monsters are not as event-based as in Amnesia. Many times creatures patrol an area and some even have dynamic appearance mechanics. So just because of this, it harder to guess when an enemy is near or not. This since the monster being simply present is not cause for the same danger as in Amnesia.

- In amnesia danger music is based purely on distance and on the monster being active or not. This makes it very clear cut. In SOMA, it depends on the state of the monster, if the player has seen it, and so forth. It is much less obvious what triggers the music. Because of this, music might not even lead to the player encountering something.

- We change this up depending on the monster and each have different ways that control how music is handled. Some even have no danger music at all. And sometimes we play danger music without there being any danger present at all. All this to mess with the player's head and avoid having recognizable patterns.

(Yikes, this got longer than what I intended. If you have more questions regarding this, ask and I might do a larger article on the subject!)