14 ms·

Happy Hacking: Music Implementation in NieR:Automata (2017)

154 points by danbolt 5y ago

brna 5y ago
Wow! I am not a gamer, but the sound transitions are really impressive. Nice job explaining it Isao.
PikachuEXE 5y ago
Love how it's implemented Hope more games can do that
chriskanan 5y ago
Nier Automata is easily among the best single player games I've played. Fantastic and subversive story, but you have to play it 3 times where each replay differs significantly. Very diverse gameplay. Amazing soundtrack.
- chii 5y ago
  > play it 3 times where each replay differs significantly. is it really 3 times, if each time the story extends and continues on?!
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    There is at least an in-game fiction of starting again. In truth it’s more of a Rashomon, the same story from different perspectives, and the restart is primarily an enabling mechanic, although those who’ve finished this masterpiece will know that it’s echoed beautifully through the looking glass by the final choice you make, making the whole thing a many-layered meditation on sacrifice and rebirth. Definitely a masterclass in videogame storytelling, and one of the best (perhaps even, the very best) game soundtracks of all time.
  - JD557 5y ago
    While I agree that it's not really 3 times, I still think that it's useful to use that description when talking about games that do this, to be explicit that the "New game plus" option is integral to finishing the game. I think this is an actual problem in Nier: Automata since (at least IMO and everyone I asked), the first ending is pretty underwhelming and it appears that the second playthrough will not change the story that much.
    - M277 5y ago
      Yeah, I found that it needs to be said explicitly with some of the people I have recommended it to. Plenty just finished the first ending and thought that that was it, and that Playthrough B was just traditional NG+. (They didn't even know that the perspective changes!)
  - vvillena 5y ago
    The game reaches "an end", but explicitely tells you to keep playing by starting a "new game" again. It's more like separate acts. The first two acts cover the same events, but the story is different because it's experienced through a different character each time.
- ahelwer 5y ago
  I guess I'll offer a counterpoint here because I was suckered into buying & pushing through this game after reading a hundred comments like this online. Nier Automata is a game with boring combat that makes you play through largely the same campaign 2.5 times in a row to get the "full story". Gameplay consists of a lot of running around empty levels and bashing health-sponge enemies until they explode, interspersed with mashing the dodge function. I reached the end of the first campaign and was thoroughly disappointed. Comments online said, no, really, you absolutely have to finish the third ending to really experience the game. So I did. In the second playthrough combat gets even worse, because the most efficient way of killing enemies is a boring 2d bullet hell hacking minigame. People talk a lot about the story but it legitimately barely makes sense. If you're a fan of anime-style storytelling I guess you might find it compelling. It is not deep. The much-vaunted philosophical aspects rise to naming some characters & bosses after famous philosophers, and nothing else. Buy it and play it if you want. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But if it doesn't stick after a couple hours, don't continue - really, it does not change or improve at all.
  - M277 5y ago
    >"The much-vaunted philosophical aspects basically rise to naming some characters & bosses after famous philosophers, and basically nothing else." Replying to this is tricky without spoilers, but I genuinely don't understand how you came to this conclusion. Did you really not find anything about the Android's lives to be even remotely philosophical? Or even the multiple playthrough aspect that you hated, what do you think is its point? Honestly, the impression I get is that you didn't really give the game a proper chance, wrote it off early on and played it while you had written it off. It's not for everyone, but your comment is too harsh.
    - rjzzleep 5y ago
      I do agree that the whole concept of the story and history is deeply philosophical and in fact apparently NieR:Automata and even NieR:Replicant are only a fraction of the whole story. BUT calling the gameplay boring with lots of running around is a fair statement. NieR:Replicant is worse. And reading through what others have said/shown about previous games in the series is that they're even worse. The gameplay looks beautiful, but it grows only very little at the beginning of the game. After that nothing changes, there is no complexity to it. If you wanted to, you could get by with circling around enemies and pressing two buttons.
- ArtWomb 5y ago
  Visionary design by Yoko Taro. Genius score by Keiichi Okabe. Under the watchful eye of Square Enix publisher Yosuke Saito. This dream team of iconoclasts is apparently working on two new titles! More from Shuji Kohata's GDC talk: An Interactive Sound Dystopia: Real-Time Audio Processing in NieR:Automata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUQdd96qzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUQdd96qzk 8-bit music will never die ;) https://www.beepbox.co/ https://www.beepbox.co/
- wackget 5y ago
  Shame the PC port was so terrible, and the developers flatly refused to fix or improve it. So much so that in the end a fan made a patch which fixed many of the issues. If your game is so crappy that the customers have to make their own patches to fix it, then you don't deserve to be supported as a game developer. P.S. the game also shipped with Denuvo DRM, and the fan-made patch mod also had its own DRM/piracy checks. That's why this game will never get my money.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Didn't the Steam version recently get a patch?
    - dvlsg 5y ago
      No, but they announced they're working on it.
      - brobinson 5y ago
        It's likely they did this because it shows up as an alert in Steam for everyone who owns Automata, and they'd see that Replicant was about to be released.
  - Ambrosia 5y ago
    That's on the publishers, Square Enix, who didn't want to play the developers to patch the game. They seem to have changed their mind recently as the patch is now in development for the steam version.
- vmception 5y ago
  Have you played Horizon Zero Dawn? Other flagship single player games released in 2017 have so much better graphics, immersive gameplays, and deeper stories. I'm really scratching my head on NieR fandom and I wonder if its lack of exposure for others to form an objective comparison, or if my tastes have really diverged so heavily.
  - Agathos 5y ago
    I played Nier: Automata right after I finished Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017. They were an interesting study in contrasts. I agree HZD is the better game, and Automata's flaws really wore on me sometimes, but I still liked it on balance. It plays around and gets weird in ways that a bigger-budget release like HZD can't risk. It probably helps that I actually did like the shooter mini-game that this article is about, musical transition and all.
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    I’ve played both. I’ve also been playing video games for four decades. They’re very different experiences: HZD’s crowning glory is the joy of taking down robot dinosaurs; the varied scenery of the post-apocalyptic world is spectacular, but the backstory is a humdrum hegemonising-swarm AI apocalypse, presented via standard linear storytelling that telegraphs its reveals loudly and crudely, and the characters well produced and acted but narratively underdeveloped and ultimately cliched. It also has the worst puzzles I’ve ever seen in a computer game, so embarrassingly easy they’d be better off removed entirely, and playing it just after The Witness (I can never listen to Grieg ever again) only compounded this gaming felony. Nier:Automata remains to date the epitome of playable existentialism, and the characters (and their development) frankly unique, cut more from Camus and Japanese theatre than any sci-fi trope. It also presents a vastly more nuanced and integrated narrative structure. The ruined world is creatively, if somewhat allegorically built, some remarkable visual set-pieces but ultimately not as finely drawn as HZD, the regular switches between game styles keep it interesting instead, the range of optional combat moves is amazing (and superbly animated) and there is downright ingenuity to some of the challenges. Still, only one of these games needs a photo mode. But this topic is ultimately about soundtracks, in which Nier is absolutely superlative and I can’t even remember HZD’s, and observe that the sonic experience is fully one-half of AV. Long and short of it, I enjoyed both, but for entirely different reasons, and in both cases enough to motivate 100%-ing them. Not sure what “fandom” is. Sounds like a sex thing though, so I’m hesitant to look.
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Love details like this in videogames, can't imagine the work to try and get all the nice details like this in, seems a struggle at times just to get the basics of a project implemented.
WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 5y ago
This should have a (2017) tag. NieR:Automata is not just one of my favorite games, but for me it has the best soundtrack out of any videogame I have ever played. Here are some of my favorite tracks [0] [1] [2] [3] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FzyKtct4es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FzyKtct4es [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEVYS7Ofbgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEVYS7Ofbgo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Frp1meFx0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Frp1meFx0c [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOuspYpbNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOuspYpbNc
- allarm 5y ago
  Silent Hill series (especially SH2) also have an amazing soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuxJNphw0Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuxJNphw0Mg
- ljm 5y ago
  The original NieR (just now re-released as NieR:Replicant) is also notable for having an amazing soundtrack with the lyrics being constructed from a totally made-up language. And the layering of the score as you go into and out of combat is nothing short of masterful. The first game holds a special place in my heart and playing the remake now is bringing back a lot of good memories. It's kind of odd but self-aware and the characterisation of a talking book is utterly astounding.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Was the remakes soundtrack redone? I noticed that the NieR:Automata soundtrack works really well with Automata, but it doesn't really stand out in any sense to me, whereas the Replicant one just sounds beautiful. So, the language is the same made-up ingame language? I've been wondering what language it could have been. It sounds a bit like a Germanic boy / children chorus.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
silvester23 5y ago
I feel like iMUSE [0] by the fantastic Michael Land needs to be mentioned here. Here it is in action: [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM
- throwaway17_17 5y ago
  Good mention. I feel like iMUSE was the beginning of what is today a large number of tools and techniques for audio presentation, particularly soundtracks, in game development.
gmueckl 5y ago
The effort that is put into the integration of video game music with the rest of the game is severely underappreciated for a lot of titles. I could list a lot of games from the top of my head that do that well in one form or another. But I'd like to point to two games that stick out of the pack in my opinion. 1. Portal 2: There are tons of subtle details to the background music in the game. Thermal Discouragement Beam targets will emit a melodic hum that integrates with the background music when they're activated. In rooms with multiple of them, each one becomes a distinct, randomized voice in the song. While catapulted through the air with an Aerial Faith Plates, the normal background music briefly fades to wind noise - with a procedurally generated retro synth melody on top. Normally, this fits in with the electronic/ambient background music, except in the one segment where there's a Bach piece playing. Then these short interstitials match Bach. 2. Control: This game has a segment called "Ashtray Maze". At the start of that segment, the player character puts on the headphones of a Walkman and a song by the Old Gods of Asgard (actually Poets of the Fall) starts playing while the player walks down what seems to be a run down motel hallway from a bygone era. The following section pulls the player through a quick succession of set pieces with big, fast fights and platforming elements, while the song seems to follow its own structure naturally. The pace is determined by the player. Yet, singing passages alternate with purely instrumental ones in a way that doesn't diminish or break the dramatic arc of the song while the tense section of the song invariably coincide with intense player action. It all culminates with the end of the song synchronizing very well with the defeat of the final enemy and exit from the section. The sound track version of the song is almost 8 minutes and the game version is probably split into countless sections (I estimate more than 100). Honorable mention: Journey and ABZU. Both games turn a score recorded by a big orchestra and choir into an adaptive layered soundtrack that is just seamless.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Dan Golding’s soundtrack for Untitled Goose Game is close to a thousand slices of Debussy preludes, dynamically resequenced according to the player action. I think someone said, it’s like a Warner Bros cartoon in how closely the music follows the horrible goose action.
- dharmab 5y ago
flobosg 5y ago
Related: “Epic and Interactive Music in Final Fantasy XV” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtoyunrO62I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtoyunrO62I

154 points by danbolt 5y ago

brna 5y ago

Wow! I am not a gamer, but the sound transitions are really impressive. Nice job explaining it Isao.

PikachuEXE 5y ago

Love how it's implemented Hope more games can do that

chriskanan 5y ago

Nier Automata is easily among the best single player games I've played. Fantastic and subversive story, but you have to play it 3 times where each replay differs significantly. Very diverse gameplay. Amazing soundtrack.

chii 5y ago
> play it 3 times where each replay differs significantly. is it really 3 times, if each time the story extends and continues on?!
- inopinatus 5y ago
  There is at least an in-game fiction of starting again. In truth it’s more of a Rashomon, the same story from different perspectives, and the restart is primarily an enabling mechanic, although those who’ve finished this masterpiece will know that it’s echoed beautifully through the looking glass by the final choice you make, making the whole thing a many-layered meditation on sacrifice and rebirth. Definitely a masterclass in videogame storytelling, and one of the best (perhaps even, the very best) game soundtracks of all time.
- JD557 5y ago
  While I agree that it's not really 3 times, I still think that it's useful to use that description when talking about games that do this, to be explicit that the "New game plus" option is integral to finishing the game. I think this is an actual problem in Nier: Automata since (at least IMO and everyone I asked), the first ending is pretty underwhelming and it appears that the second playthrough will not change the story that much.
  - M277 5y ago
    Yeah, I found that it needs to be said explicitly with some of the people I have recommended it to. Plenty just finished the first ending and thought that that was it, and that Playthrough B was just traditional NG+. (They didn't even know that the perspective changes!)
- vvillena 5y ago
  The game reaches "an end", but explicitely tells you to keep playing by starting a "new game" again. It's more like separate acts. The first two acts cover the same events, but the story is different because it's experienced through a different character each time.
ahelwer 5y ago
I guess I'll offer a counterpoint here because I was suckered into buying & pushing through this game after reading a hundred comments like this online. Nier Automata is a game with boring combat that makes you play through largely the same campaign 2.5 times in a row to get the "full story". Gameplay consists of a lot of running around empty levels and bashing health-sponge enemies until they explode, interspersed with mashing the dodge function. I reached the end of the first campaign and was thoroughly disappointed. Comments online said, no, really, you absolutely have to finish the third ending to really experience the game. So I did. In the second playthrough combat gets even worse, because the most efficient way of killing enemies is a boring 2d bullet hell hacking minigame. People talk a lot about the story but it legitimately barely makes sense. If you're a fan of anime-style storytelling I guess you might find it compelling. It is not deep. The much-vaunted philosophical aspects rise to naming some characters & bosses after famous philosophers, and nothing else. Buy it and play it if you want. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But if it doesn't stick after a couple hours, don't continue - really, it does not change or improve at all.
- M277 5y ago
  >"The much-vaunted philosophical aspects basically rise to naming some characters & bosses after famous philosophers, and basically nothing else." Replying to this is tricky without spoilers, but I genuinely don't understand how you came to this conclusion. Did you really not find anything about the Android's lives to be even remotely philosophical? Or even the multiple playthrough aspect that you hated, what do you think is its point? Honestly, the impression I get is that you didn't really give the game a proper chance, wrote it off early on and played it while you had written it off. It's not for everyone, but your comment is too harsh.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    I do agree that the whole concept of the story and history is deeply philosophical and in fact apparently NieR:Automata and even NieR:Replicant are only a fraction of the whole story. BUT calling the gameplay boring with lots of running around is a fair statement. NieR:Replicant is worse. And reading through what others have said/shown about previous games in the series is that they're even worse. The gameplay looks beautiful, but it grows only very little at the beginning of the game. After that nothing changes, there is no complexity to it. If you wanted to, you could get by with circling around enemies and pressing two buttons.
ArtWomb 5y ago
Visionary design by Yoko Taro. Genius score by Keiichi Okabe. Under the watchful eye of Square Enix publisher Yosuke Saito. This dream team of iconoclasts is apparently working on two new titles! More from Shuji Kohata's GDC talk: An Interactive Sound Dystopia: Real-Time Audio Processing in NieR:Automata https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUQdd96qzk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrUQdd96qzk 8-bit music will never die ;) https://www.beepbox.co/ https://www.beepbox.co/
wackget 5y ago
Shame the PC port was so terrible, and the developers flatly refused to fix or improve it. So much so that in the end a fan made a patch which fixed many of the issues. If your game is so crappy that the customers have to make their own patches to fix it, then you don't deserve to be supported as a game developer. P.S. the game also shipped with Denuvo DRM, and the fan-made patch mod also had its own DRM/piracy checks. That's why this game will never get my money.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Didn't the Steam version recently get a patch?
  - dvlsg 5y ago
    No, but they announced they're working on it.
    - brobinson 5y ago
      It's likely they did this because it shows up as an alert in Steam for everyone who owns Automata, and they'd see that Replicant was about to be released.
- Ambrosia 5y ago
  That's on the publishers, Square Enix, who didn't want to play the developers to patch the game. They seem to have changed their mind recently as the patch is now in development for the steam version.
vmception 5y ago
Have you played Horizon Zero Dawn? Other flagship single player games released in 2017 have so much better graphics, immersive gameplays, and deeper stories. I'm really scratching my head on NieR fandom and I wonder if its lack of exposure for others to form an objective comparison, or if my tastes have really diverged so heavily.
- Agathos 5y ago
  I played Nier: Automata right after I finished Horizon Zero Dawn back in 2017. They were an interesting study in contrasts. I agree HZD is the better game, and Automata's flaws really wore on me sometimes, but I still liked it on balance. It plays around and gets weird in ways that a bigger-budget release like HZD can't risk. It probably helps that I actually did like the shooter mini-game that this article is about, musical transition and all.
- inopinatus 5y ago
  I’ve played both. I’ve also been playing video games for four decades. They’re very different experiences: HZD’s crowning glory is the joy of taking down robot dinosaurs; the varied scenery of the post-apocalyptic world is spectacular, but the backstory is a humdrum hegemonising-swarm AI apocalypse, presented via standard linear storytelling that telegraphs its reveals loudly and crudely, and the characters well produced and acted but narratively underdeveloped and ultimately cliched. It also has the worst puzzles I’ve ever seen in a computer game, so embarrassingly easy they’d be better off removed entirely, and playing it just after The Witness (I can never listen to Grieg ever again) only compounded this gaming felony. Nier:Automata remains to date the epitome of playable existentialism, and the characters (and their development) frankly unique, cut more from Camus and Japanese theatre than any sci-fi trope. It also presents a vastly more nuanced and integrated narrative structure. The ruined world is creatively, if somewhat allegorically built, some remarkable visual set-pieces but ultimately not as finely drawn as HZD, the regular switches between game styles keep it interesting instead, the range of optional combat moves is amazing (and superbly animated) and there is downright ingenuity to some of the challenges. Still, only one of these games needs a photo mode. But this topic is ultimately about soundtracks, in which Nier is absolutely superlative and I can’t even remember HZD’s, and observe that the sonic experience is fully one-half of AV. Long and short of it, I enjoyed both, but for entirely different reasons, and in both cases enough to motivate 100%-ing them. Not sure what “fandom” is. Sounds like a sex thing though, so I’m hesitant to look.

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Love details like this in videogames, can't imagine the work to try and get all the nice details like this in, seems a struggle at times just to get the basics of a project implemented.

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 5y ago

This should have a (2017) tag. NieR:Automata is not just one of my favorite games, but for me it has the best soundtrack out of any videogame I have ever played. Here are some of my favorite tracks [0] [1] [2] [3] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FzyKtct4es https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FzyKtct4es [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEVYS7Ofbgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEVYS7Ofbgo [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Frp1meFx0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Frp1meFx0c [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOuspYpbNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTOuspYpbNc

allarm 5y ago
Silent Hill series (especially SH2) also have an amazing soundtrack. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuxJNphw0Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuxJNphw0Mg
ljm 5y ago
The original NieR (just now re-released as NieR:Replicant) is also notable for having an amazing soundtrack with the lyrics being constructed from a totally made-up language. And the layering of the score as you go into and out of combat is nothing short of masterful. The first game holds a special place in my heart and playing the remake now is bringing back a lot of good memories. It's kind of odd but self-aware and the characterisation of a talking book is utterly astounding.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Was the remakes soundtrack redone? I noticed that the NieR:Automata soundtrack works really well with Automata, but it doesn't really stand out in any sense to me, whereas the Replicant one just sounds beautiful. So, the language is the same made-up ingame language? I've been wondering what language it could have been. It sounds a bit like a Germanic boy / children chorus.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

silvester23 5y ago

I feel like iMUSE [0] by the fantastic Michael Land needs to be mentioned here. Here it is in action: [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N41TEcjcvM

throwaway17_17 5y ago
Good mention. I feel like iMUSE was the beginning of what is today a large number of tools and techniques for audio presentation, particularly soundtracks, in game development.

gmueckl 5y ago

The effort that is put into the integration of video game music with the rest of the game is severely underappreciated for a lot of titles. I could list a lot of games from the top of my head that do that well in one form or another. But I'd like to point to two games that stick out of the pack in my opinion. 1. Portal 2: There are tons of subtle details to the background music in the game. Thermal Discouragement Beam targets will emit a melodic hum that integrates with the background music when they're activated. In rooms with multiple of them, each one becomes a distinct, randomized voice in the song. While catapulted through the air with an Aerial Faith Plates, the normal background music briefly fades to wind noise - with a procedurally generated retro synth melody on top. Normally, this fits in with the electronic/ambient background music, except in the one segment where there's a Bach piece playing. Then these short interstitials match Bach. 2. Control: This game has a segment called "Ashtray Maze". At the start of that segment, the player character puts on the headphones of a Walkman and a song by the Old Gods of Asgard (actually Poets of the Fall) starts playing while the player walks down what seems to be a run down motel hallway from a bygone era. The following section pulls the player through a quick succession of set pieces with big, fast fights and platforming elements, while the song seems to follow its own structure naturally. The pace is determined by the player. Yet, singing passages alternate with purely instrumental ones in a way that doesn't diminish or break the dramatic arc of the song while the tense section of the song invariably coincide with intense player action. It all culminates with the end of the song synchronizing very well with the defeat of the final enemy and exit from the section. The sound track version of the song is almost 8 minutes and the game version is probably split into countless sections (I estimate more than 100). Honorable mention: Journey and ABZU. Both games turn a score recorded by a big orchestra and choir into an adaptive layered soundtrack that is just seamless.

inopinatus 5y ago
Dan Golding’s soundtrack for Untitled Goose Game is close to a thousand slices of Debussy preludes, dynamically resequenced according to the player action. I think someone said, it’s like a Warner Bros cartoon in how closely the music follows the horrible goose action.
dharmab 5y ago

flobosg 5y ago

Related: “Epic and Interactive Music in Final Fantasy XV” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtoyunrO62I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtoyunrO62I