Chapter 20: A DirectMusic Case Study for Asheron s Call 2: The Fallen Kings

Download CD Content

Jason Booth

Introduction

Turbine Entertainment developed Asheron's Call 2: The Fallen Kings. Geoff Scott composed the music for the game. Dan Ogles handled the DirectMusic programming. I designed the music system and integration.

Music for Massively Multiplayer Games

Understanding the dynamics of the game is the first step to designing a music system. It is important to ask yourself many questions about the player's experience that go beyond simple stylistic concerns. Asheron's Call 2 is an "online massively multiplayer roleplaying game," or MMRPG for short. A massively multiplayer game involves thousands of users playing together in one large fantasy game world, hosted online. A role-playing game (RPG) is one in which the player assumes the life of a fictional character that he or she creates. We call this character an avatar. An avatar in Asheron's Call 2 is a three-dimensional character that can be one of a number of fantasy races, be either gender, and have various customizable physical traits. In an MMRPG, gameplay is not clearly defined; players can roam the game world as a loner, or they can choose to work with other users to solve various quests and puzzles.

Massively multiplayer games (MMPs), in their current form, have some unique challenges worth considering when designing a music system. For instance, the average MMP game session is much longer than most single-player game sessions. In addition, people tend to play MMP games for many months or years before growing tired of the game. Regardless of your development budget, chances are you're going to have a hard time making the music interesting for an extremely long period.

The sheer size of an MMP is also daunting. Many of the techniques used in a traditional interactive scoring approach may not be viable simply because you cannot create music for every place or place cues for every location. In our case, we are dealing with a seamless world, which means we cannot rely on convenient divisions to start and stop music or load in new data.

You also do not have control over in-game situations. In a tightly scripted single-player game sequence, you only have to worry about one person interacting with the game, and therefore it is possible to set up musical changes based on what the listener expects to happen. With an MMP, an area that is supposed to be a hotbed of excitement might be completely swarmed with players who cleared out all the monsters, thus making it seem more like a safe haven than a battleground.

Finally, when making an MMP, there is a strong desire to be able to change data after the game's release. In the case of Asheron's Call, we built the franchise around stories that propagate to the user over small monthly patches. This has greatly influenced our data structure choices, as we want to be able to make huge changes to the game in very small amounts of data so our users don't have to suffer through large downloads. For us, being able to add new music in a small amount of data was also important.

However, while there are a lot of new restrictions imposed by the current MMP game designs, there are some unique opportunities as well. First, MMPs are primarily a social experience. While you might think that you are building a certain type of game, what you are really building is an experience for people with common interests to socialize around. At any given time, a very large percent of the user base is simply socializing around a meeting point or common interest within the game. Many of the systems in these games are designed to encourage social interaction, as in the long run it will be the social aspects of the game that keep many of your users subscribed to your service.

Given this, it is necessary to look at the activities that friends enjoy together, as well as those popular and universal throughout the world's culture. It is also important to look at the tools people use to identify themselves as individuals while identifying themselves with various groups within society. An MMP that successfully provides these activities and tools will be one with a compelling social base and therefore have a longer subscriber life.

In my experience, music has the potential to provide all of this and more. Music is fundamentally a social experience. Whether you are going to a concert or playing in a band, it is a social experience at heart. Outside of downloading pornography, chat and music downloading are also the two largest activities on the web. This makes some type of musical activity the perfect fit for an MMP, which is why we decided to add some form of player-created music into the game.

Project Goals

Before we move into the details of the music system, let's define a common set of terms, review the problems, and discuss potential solutions to those problems:

Repetition

This is probably the number one reason I turn the music off on so many games. I simply get sick of hearing the same thing repeatedly. It is important that the game's music vary each time that it plays. The wider the variance, the longer the ear can withstand the same basic song playing.

Adaptive

When many people talk about "interactive" or "dynamic" music systems, they are often talking about the music system being able to adapt to changes in gameplay. Much like a good film score, the music should highlight key moments in the gameplay, making things more exciting and supporting the mood.

Interactive

By my definitions, an interactive music system is one that the user can directly control in some way. To accomplish this goal, AC2 allows players to play music with each other using a simplified musical interface. Additionally, the Tumeroks, a type of playable character (or race, to be more accurate) in the game, use drums to cast magic spells, which also work with the music system.

Informative

My final goal was that the music system be informative. It is my belief that a passive music system does not hold the listener as long as a system that is providing information interesting to the listener. We spend an amazing amount of time making the visuals of a game clue in players about their surroundings, and so should the music. Many of these clues can be subtle, leaving the player with subconscious information about situations and surroundings. For AC2, the scenery around the player determines the background music, while monsters bring in individual melodies that warn the player of their presence.

Code Budget

We knew from the beginning of the project that our programming time and support would be limited. The music system was very much my pet project for AC2. Others treated it with less priority than it deserved. The team passed it off from one programmer to another, and it accrued bugs along the way. Given this, we tried to design things to "just work" with as little custom code as possible. We also knew that eventually we would work on other projects, so others might not follow any rules that we established about how to place music in the world in the future.

Our mechanism for triggering music was the same as triggering sound. A music hook looked just like a sound hook to the system, so anywhere that we could call a sound sample we could call a Segment. This was useful because it meant we could attach music hooks to character animations or spell effects through our "fx system" or environments through our ambient sound system. Once triggered, DirectMusic handles everything else.