» Tue Jun 12, 2012 2:11 am What about the score? I mean, writing a score and getting it recorded by an orchestra and a vocal choir is no inexpensive proposition. The composer commands a good fee, then there's a conductor and an entire orchestra to pay to record the piece - lots of pieces, actually, since there's more than just the opening score. There's background music playing through the entire game, and there's incidental music when something particularly dramatic happens - leveling up, seeing some especially scenic view in a dungeon, and of course the combat music. Then on top of that, Skyrim has a number of pieces that include vocal parts, so you've got to hire a choir on top of the orchestra.
Then you also have to pay for studio time - and a professional recording studio is not cheap at all - along with the rather expensive talents of professional engineers and a music producer, all of whom are well-paid professionals working in a very lucrative industry.
Long story short, this is one hell of a lot of money dedicated to having the game scored. It's obviously just yet another step in Bethesda's long decline since they were doing things right, back in the days of Morrowind (although even Morrowind had resources leeched by a professional score) and they're just abandoning the hardcoe gamers, the RPers, their real base, to appeal to the Casuals and their ridiculous Modern Warfare and Call of Duty and Angry Birds. Think about how much money they could have saved by not having spent all that money on this flash-in-the-pan, all-glitz-and-no-substance music score, and instead spending it to hire a metric ton of writers, who could really flesh out their characters? I mean, really flesh them out. Don't you just kinda find it annoying that you can't follow Nazeem and find out why he doesn't seem to think his [censored] stinks? Well, if there were enough writers hired, there could have been a writer whose only task was to develop a massive, branching dialogue tree that would allow you to find out why Nazeem was such a [censored] arrogant [censored] and why he wanders around town when he's got a farm to run? Maybe you could invite him to the inn for a meal and, y'know, just sit down to talk to him and really get to know Nazeem as Nazeem, an individual, and not just "that stuck-up Redguard who wanders around the market in Whiterun and whose wife thinks he's worthless."
I mean, do we really need a live score to the game? Back in the day we had MIDI scores playing in the background? Was that so bad? Did we have to abandon MIDI scores, which were dirt cheap, and replace them with expensive scores played by live musicians, when we could have had the money allocated to some real, deep conversational trees, so that we could really get to know these simulated characters better?
And then there's 3D modeling. Yes, yes, it's pretty and all, but is it really all that necessary from a role-playing perspective? I mean, back in the day we had Doom, with its sprite-based enemies, and that worked well enough. Daggerfall used sprites for NPCs and monsters as well, and durn it that worked well enough for role-playing purposes. Where's peoples' senses of imagination? And again - think of all the money Bethesda had to sink into a top-of-the-line game engine capable of rendering all these high-polygon 3D models with textures, and their fancy HDR lighting effects and water particle spray effects for the waterfalls.
Think of how many writers Bethesda could have hired if they had saved the money on the score AND on all the fancy graphical bells and whistles that serve nothing but to lure the stupid Casual Gamers away from their Wii and their iPhones and their Farmville and their Words With Friends and their Mario Kart; they're just messing things up and distracting Bethesda from developing games for the REAL gamers, the Hard-core Gamers, the True Believers.
Again, think of how many writers Bethesda could have hired with all that money; hell, I bet you could sit and talk to Nazeem or Belethor for hours. Maybe one day, Nazeem. Maybe one day.
