Adaptive Soundtrack from Across the World

Partnering with Relic Entertainment and World’s Edge, Dynamedion embarks on the largest, most immersive project of its history.

(Credits: Relic Entertainment)

Project: Age of Empires IV

Client: Relic Entertainment, World’s Edge

We Did: Music Composition • Orchestra, Choir, Soloist Recordings

Age of Empires is known as one of the best ever real-time-strategy games. People continue to play the previous installments of the franchise in massive tournaments online, as well as the more recently released Definitive Edition titles. For some time, fans have asked for a brand new entry to the franchise.

Working together, Relic Entertainment and World’s Edge have delivered and answered. Big time. After a sixteen-year hiatus, Age of Empires has returned with an all-new edition, with a soundtrack which we nearly completely composed and recorded.

“Our team has really given everything to live up to the huge expectations of this great brand,” our lead composer Tilman Sillescu said about working with Relic. “This project was more than just a video game – there is so much enthusiasm for history, culture, and all the peculiarities of the two. We at Dynamedion hope that enthusiasm carries over to the players.”

A project of epic proportions

With over 620 minutes of music in the most massive project of our nearly 20-year history, there were indeed some huge expectations. It is an intensively complex soundtrack: It includes perfectly timed transitions designed to carry the players smoothly from one phase of gameplay into the next; with an intensity that changes depending on what is happening as well, from combat to ambient, from tense to raw.

“We’ve used such techniques that we implemented in Age of Empires IV in other games before,” says Tilman Sillescu. “But we’ve never used so many techniques at the same time and so complexly intertwined. Each cue had to be coordinated with many others, loopable and with transitions, so that all transitions worked smoothly. It was a big, architectural task, almost like a big Wagnerian opera with overlength!”

Working on the project was some of our top veteran composers, including Tilman Sillescu, Henning Nugel, Armin Haas and Alexander Röder, who have been working on the project since 2018.

Around the world with painstaking authenticity

We were responsible for composing and orchestrating the main theme and music for nearly all the featured civilizations. Haas composed the sounds for the Delhi Sultanate, Sillescu covered the Mongols and the Holy Roman Empire, Nugel took the Rus and the Abbasid Dynasty, while Röder wrote the soundtrack for the Chinese and the English. Every effort was made to maintain the authenticity of the sounds of each civilization. The historical music of each group was carefully analyzed and woven into the soundtrack, and orchestras and musicians from all around the world were tapped to take part. For example, the Mongolian themes include a professional Mongolian throat singer and an actual Morin Khuur ensemble recorded on location.

This is not your typical game soundtrack, but rather a truly global endeavor. Recorded in 11 studios across the world, it features 3 live orchestras, 2 choirs, and over 20 soloists, utilizing culturally specific instruments and virtuosos from the relevant regions.

Close cooperation with Relic

The work required very close interaction with Relic Entertainment, as required the civilizations to be depicted as seriously and accurately as possible. Our team was involved in weekly Skype calls with Lin Gardiner, the Relic Music Lead, to assure an unrivaled complexity and immersion in the soundtrack for the gameplay process. Gardiner did mountains of research on the styles of the different cultures and made sure that everything was clear with our team. “She even wrote lists of historical instruments used at the different times for us. I had never experienced such a meticulous approach to cultures before,” Sillescu shares. “Lin incorporated every cue we made directly into the current version of the game and was able to give us very meaningful feedback about the effect of the music in the game.”

Learn more about the music development in this Dev Diary: Music & Voice Over

Get a taste of the music:

OST-Credits:

Artist: Various

Composers: Tilman Sillescu, Alex Röder, Henning Nugel, Armin Haas, Mikolai Stroinski

Orchestrated by: David Christiansen

Live Recordings produced by: Dynamedion

Exceutive Producer: Lin Gardiner 

Mixed by: Rupert Coulson 

Mastered by: Gavin Lurrsen

Production Support: Savannah Harrison

Special Thanks: Todd Masten, Bryan Rennie, Lauren Wood

FIRST REACTIONS

“…amazing job, seriously. The ingame music is a Masterpiece. It gives you chills, it lets you feel heroic, it sets the mood, the tone. Rarely I have seen anything comparable…Well done.”

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“Sound design and music design of this game is astounding… 10/10”

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“The voice acting and music in this game is just 🖤“

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“EXCELLENT JOB to everyone involved in music and sound.“

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Chilling horns and daring strings storm the beaches of Italy.

Relic Entertainment asked us to compose the music for two trailers presenting their upcoming Company of Heroes 3.

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(Credits: Relic Entertainment)

Project: Company of Heroes 3 – Announcement Trailers

Client: Relic Entertainment / SEGA

We Did: Composition, Recording

Alex Pfeffer and Benny Oschmann, two of our most experienced composers, had the extreme pleasure to compose the soundtracks for Company of Heroes 3‘s announcement trailers. They wrote the adventurous compositions which were later recorded by a live studio orchestral sections, to capture the perfect essence of the upcoming action video game. The woodwinds, brass, and strings were recorded separately in Budapest in 2020 in cooperation with the Budapest Symphonic Scoring Orchestra.

Company of Heroes 3

The Company of Heroes games are renowned and publicly acclaimed as one of the best real-time strategy video games since the original’s inception in 2006. Company of Heroes 3 follows the story of a group of Allied companions battling against German forces in North Africa and landing in Italy at the onset of the Allied invasion. Following the company’s assault on German positions, the game carries the players through battlefield strategy, flanking maneuvers, artillery shelling and more as it immerses them into the period of the Second World War.

The process

“I was aiming for the typical and familiar WW2 style of music. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel here, but I was also aiming for a little more modern and gritty approach and without the typical military snares,” Alex Pfeffer said regarding creating the soundtrack. “There is a lot of preparation, infiltration, and destruction going on. So, I wanted to make sure to underline that. The only shiny moment is basically the airstrike at the very end which is perfectly resembled by the main theme.”

The cinematic announcement trailer

Part of the immersion is having the right soundtrack, and you can see and hear in the videos how Alex and Benny captured this.

The first video, the cinematic announcement trailer, opens with a slow horn drone while Allied soldiers race across the beach and paratroopers drop from the sky. The music is then used to signal mystery and tension with a staccato string rhythm. Tension builds with a timpani striking like small explosions to accent the rhythm.

And then silence to accent the action. Horns blasting, rising, lowering, following the queues of each scene, giving space or heightening the underscore as its needed. As the actions build, so do the strings and the heroic, almost swashbuckling resolution when our heroes emerge from the wreckage, nod to the woman helping them, and hurry off to start their next mission.

The gameplay trailer

The second trailer is the gameplay trailer. Here we start off in the parachutes, with the action-adventure strings already warmed up and bowing as we look through flashing scenes from the announcement trailer. The music quiets down and lets the timpani take over as the voiceover comes in, setting up the scene. When the voice finishes the introduction, the strings pick up and keep the adventurous, actionable mood of the game.

“The tricky part of the trailer was to set up the flow and the mood for all the different, mostly, unfinished scenes and imagine how it all turns out in the end,” said Alex. “To be honest, I am very happy with the results and Benny did an awesome job on writing that main theme.”

Relic Entertainment will release Company of Heroes 3 on Steam in 2022. An alpha build is currently available to try.

Our involved team:

Composers: Alex Pfeffer and Benny Oschmann

Are you also interested in working together with Dynamedion? Check out our services and tell us more about your project!

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