By the end of Baldur’s Gate 3, widely considered the standout video game released this year, you can literally go to hell. Doing so will pit you against the game’s equivalent of the devil, a charismatic yet demonic trickster who calls himself Raphael.
It’s one of the toughest and most dramatic encounters in the game, the culmination of 150 hours of play. Naturally, developer Larian Studios wanted it to feel monumental. So they decided that the battle should be accompanied by a song, and that Raphael should sing it. “The idea to have a song performed by Raphael himself came from our director Swen Vincke about six months before the release of the game,” says Borislav Slavov, music director of Baldur’s Gate 3. “The team immediately loved it. ”
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a big orchestral score, as you would expect from an epic fantasy story. But Raphael is more than just a powerful opponent. He is wry, cunning, narcissistic and has a penchant for the theatrical. A lover of West End theatre, Slavov began to wonder if there was another way to approach this particular part of the soundtrack. “The moment the text landed on my desk, I realized there was still one exciting way to go: a full musical number.”
The result was Raphael’s Final Act, a two-minute ode to Raphael’s power and the player’s impending doom, an ode that combines a creeping pipe organ melody with grand orchestral swells and imperious, mocking lyrics, sung in part by Raphael’s voice actor. (It’s funny that if you cast the Silence spell on Raphael during the battle, his lyrics are removed from the music.)
In a game designed to generate memorable moments, Raphael’s Final Act stands out. And strangely enough, Larian isn’t the only developer drawing inspiration from musicals this year. Plenty of major games have used music tracks to punctuate key moments. It’s a fascinating trend, one that highlights developers’ confidence: because of all the storytelling modes, musical theater leaves creators the least room to hide.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion is a spy thriller set in the fortified Dogtown district of Night City and asks the player to rescue an agent of the President from the clutches of a military dictator. The signature mission story is a glittering party at the top of a skyscraper that the player must infiltrate. The centerpiece is Delicate Weapon, a song performed on stage by Cyberpunk’s fictional pop star Lizzy Wizzy, written and performed by real-life musician Grimes.
“While designing this quest, our references included cult classics of the spy thriller genre. That was the atmosphere we wanted to create – chic parties full of beautiful people mingling and discussing highly critical topics in bored voices,” says Konrad Chlasta, quest design coordinator at CD Projekt Red. “We knew that music is absolutely crucial, because every song in these types of iconic scenes is a story in itself.”
CD Projekt wanted to create a musical number that would draw players in, juxtaposing the dangerous reality of their situation as intruders in the scene. But creating a ‘live’ musical act in a video game is no easy feat. Not only does the song have to be convincing, the performance also has to be believable, which is difficult to achieve with real-time animation. “Cinematic cutscenes are one thing, but seeing unnatural movements in dancing and unsynchronized vocal lines during songs are very easy to spot and would immediately break the immersion,” says Chlasta.
Putting together the Delicate Weapon series required input from virtually all game design disciplines: artists, animators, level designers, quest designers, cinematics, writers, programmers, not to mention the music itself. But the most crucial element for the performance to succeed was the timing. “There was one iteration [the song] it started right away when we entered the party, but that didn’t allow the player to actually interact with the guests or experience all the conversations,” says Chlasta. “We felt the perfect moment was right after the tone change – the moment the plan shifts; when an officer gets caught in a net bigger than they imagined.”
In the final version, Lizzy’s appearance begins immediately after you contact the agent you’re looking for. At this point, your preconceptions about where loyalties lie and what exactly is at stake suddenly change, and you’re left to consider what it all means amid the dancing lights of Lizzie’s holograms. “I noticed that most people watched the show and didn’t immediately bring up the plot, which means the concert works as it should,” says Chlasta. “It’s a pause for what comes next.”
Perhaps the most outrageous use of songs as storytelling this year comes from Remedy Entertainment, the Finnish studio behind Alan Wake 2, in which a real Finnish band called Poets of The Fall composed numerous songs as the fictional rock trio Old Gods of Asgard – and performed them in the game.
“It’s been a long process for us, using music and songs as part of the storytelling.” says Sam Lake, creative director of Remedy. “I’ve wanted a musical sequence in our games for a long time.” In Alan Wake 2, Alan, a professional author, is trapped in the Dark Place, an alternate dimension where anything he writes can come to life. “The dream-like nature of the Dark Place gave us a wonderful opportunity to create [a musical moment]as the entire Dark Place could be seen as a crazy Alan Wake fever dream,” Lake adds.
Lake devised a sequence in which Alan’s life story would be told through a spectacular four-part musical number. “I did what I usually do in our collaboration with Poets of the Fall and wrote a rough poem about what the text might be about, from which Marko Saaresto [Poets’ lead vocalist and songwriter] created the actual lyrics.”
The resulting song is a nine-minute musical biopic entitled Herald of Darkness. Remedy decided to combine live-action footage of the performance with the in-game world, with the player wandering around a stage while the song played on giant screens in the background. It was performed live by the game’s cast at LA’s Game Awards in December; Poets of the Fall, like Old Gods of Asgard, spent a week at number 18 on the album charts, meaning the game’s fiction actually changed reality.
Lake describes putting together Alan Wake 2’s musical numbers as “an enormous and complex technical effort” that involved not only the performance of the songs and a choreographed dance performed by key members of the game’s cast, but also the build-up of the level at which the player experiences the musical. . Nevertheless, We Sing is undeniably the highlight of the game. Not only is it completely unexpected in a survival horror game, but it also addresses the inherent silliness of the story, turning what could have been a weakness into a strength. “It felt like a perfect way to encapsulate Alan Wake’s character and story so far,” says Lake. “An exciting idea to surprise the player and show how crazy the Dark Place is as a setting.”
Remarkably, there’s an even more ambitious example of a game doing this in 2023. In August, Summerfall Studios released its debut title Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical. As the title suggests, Stray Gods is a fully-fledged, interactive West End show, where the choices you make influence not only the trajectory of the story, but also the direction of the songs.
“I toyed with the idea of an interactive musical when I was working for BioWare on Dragon Age: Inquisition,” said David Gaider, creative director and co-founder of Summerfall Studios. “It largely sticks to our strengths… dialogue, character, story – while expanding on those in a way that I found intriguing. After all, how hard can it be to branch out dialogue and add music and timers? The answer turned out to be ‘very’.”
Stray Gods places players in the role of Grace, a young singer who inherits the power of the ancient Greek muse, allowing her to compel people to express their feelings and desires through song. But this draws the attention of the ancient Greek gods, who accuse her of murdering the previous muse. To prove her innocence, Grace must discover the truth of what happened. In short: a perfect story for a musical.
Unlike a traditional musical, players can make choices that influence the story of Stray Gods. Players can determine how a number should proceed at various times during the performance. “The sheer difficulty in constructing the branching numbers, both from a creative and design perspective, was enormous,” says Gaider. Some of this was simply telling a video game story primarily through songs. “There were so many differences when it came to making a song, rules about what actually made it a song, as opposed to dialogue set to music.”
Creating a protagonist that feels consistent while giving the player the freedom to make choices is a known problem in game design, but Gaider says the musical element exacerbated this. “A traditional musical assumes that the main character has a clear arc, with his own dreams and hopes. However, once player agency is introduced, things become more complicated.” Gaider points to Once More With Feeling, the famous musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, as a guiding light throughout the development of Stray Gods because of “how it fundamentally changed the way the episode’s story was constructed. But in the end it was all a learning process. “We didn’t really find out until we were almost done making the game.”
Stray Gods may have been, in Gaider’s own words, a “five-year investment of sweat and blood,” but the result is a truly unique combination of narrative role-playing and musical theater. The project also showed Gaider the power music can have as a narrative tool. “I had a theory that, despite all the romances I’d written before in games that required hours of dialogue, I could possibly do the same thing in a much shorter time with music,” he says. “Can I make the player fall in love with a character in the space of one song? It turned out that the answer was definitively yes.”
Video games have long understood the importance of music as an accompaniment to play, and how music can set the mood for a given level or encounter. But what these projects demonstrate is the potential that music has when it is integrated more directly into the story, when it becomes an active participant in the story, rather than a passive one. “I believe that integrating songs into story-driven games is a very effective way to enhance the impact of the story and take it to the next level,” concludes Slavov. “We as humans tend to connect key moments in our lives with songs we listened to at the time. I believe this is the same for songs in video games.”