Sometimes a video game’s music is so good that you stop playing and just sit there, enjoying it. That’s definitely happened to me a few times while playing the Destiny beta.
When you’re cruising in your ship, killing time before setting off on another quest, the game’s orchestral score will start to play in the background. It is lovely.
I like this track in particular, an anthem that gets so epic it almost makes me laugh — it’s like The West Wing meets John Williams. It’s somehow even better with the low rumble of my ship idling in the background.
I went ahead and cut together the cutscenes from the Beta, if you’re curious and want to watch them. (They contain some spoilers, I suppose, though it’s not clear how close the beginning of the Beta is to the beginning of the actual game.) The music that plays during the cinematic sequences is uniformly terrific, sometimes to a distracting degree.
The piece of music from the first video plays during the cutscene at 8:32, and I can’t deny it’s doing some serious emotional heavy lifting. The dialogue itself is awfully ponderous, this guy with no face talking about The Darkness and The Ghosts. But the music…it’s so good, it elevates the whole thing to a degree of grandeur that the writing couldn’t hope to achieve alone.
Given the fact that Bungie unceremoniously fired their longtime resident composer Martin O’Donnell just a couple of months ago and have a number of other composers working on Destiny, it might never be entirely clear who composed which tracks for the game. (Though we can hope for an original soundtrack release that comes with proper crediting.) That said, these orchestral tracks have O’Donnell’s fingerprints all over them, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t his work.
It’s brilliant, grand stuff, and displays a level of poise and melodic confidence that we rarely get to hear in video games. Yet another reminder never to underestimate the power of a good video game soundtrack.
Comments
7 responses to “The Destiny Soundtrack Is So Good It’s Distracting”
This shouldn’t be surprising, Halo some of the best soundtracks in the business. Up there with Uncharted and Mass Effect.
Man, the mind boggles if you think what this game could be if Bungie didn’t feel the need to conform to the first-person shooter genre. (le sigh)
Yeah, I wish Bungie and Naughty-Dog would get together and make some epic, story driven monster of a game.
The soundtrack actually lets me know when ive killed all the enemies during a firefight lol
This is why getting rid of Martin O’Donnell was such a terrible idea, and why I hope that he goes back to Halo with 343i.
A gif in an article about music? Seems like a logical choice…
Not really interested in playing the game, but I’m going to buy the Destiny OST as soon as it’s out.