#Jack mass effect full

“I’ve done a ton of music outside of that era but owed to that era, like Mass Effect.”

“I was super excited when I learned we would be in that era,” says Wall. Even if you’re not thinking about the music while playing the game’s story mode, we feel it viscerally improves the experience if we give the music all the love we can.”īeing able to work on a new campaign score for Black Ops Cold War was a delight in itself, Wall tells us, but the fact that the story was set in the 1980s – a period that continues to be hugely influential for sci-fi and futuristic sounds – was even more thrilling. He continues: “For me, storytelling is the fun part of writing music for games and Treyarch spends a lot of time focusing on the narrative in the single-player campaigns. If the music goes away or is not there, and you miss it, then we’re doing our job.” In any case, it’s got to have energy and keep up with the action. Maybe it’s the location or the characters involved that I can latch onto. Or I might have a lot of percussion that feels appropriate for a specific map. “I might do something with high strings or a pad without a lot of conflicting percussion.

#Jack mass effect full

But even when the combat is full on, there are ways to heighten the experience for the player, even if the music is playing more of a support role in the background.

For example, I will write more moody music for the exploration sections. “But there are plenty of moments when you’re not fully engaged in combat in the campaign. “It’s definitely an important consideration,” Wall admits. Certainly, in the immediate adrenaline of an FPS, an immersive cinematic score might not be as much of a priority as compared to the sounds of gunfire, explosions and enemy footsteps. So it must be a surprise then that Wall didn’t continue working on Mass Effect after the second instalment – arguably the series’ peak – but instead leapt into the challenge of composing for Call Of Duty’s Black Ops series, starting with 2012’s Black Ops 2 and continuing with the latest Black Ops Cold War.