Fans of the eagerly anticipated RPG from Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment, Pillars of Eternity, have been given an extensive look into the creation of the game’s soundtrack, along with a teaser track from one of the environments.
Accompanying an extensive forum post from Audio Director Justin Bell is the background score for an area of the game called Dyrford Village. The piece’s sweeping orchestral soundscapes are accompanied by stills of the game’s environments.
“Things I’ve been putting on lately are the soundtracks for The Elder Scrolls (III, IV, and V), The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, anything by Basil Poledouris, and of course the [Infinity Engine] soundtracks, just to name a few” writes Bell, citing various works that are informing his work on Pillars.
His mentioning of the Infinity Engine soundtracks references Pillars‘ spiritual ancestors that ran on Bioware’s Infinity Engine, namely Planescape Torment, Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. “If you were to loosely analyze the music from Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 for example,” he continues, “you would find a number of stylistic similarities between them. Without getting too technical, their music combines tropes found in European folk and pre-Renaissance modal music, and mashes that together with modern day orchestration techniques and film music aesthetics.”
Envisioned as a modern day isometric-view RPG reminiscent of Bioware and Black Isle’s greatest hits, Pillars of Eternity has been in development since 2012, and successfully raised close to $4 million on Kickstarter, becoming one of the highest funded projects on the website. Obsidian have stated that they chose to fund their project through crowdfunding as the lack of a funding publisher would free them to explore more mature subject matter in their game. This includes hot topics such as slavery, drug use, and racism.
Although the game’s Kickstarter run has ended, Obsidian is still taking pledges for the game in order to fund the creation of additional environments and companions.
Pillars of Eternity is set to release sometime this year for the PC, Mac and Linux via Steam and GOG.