What makes a good game - A critics perspective: Episode #2 - Music and Sound Effects

Hello everyone and welcome to a series here on Kralizec Gaming - „What makes a game good – A critics perspective“

In this series we will look at mechanics that make for good, fun and entertaining games.

Today we will be looking at another topic very much similar to graphics in the way it impacts games as its main purpose is to create atmosphere within games. Today we are going to be taking a look at music and sound effects in games.

So music. One of the most subjective things you can find. How can you quantify whether music in a game is good or bad objectively if you just don't like the genre. To be honest, you can't. But you can judge things like whether the music fits the game. Whether it is well used to make you feel calm in the mellow parts of the game and get you all worked out during the action parts of the game. Or of course, there are times when the music is just of so high quality that even if you don't like that particular genre you can say that it is just awesome.

Music

Music is sadly something developers often overlook when creating their game. And I'm not saying it causes their games to be bad, but great music can often elevate a good game into a great game. Or a great game into a masterpiece. Luckily, thanks to the amounts of royalty free music available online these days, most games don't really have that bad music, but so often it's just so average that you don't even notice it is in the game.

But let's talk about the main thing that makes music great in games. And that is how responsive it is to the gameplay. So often, specially in smaller games, we just see the music being played in a randomized loop in the background. Luckily, triple A and even double A games these days realize that making the music react to the gameplay is an important thing. Here the one issue that does often the music doesn't react quick enough to a situation change. Like when you get into cover, there should be different music from the combat music, but it just sticks for like 15 seconds, because the game isn't noticing you are already in combat.

Then you have the genre. As I already stated, it is really hard to judge whether the music is good in a genre you're not a fan of. But what you can criticize really easily is the validity of the choice of the music genre to the game genre. Like for instance, having death-metal as the soundtrack for a cute platformer probably won't be the ideal choice and on the other hand, calm romantic music probably won't work well for a game like Quake.

Sound effects

The second thing that makes games sound great are its sound effects. These are something you can still find to be bad in many many games even these days. Though there is one thing similar to music - the bigger companies tend to have their sound effects at least decent if not good.

Sadly, specially new small studios tend to underestimate the value of good sound effects, even though you again can easily get them of the internet for a minuscule amount of money or even for free. And I don't really understand why these studios don't take a look at these assets of their games. They still have to include sound effects in at least a basic way, so while finding, choosing and even paying would add to the development cost for sure, I'm also quite sure that the amount of money made because the effects of the games don't sound like they were made by a 5 year old's mouth 10 minutes before the release of the game would be much larger then the costs.

So in the end, we must come to some sort of conclusion right? Of course we do. Music is in my opinion an underestimated tool by game developers. Sometimes I feel like they feel like music is just something they need to add because it's the industry standard and putting some thought and work into is something that doesn't pay out. But it does. There are games like for example Transistor that prove music can definitely be one of the selling points of your game. Luckily, with the rise of selling the original soundtracks on Steam, we are starting to see more and more devs being more thoughtful about what music and sound effects they will include in their game as it alone can be another revenue source for the developers.