Adventure Gamers - Forums

DustCropper - 14 September 2014 06:27 PM

I just preordered the game on GOG and quickly previewed the soundtrack. While I seem to be an outlier here in that I find the graphics to be pretty decent, I am slightly disappointed with the soundtrack. I guess with Robert Holmes remastering it himself I had high expectations, and I was hoping that he’d introduce a lot more live instrumentation similar to what Jesse Harlin did with the Monkey Island soundtracks in the Monkey Island Special Editions. However, I guess that was outside the scope of this project as the music still relies quite heavily on synthesized instruments.

This won’t really change the basic source of your disappointment, since I’m sure that the final soundtrack will still rely heavily on synthesized instruments. (As you’ve speculated, I imagine that greater use of real instruments just wasn’t within the budget of the remake.) But you might be interested to know that the soundtrack given with pre-orders and to backers apparently isn’t quite final. There were some problems with the mixing and mastering of certain tracks, and Mr. Holmes has said that he hopes to correct the problematic tracks before the game’s release. So there’s at least some chance that you’ll like the final mixes of those tracks a bit better.

Iznogood - 14 September 2014 09:16 PM

Isn’t it Activision and not POS that is the publisher of the game and therefore the one doing the strong-arming?

Technically, no, Activision is not publishing the game; they are licensing out the GK1 remake rights. Pinkerton Road (Jane Jensen’s company) is self-publishing.

However, that doesn’t mean Activision has no authority over the remake: they still have authority via the terms of the licensing contract. Backers know, for example, that Pinkerton Road has a contractual timeframe within which to release the GK1 remake. We’ve also been told that Activision is approving the final GK1 build before it’s released.

I’m not sure what the situation is with the regional pricing on GOG, but it could be either Activision or Pinkerton Road that made the decision.

Caliburn - 14 September 2014 11:26 PM

This won’t really change the basic source of your disappointment, since I’m sure that the final soundtrack will still rely heavily on synthesized instruments. (As you’ve speculated, I imagine that greater use of real instruments just wasn’t within the budget of the remake.) But you might be interested to know that the soundtrack given with pre-orders and to backers apparently isn’t quite final. There were some problems with the mixing and mastering of certain tracks, and Mr. Holmes has said that he hopes to correct the problematic tracks before the game’s release. So there’s at least some chance that you’ll like the final mixes of those tracks a bit better.

Thanks for updating me on those issues. That’s good to hear that the music is being updated. Shame about the technical troubles, I hope that Robert Holmes is able to recover whatever was lost.

Judging from his work on recent POS/PRS titles I’d say Mr. Holmes seems to like the brick wall mastering that has been so popular in the last 15 years or so but is thankfully more and more a thing of the past. Nothing could be less professional these days than to limit the dynamic range of music too much through digital compressors. Good thing he seems to have listened to critics though. I for one would rather he left the soundtrack alone completely. Such a fantastic job with only midi instruments in the early 90’s! Still holds.

Looking very much forward to the game. Am I right to believe I will get it for free since I was a backer (US 50 plus) of Moebius? Preordered in from GOG before I came to think of that… But if it will bring us closer to a GK 4 it is worth paying for it twice.

KatieHal - 10 September 2014 02:29 PM

Ahh. Yes, in that case it will depend on if you chose GK as your game from the Kickstarter. If so, when we get closer to release, we’ll be sending it to that specific list of people.

Katie, is it confirmed that backers from the Kickstarter that selected Gabriel Knight over Moebius will get the soundtrack aswel?
I need to know, because if not, I probably need to do the pre-order before the deal expires! I really don’t want to miss Robert Holmes’ soundtrack

No, the August update (Kickstarter update 63) contained a dropbox link with a GK media kit, CSG update and Moebius into the fire pdf, but no music or soundtrack.

[EDIT: None of the files in Dropbox seem to work…..did I miss maybe an update? The last Kickstarter update was from the 9th of September]

I didn’t get an additional Kickstarter message after the one I mentioned earlier, but I’ll try to login Kickstarter and see if I can find it there.

Yeah, one of the things you learn being on the development side of things, is that game journalists rarely do their due diligence when previewing or reviewing a game.  I lost count of how many QFI reviews chided us for not allowing players to play the game in fullscreen (despite that option clearly being available in the setup menu.)  It is not at all uncommon for them to just make statements like that entirely out of their ass.  Maybe the author meant that the musical pieces are the same as the original (not the same recordings, but the same tunes.)  In any case, the way he said it was certainly misleading.