Fans around the world have been waiting for the return of Age of Empires and Dynamedion has been excited to take part in its development. In collaboration with World’s Edge Studio and Relic Entertainment, Dynamedion announced their work on producing the soundtrack of the upcoming release, Age of Empires IV.
The Dynamedion team provided more than 620 minutes of music in the most massive project of its nearly 20-year history. The soundtrack is intensively complex: perfectly timed transitions are designed to carry the players smoothly from one phase of gameplay into the next. The intensity changes depending on what is happening as well, from combat to ambient, from tense to raw. They were further designed to imperceptibly change as the players advance through the ages. The scores of the comprehensive soundtrack were written by top composers from Dynamedion, including Tilman Sillescu, Henning Nugel, Armin Haas and Alexander Röder, who have been working on the project since 2018.
The lead composer of the project Tilman Sillescu said, “We’ve used such techniques that we implemented in Age of Empires IV in other games before. But we’ve never used so many techniques at the same time and so complexly intertwined. Each cue had to be coordinated with many others, loopable and with transitions, so that all transitions worked smoothly. It was a big, architectural task, almost like a big Wagnerian opera with overlength!”
The company was responsible for composing and orchestrating the main theme and music for nearly all the featured civilizations, including the Delhi Sultanate (Haas), Mongols (Sillescu), Holy Roman Empire (Sillescu), Rus (Nugel), Abbasid Dynasty (Nugel), Chinese (Röder), and English (Röder). Every effort was made to maintain the authenticity of the sounds of each civilization. The historical music of each group was carefully analyzed and woven into the soundtrack, and orchestras and musicians from around the world were tapped to take part. For example, the Mongolian themes include a professional Mongolian throat singer and an actual Morin Khuur ensemble recorded on location.
This is not your typical game soundtrack, but rather a truly global endeavor. Recorded in 11 studios across the world, it features three live orchestras, two choirs, and over 20 soloists, utilising culturally specific instruments and virtuosos from the relevant regions.
The work required very close interaction with Relic Entertainment. “I had never experienced such a meticulous approach to cultures before,” Sillescu shares. “Relic really wanted the civilizations to be depicted as seriously and accurately as possible.” The collaboration with Lin Gardiner, the Relic Music Lead, was a special experience for the team of composers, assuring an unrivaled complexity and immersion in the soundtrack for the gameplay process.
“We have a long-standing relationship with Dynamedion and they have delivered again on an epic, globally recorded soundtrack that is guaranteed to thrill diehard fans and newcomers to the Age of Empires franchise,” says World’s Edge, audio director Todd Masten.
