Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1538144
58 M PS E . O R G From Linear to Interactive: Adapting Music for Player Agency Garrett Montgomery MPSE: Congratulations on the MPSE Golden Reel Award. What did this recognition mean to your team, and what aspect of your music editorial work on Star Wars Outlaws do you feel stood out to the judges? Simon Koudriavtsev MPSE: Thank you! It means a lot to us. We are extremely happy to get this amazing recognition! We wouldn't have gotten to this point without Wilbert Roget's (and co-composers Jon Everist and Kazuma Jinnouchi's) amazing soundtrack, so our goal was to make sure we made it shine as much as possible. The two toughest aspects of making the music work in our game were, first, it being an open-world game where anything can happen at any time, and second, Star Wars music is quite complex in the way it's structured, with odd time signatures and peculiar tonal shifts. Making it all feel seamless is possibly one of the factors that the judges recognized. How does music editing for a dynamic, open-world title like Outlaws differ from linear media like film or television? Simon: The biggest factor is that the player is in control of what is going to happen next. The player can explore locations on the speeder, end up in space combat with the Trailblazer, play Sabacc in a cantina, or infiltrate an Imperial compound. Our job was to ensure that the music flowed seamlessly throughout any moment, unless it was a cinematic moment, where the music treatment is very much like in linear media. Here, I have to give credit to all our fantastic music editors on the project, as we had a lot of cinematics to get through! Scoring for Storytelling: Themes, Branches, and Narrative Flow How did you approach editing music to support the nonlinear storytell- ing and player-driven choices in the game? Were there branching musical cues or layered stems that had to be meticulously managed? Simon: Being such a huge game, we had to find a way of splitting the music up into categories or "themes," as we Imperial Station