Jeremy Soule is an undoubtedly talented composer, writing the themes for games such as Guild Wars and Company of Heroes. I love listening to them, but the main problem I find is that they are way too short. They are often large orchestral scores, which you would expect to be long and epic but most of them only clock in at around 2 minutes, shorter than most ambient tracks in games.
The theme usually takes 30 seconds to start up, goes into an awesome main melody for about a minute, but then ends abruptly and starts to wind down. Here are some examples:
Guild Wars Prophecies Main Theme
Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts Main Theme
Compare to:
Wrath of the Lich King Main Theme
Metal Gear Solid 3 Main Theme
As you can tell, the quality is at least as good, perhaps even better than similar game music, but the short length of Jeremy Soule's pieces heavily detract from the overall experience. I realize that it's very difficult to compose music for games, but his work would seriously benefit from an increase in length.
Log in to comment