I’d love to hear a dual interview from Masten and Rippy sometime to get a better sense of their differing though process on how to approach game music.Celebrating its first year of delighting millions of global players, the award-winning and best-selling strategy franchise continues with Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition, putting you at the center of even more epic historical battles that shaped the world.įeaturing both familiar and innovative new ways to expand your empire, Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition brings an evolved real-time strategy game to the next level with a host of free new content and features including brand-new civilizations, new maps, additional in-game updates and languages, and new masteries, challenges, taunts and cheats – all at an amazing value that packs in more history than ever before! Overall I’d say this is a big step up and I wonder what we have in store for AoE3DE and especially 4 since then Todd Masten will truly be able to express himself musically without previous tracks to bind him. Its not perfect mind you, placing two Conquerers tracks before 4 tracks like victory and loss screens before they resume is a strange move, but it wasn’t anything like the seemingly random mess of track ordering in the original AoEDE. I also feel like the track listing on this soundtrack is more sensible than the previous release. In general I feel the DE II soundtrack was handled better than DE (maybe partially sue to experience but also I feel the melodies stand out better and the choice of instrumentation sits better with me) but the Conquerors tracks are almost transcendant compared to the original and they may become my preferred way to listen to those tracks. This is where Masten really shines since it seems to play to his strong suits and rather than being disappointed that an increase in fidelity didn’t enhance the old tracks like I had hoped I felt blown away by these new tracks to the point where I think I may actually prefer them over the original. Conquerers was already less melodic and more ambient in the first place, with a larger focus on a feeling of space and a slight feeling of tension. Even just hearing Pork Parts once I could tell this was going to be different. However I feel that the work on the Conquerers soundtrack is fantastic. They aren’t bad but the strong melodies and the fusion of electronic and traditional instruments that I loved in the original soundtracks just seem a lot less present in Masten’s work so far. Its not that the melodies aren’t there its that some of the notes have been changed for a seemingly indeterminate reason often creating tension and not resolving chord progression while other layers have simply been lowered in the mix so much that I can only notice them with headphones. Without the melodies being as strong I find it harder to notice the music during gameplay. They also sometimes feel a little over complicated, adding in a ton of layers that certainly make the track feel full when some of the older tracks could feel sparse at times, however this is at the sacrifice of clarity as all of the layers can sometimes blend together in gameplay. This may be due to Nostalgia but I also feel that Masten’s work tends to focus less on the strong melodies of the original. In listening to both Stephen Rippy’s work and the work of Todd Masten I have to say that I generally prefer Rippy’s.
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