GDC 2025 Session Viewer

The Star Wars franchise is well-known for its scores featuring traditional full orchestra. In previous games, we've used scripted music changes and horizontal transitions to add interactivity to the music, but due to the orchestral nature of the franchise, a fully dynamic system was generally infeasible. This talk discusses the creative and technical solutions we developed for Star Wars: Outlaws, an open world action-adventure title featuring dynamic music and modern production elements, but still carrying the orchestral signature of the franchise.

Takeaway

This presentation demonstrates a robust open-world music system, and explains the specific compositional restrictions and recording practices we used to fit our orchestral score into it. It also discusses the use of non-orchestral instruments and modern production elements, detailing how and why they became vital to the music direction.

Intended Audience

This presentation assumes basic knowledge of music composition and music implementation. Ideal attendees include music composers, supervisors, editors, and implementers, or anyone working with dynamic music system design.