Assassin's Creed Odyssey sets players on a grand adventure through an Ancient Greece rich with culture, conflict, and consequences. To compose the soundtrack for this open-world epic adventure, Ubisoft sought the talents of Ivor Novello award-winning composer duo The Flight (Joe Henson and Alexis Smith). The two men have a strong pedigree that includes composing numerous high-profile video game soundtracks, and we got a chance to ask them about their process for scoring Assassin's Creed Odyssey.
What's your approach to creating music for a game of this size? What are some of your first priorities, for example?
With today's technology anything is possible so our first priority is to apply a set of rules. We try to pin down what we are trying to achieve with the score, and how we are going to do that, keeping the sound unique and exciting, yet consistent through the many hours of gameplay.
Our first step on this path with Odyssey was researching the historical and geographical setting, and this gave us an ‘in' as to how we wanted it to sound: Ancient Greek in flavor and feeling whilst still being a contemporary score.
Is there an overriding theme you were trying to capture or create with the soundtrack? A particular feeling you wanted to evoke with it?
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is about family, betrayal and war; it's a proper Greek tragedy. We wanted the music to reflect that, to be able to go from tender and tragic, human and fragile to full-on epic battle.
In between moments of grand adventure, there are quiet times when players are in transit or appreciating views or not on the attack. How did you approach these mellower moments?
We actually enjoy these moments the most, where silence and spaces are as important as the notes. We liked to start these pieces by playing live, the two of us plus our collaborator Mike Georgiades picking up instruments and playing together. By the time we were a few months in, we could channel the Ancient Greeks through our badly-tuned ancient instruments!
When working with a big open-world game like this, is it important to give different regions distinctive musical textures? What kinds of things did you want the music to reflect?
We thought that giving each region a different sound would be very important, and enhance the player's journey significantly. Ubisoft sent us playthroughs, concept art, and storylines that might occur in each of the regions, and from that we decided on a musical palette, and an overall vibe for each one. For instance, we saw the Athenians, and their homeland of Attica, as being the seat of learning and philosophy, and so we gave them quite a calm, stately, almost classical sound. Some of the more southern island groups, where pirates roam and the living is hard, have a rougher, more improvised sound.
What instruments did you feel were important to use to represent the time period?
We did a lot of research into this, discovering the sort of instruments that historians believe the Ancient Greeks would have played. Although nothing original survives outside of a museum, they actually invented a lot of the instrument groups that we take for granted today, and we could find their closest contemporary relatives.
We work in London, U.K, and there are two amazing shops that we found some great stuff in: Hobgoblin Music and the Early Music Centre. We bought Lyres, harps, panpipes, a psaltry, a Santoor and a Bouzouki. One instrument that we were keen to involve was the Diaulos; we found some videos of people playing them online and loved the sound, but it proved impossible to get hold of one in time, so we used bagpipe chanters and a blown reed to get an approximation.
We love buying and playing new instruments that we aren't familiar with; it makes you play in a different way than you are used to.
A fair number of ancient Greek compositions have survived into the modern era—did you draw on any of them when creating the soundtrack?
We listened to a lot of the reproductions of Ancient Greek music and drew a lot of inspiration from them, especially in terms of harmony and instrumentation. Of course, we weren't trying to re-create this in our score, as that was the job of the diegetic music, so it was more for vibe and feeling.
How did you go about creating the music that is played by in-game musicians (in streets and plazas, etc.)?
This was mostly Audio Director Lydia Andrew's department, except for some of the moments when some of our themes and melodies are played by solo musicians. For example, as we first meet Kassandra she is sitting in her house, humming our ‘family' theme.
You've woven classic Assassin's Creed themes woven into the music, most notably "Ezio's Family." How did you decide where and how to incorporate familiar themes into the soundtrack?
For many fans, Ezio's Family has now become the Assassin's Creed theme tune, and Ubisoft wanted us to do an Odyssey-flavoured version for some key moments of the game. It can be quite daunting to start a version of a piece that has been already done a few times before, but we thought that by keeping our Ancient Greek palette we could add something new. We started by playing the theme on our favorite Lyre, and then building the piece up into a climax, with Emma Rohan's vocals taking over. It was one of the last pieces we did on the game and it seemed like a fitting place to end!
