GameTavern - Clint Mansell to Compose Mass Effect 3 OST

Quote:

Clint Mansell, composer of such classic motion picture scores as 'The Fountain' and 'Requiem For a Dream' dropped the news that he is writing the musical score for the last chapter in BioWare's epic Mass Effect trilogy in an interview with The Quietus about his latest film, 'Black Swan'...

When describing what it's like to score a video game, Mansell said: "As I was saying about Public Enemy and re-working old hip-hop tunes for Requiem, and kind of re-working old ballet tunes for Black Swan, with something like Mass Effect you're more like a DJ, with all these elements. You've got the holding pattern, then the big explosion where you need the score to kick in. Then you need to take it off on a tangent. You've got all these different elements that change depending on what the player does. You have to figure out an overall symphony, but be able to break it down into component parts. You can bring the pain when required".

You might recognize Mansell's work from the awesome remix they did for Return of the King previews.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/114/1148845p1.html

I have to say I'm somewhat torn by this. Jack Wall scored a perfect soundtrack for the original Mass Effect. It was like nothing else out there. Instead of overblown and "epic", it was subtle, synthetic, and barren. The main theme is one of the greatest ever, IMHO.

For Mass Effect 2 the score was more bombastic, I suppose to fit the story, but it was also very average because of it. Now they have hired Mansell, who ironically I believe was Wall's inspiration for his ME2 OST.

It will be interesting...

EDIT: Sorry, can someone move this to the Video Games forum?