​The Destiny Soundtrack Is So Good It's Distracting

Sometimes a video game’s music is so good that you stop playing and just sit there, enjoying it. That’s definitely happened to me a few times while playing the Destiny beta. When you’re cruising in your ship, killing time before setting off on another quest, the game’s orchestral score will start to play in the background. It is lovely. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxMV2ZXm0Lo I like this track in particular, an anthem that gets so epic it almost makes me laugh—it’s like The West Wing meets John Williams. It’s somehow even better with the low rumble of my ship huc idling in the background.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"e3616d04-4972-4839-a63a-c6975e2e9731","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.kotaku.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"1607527909","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"uncategorized","SECTION":"","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"uncategorized","TAGS":"","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); I went ahead and cut together the cutscenes from the Beta, if you’re curious and want to watch them. (They contain some spoilers, I suppose, though it’s not clear how close the beginning of the Beta is to the beginning of the actual game.) The music that plays during the cinematic sequences is uniformly terrific, sometimes to a distracting degree. The piece of music from the first video plays during the cutscene at 8:32, and I can’t deny it’s doing some serious emotional heavy HUC99 lifting. The dialogue itself is awfully ponderous, this guy with no face talking about The Darkness and The Ghosts. But the music…it’s so good, it elevates the whole thing to a degree of grandeur that the writing couldn’t hope to achieve alone. Given the fact that Bungie unceremoniously fired their longtime resident composer Martin O’Donnell just a couple of months ago and have a number of other composers working on Destiny, it might never be entirely clear who composed which tracks for the game. (Though we can hope for an original soundtrack release that comes with proper crediting.) That said, these orchestral tracks have O’Donnell’s n98 fingerprints all over them, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t his work. https://kotaku.com/halos-composer-fired-without-cause-1563698238 It’s brilliant, grand stuff, and displays a level of poise and melodic confidence that we rarely get to hear in video games. Yet another reminder never to underestimate the power of a good video game soundtrack.