Guild Wars 2

I recently got my hands on the wonderful 4 disc soundtrack for this game and the music is pretty spectacular and immersive, but I noticed the peculiar trait that most songs have a running time of 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds), give or take 15 seconds. I have my music interval length set all the way to max anyway but I’m curious as to why this particular run time was chosen as a ‘sweet spot’ for the music composition. Any insight on this would be appreciated!

Because those 2:30 appear to be the chosen sweet spot for all intervals in GW2 (gameplay design wise). You have no dialogs which take longer than 2:30, and most fights in open world (except for champions) also don’t take much longer.

You will rarely be in the same situation for more than 2:30, so it wouldn’t make any sense to add any characteristic tunes beyond that point.

That has a drawback, of course. You will never have any “continuous” background music or longer themes. Thats why (just an example, but one of the best!) Valve used a different concept for Portal 2, instead of just stitching together various songs for different situations, they used ONE single theme, but assigned each partition of the track to different entities / conditions which could be present in the scene. So you always had the same main theme, but it sounded completely different, based on what type of scene you were in.

Exterminans.9723:

Because those 2:30 appear to be the chosen sweet spot for all intervals in GW2 (gameplay design wise). You have no dialogs which take longer than 2:30, and most fights in open world (except for champions) also don’t take much longer.

You will rarely be in the same situation for more than 2:30, so it wouldn’t make any sense to add any characteristic tunes beyond that point.

That has a drawback, of course. You will never have any “continuous” background music or longer themes. Thats why (just an example, but one of the best!) Valve used a different concept for Portal 2, instead of just stitching together various songs for different situations, they used ONE single theme, but assigned each partition of the track to different entities / conditions which could be present in the scene. So you always had the same main theme, but it sounded completely different, based on what type of scene you were in.

I think that answered my question pretty well! I didn’t think about that actually but you’re right in that battles don’t last very long. I still kinda wish some tracks might’ve been longer for out of battle situations since typically I find myself staying out of battle for times longer than the ‘sweet spot’ (especially when crafting).