Hey, welcome to the forums.
In terms of the music, you're right that the same composer (Pablo Vega) has been doing the tracks for all the games that Arcen has put out. We've tried to go with a unique sort of sound for each one. For AVWW, there's a single instrument line in each track that is 8bit, but that's mixed with other instruments, percussion, etc, that is of the exact same quality of AI War and Tidalis. It's been overwhelmingly the most popular choice we've ever made so far, judging by the general response to the videos.
That said, one thing we're also going for with this soundtrack is something I think you'll be particularly pleased about. Most tracks, no matter how good, have a bit of a shelf life because they simply get repetitive. One thing we've experimented with the past is changing up instrumentation and percussion and other things of that nature surrounding the same basic structure and melody. That leads to surprisingly different results, and by doing things like octave shifts you can even drastically shift the emotional tone of the piece.
With AVWW, we're taking that to heart: we're going to be having alternate tracks for most of the in-game music, with those sorts of shifts and changes to keep things fresh. It's almost like having remixes within the game itself. In most of those other tracks, Pablo has tended to replace the 8bit sound with some other instrument, or the 8bit sound swaps with another line and winds up being part of the background. I'm not sure if this extra music pack will be a separate bonus download or if we'll be including it with every copy of the game (some things still to figure out), but we've been planning this since the start. Right now I think we have something like 14 original tracks, and 2 variation tracks, so we haven't done much with the variations in practice yet; the harder part is doing the originals, so I think Pablo has been really focused on the hard stuff first.
Anyway, hopefully that will help alleviate your worries; if the 8bit stuff bugs you, you can always replace those files with the variations so that you don't hear the main 8bit tracks. But for myself, I really have to say I love what Pablo's putting together and this is my favorite soundtrack of his by far. A simpler sound like this actually makes things immeasurably harder on him, because it puts all the focus on the melody and structure of the song, and so that takes it in a bit more of a pop orchestral direction rather than a classical orchestral, if you see what I mean.
I think the result is really worthwhile, though, and the blend of 8bit and modern is something that I've only heard in places like OC Remix and VGMix, and the recent TRON soundtrack; Pablo and I are both a big fan of that particular soundtrack, and I know that Daft Punk's work on that album has been at least somewhat of an influence on his work here.
Anyway, hope that makes sense!
