Chimaera said:
Keymaster, I find your premise fascinating - only because I don't personally find music to be all that compelling after a while in a MMO. For certain moments such as a boss fight, or some such, perhaps. But many MMO players (including me) tend to listen a couple times, then turn it off in favor of personal soundtracks in the background.
This is a seriously rotting necro post I'm about to make, but I was digging through my old posts archive and realized someone had responded to my post in this thread. Despite it being so old I can't bring myself to leave it unanswered.
Music is a very important aspect of immersion for me when playing a game. In a way it helps me to better connect with the character on screen; especially in MMOs. One of the things that kept me playing WoW for so long was the amazing soundtrack it had to offer. From setting the mood of an area or just giving me something pleasant to listen to while grinding away at dailies; it simply completed the experience. Music in games has much the same effect for me as it does in movies. The graphics and story may give you a world to explore and goal to reach, but the music sets the context for all of that. Some of my favorite examples of area music from WoW were Durotar, Sholozzar Basin, and The Stormpeaks/Ulduar.
The music of Durotar (pre-Wrath) fit the idea of the zone perfectly. Soft and subtle the dry harshness of the land was conveyed in the simple blows of the horns, but the occasional rise of what I think were violins would highlight the silent beauty in the harshness of the landscape.
Sholozzar's music was much like it's landscap; lush and filled vigor. It encouraged the sense of adventure associated with the Nessingwary expedition. It compelled you to move deeper into the thick jungle to find what was hidden and inspired a certain zeal for protecting the land from the encroaching scourge of Icecrown.
Then there was The Stormpeaks and Ulduar; hard pressed to be topped by any other. The haunting beauty of the snowy landscape littered with Titan artifacts. The music was filled with soft singing that sounded more like the wind endlessly blowing through the mountain passes than it did voices. The tinge of danger and epic adventure shining through every so often, but kept to a minimum to drive home the point that the beauty of the environment held something far more dangerous than you'd yet encountered. Ulduar took that underlying idea and drove it home with amazing gusto. It's music wanted you to know where you were; in a Titan city built filled to the brim with secrets and wonderment just waiting to be uncovered by brave adventurers. The two dungeons and raid contained with in each a different spectacle of visual feasts and moral inspiring music the deeper you delved down the darker growing rabbit hole.
WoW, however, is not the only MMO I've played that had a soundtrack which interacted so well with it's environment. City of Heroes simply lacked that, where was my motivation to save the day or bring unbridled chaos to the world? My imagination can only take me so far, the music of the world needed to be there to help me make that last leap immersion and take on the role of Professor Metric Chaos as he sows chaos and destruction with his army of metric unit themed robots.
The idea of turning off the music of a game and substituting it for my own soundtrack is utterly inconceivable to me. A soundtrack had already been provided for me by the creators, one that was designed to mesh accordingly with the environments I was interacting with. Shutting off that music and playing my favorite metal album would undermine the narrative and emotional structure of the game.
The point is that, for me, music is a very large factor that can make or break a game; especially an MMO. It's the final enveloping layer of immersion that allows me to get lost in a world for hours on end; whether it be gathering psychotic amounts of saronite and titanium or unleashing my menacing army of robots upon the unsuspecting denizens of the Rogue Isles.
