WoW's Undermine(d) patch is out, and it's downright groovy—having done a few laps around the goblin city of Undermine myself, I've been pleasantly surprised by how the game's soundtrack, usually pretty ambient, has been front and center. I've been cranking that stuff up while stubbornly grabbing gold in my clunky car.
Turns out, as per a recent dev diary, that the game's composers worked on it with a live jazz ensemble—and while they definitely came out swinging with a template, a lot of what you're hearing while you and your mates are beating Gallywix up was improvised during the recording session.
As lead composer Leo Kaliski explains, typically when recording with actual musicians, "you have to, with your limited time in the session, decide: Do you like their version of it, or do you want to ask them to do it again to get closer to what you have in mind? With this patch, we kinda wanted their version. We would be like 'yeah, this is the melody, but feel free to embellish it'. Usually those were the takes that ended up in the final version over what we originally wrote."
It's something that's concurred by music director Derek Duke, who adds: "We [explained] the character of the goblins, when the soloist improvises, they interpret it. By giving descriptors and helping the players understand the characters of the goblins more, they can get into character. It helped eke out so much more feeling and vibe from the performances."
I'm not entirely sure what playing jazz like a goblin entails, but I'm pretty sure the music of this patch gets damn close. The soundtrack itself (collected below by YouTuber Yodragon) takes more of a centre stage than I'm used to from the big bads of Azeroth.
It's genuinely downright exciting to see, especially as someone with a background in Final Fantasy 14, too—a game that's almost as famous for its soundtrack as it is its catboys. While I'm not sure WoW's quite ready for absolute bops like "Bee My Honey" or "Metal: Brute Justice", the idea that we'll be getting more audio experimentation in the future is a welcome one.
That's not to say WoW doesn't have its own iconic music—but it's usually more ambient and subtle, and when it does get kicking, it rarely deviates from the same 'we want you to feel epic' blaring of trumpets and strings. Why not get a jazz ensemble together and let them go gob wild?
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