World of Warcraft, Asheron’s Call, and more…

Okay, I admit it.  I’ve renewed my subscription for World of Warcraft (WoW) as of last Friday evening.  I played most of this past weekend, and parts of yesterday and today.  It’s research I tell you!!  I’m designing an online RPG, and WoW is truly the Gold Standard, so I am using it for comparison to Arcanoria and the ideas that I’ve (re-)started to generate.  Now, WoW is not everyone’s cup of tea in terms of graphics choices, but the quality of their service is undeniable.  The game system itself is incredibly intricate and well balanced, especially considering how many different classes, races and levels there are actively in play.  The world environment is magnificently detailed and simply enormous.  The music is utterly fantastic!  Their website and support are top notch as well.  The software and deployment are seamless and informative.  I give WoW 5 stars out of 5!  Wow!

Here’s a quick in-game video I made just now:

I also activated a trial subscription for my first MMO love, Asheron’s Call (AC).  I played AC for at least 5 years back in the 90s, with multiple accounts.  It’s truly amazing that the AC servers are still up and running, and there is apparently a small but loyal player base still active.  But, to be honest, AC’s graphics are just so out of date that it’s distracting to me.  Furthermore, the AC server connectivity is dodgy at best for me.  I won’t be renewing.  It’s too bad too, since there are some really nifty things that I love about AC.  They had a revolutionary spell research system (which has since been removed).  They also have a huge and unique world that I remember fondly.  And their character development is entirely skill based, so War Mages can potentially also be the best Sword fighters in the game, depending on what stats they chose.  This led to some interesting choices, but also to some “sameyness” between characters as certain skills were determined to be less useful, and thus avoided by all, even if it would be in-character to have it.  For example, Missile Defense is just so overpriced and underwhelming that even an Archer character would often skip it in favor of something more useful, like Creature Magic.

Asheron's Call
Asheron’s Call

Anyway, the good news is that WoW has inspired me to do some things I’d forgotten I wanted to do.  Including making some kind of symphonic/orchestral music.  In fact, I started working on exactly this a few days ago, and finished up my first piece today.  It’s called Kalahari Plains.  Here’s a listen for you!

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”20121210-orch-somber.mp3″ loop=”y”]

This is my first attempt at orchestral music production.  I think it came out pretty good anyway. 🙂  I’ll have more about the music production work in a future post.

2 Comments

  1. Wow, so you made that music?!? I wouldn’t even know where to begin doing that. I’m guessing there’s software that lets you combine drum sounds with other instruments? Anyway, that’s very cool. I haven’t even begun to THINK about putting music in my game. The um, orchestra was uh…killed in the apocalypse! Yeah! 🙂

    One thing that surprised me was the “electronic” sound of the horns when they came in at around 00:16. For some reason, I expected a more organic/medieval sound. It had more of a retro game sound. Anyway, that sound maybe be exactly what you’re going for. Still very impressive, making orchestral music. I wouldn’t have even considered it. Now I’m going to have to look into it.

  2. Thanks for stopping by my little blog site and posting your comments zangad!

    I actually started my company as a recording studio about 10 years back, having engineered and produced music demos and albums for hundreds of local artists. We did pop, rock, punk, metal, some ethnic stuff, R&B, country, and more. It was a blast! But unfortunately there wasn’t much money in it, so we moved on. That’s a long story, which maybe I’ll tell here another time.

    The short version is that I personally got a lot of experience as a music producer and a musician. I played on a lot of my clients’ records, including vocals (backing or lead), acoustic/electric guitars, bass, drums (as in on a real drumkit), trumpet, harmonica, and lots of keyboard and synth work, including simple piano/organ parts, as well as complex electronic drum and MIDI instrument programming.

    In addition to my clients’ music, I also wrote and recorded my own music. I’m planning to make a Music page here on this blog site at some point, but for now you can check out a couple of links to my work:

    rock music – http://www.soundclick.com/collinsanddibon

    synthy game music – http://www.soundclick.com/arcanoria