Jul 30, 2013
This week on Battle Bards, Syl, Steff, and Syp sail off to Norrath for a good dose of EverQuest 2. It's a truly massive soundtrack with plenty of stellar pieces to plunder, although it does sound suspiciously more like a movie score than something in an MMO. Intentional or not? Listen and decide for yourself!
Episode 8 show notes
Special thanks to Tesh for the Battle Bards logo!
Great podcast! We're going to share it on the official EQ2 social networks as well. Hope you don't mind even though it's an older show for y'all. :)
To answer your question regarding the music and its accessibility: It seems that we just haven't had enough player interest in it. I'm going to take initiative on this project and get our music in a more convenient location for players to download and utilize.
Currently, you can get it from the game files after you download the game.
Great show, folks! I agree with your assertion that many of the pieces in EQ2 selected for the show had a very theatrical feel to them, as if they had been targeting a movie scene. I did enjoy the music quite a bit, though, and will probably hunt down the soundtrack.
Justin, you had mentioned that a friend of yours had extracted the music files from EQ2 and found an amazing amount of music in there. I had wondered how this would compare to my MMO du jour, LotRO. I found some python code on GitHub that would extract the files, and got it working. What I found: LotRO has its sound and music files mixed together, all in either OGG or WAV formats. It's common to use OGG compression for video games music as it's an open format that doesn't require licensing. The WAV files were almost all short sound effects. Extracting produced 10,735 sound files, taking up 2.7GB. Wow - I never really stopped to think about how much sound (and not just music) goes into the making of a AAA MMO. Almost all of that was sound effects, so I pruned the list down to files over 1 MB (a minute or so of compressed OGG music, give or take, depending on quality of the file), and got 530 items, totaling about 26-27 hours of music! The longest piece was ambient file I didn't recognize (maybe from an instance I haven't played yet) that ran 42 minutes!
Anyway, thank you all for the great podcast - it's made many of my morning commutes more pleasant.