by Magistrate - 8 years ago     show comments

In case you missed it, there was a quick interview with World of Warcraft: Legion‘s senior audio director and composer Russell Brower mixed in with the virtual pass experience.

Brower has been around for a while, and the work he and his colleagues do helps to set the atmosphere and sense of adventure we’ve come to know and love in Warcraft entries.

In actuality, there are many composers behind a given Warcraft expansion. They work together in recording studios, listening to each other’s work to bounce ideas and get inspiration. After a certain point, Brower notes that the work all starts to sound like one piece–a point where the composers are essentially “finishing each other’s sentences” with their scores.

For Legion, the composers wanted to do something heavier, darker, and a little more subliminal. Bouncing off of an idea from one of the artists, they went on to create a theme for Legion that uses low strings–often quietly building in a menacing, unsettling fever. They wanted to give the impression that our heroes were getting into something that “they might not be equipped to handle.”

The greatest invasion of the Burning Legion would probably be just that.

In the end, though, Brower says that the music helps to not only telegraph the arrival of the Legion, but also to express the power of sacrifice and compassion in the face of loss, chaos, and perhaps the greatest apocalypse Azeroth has ever seen. This, he says, is the “heart and soul behind the notes in our musical score.”