Tickled Pink: Music from the Hearts of Warcraft

This is the final Tickled Pink post. Under this label the staff at the PPI used to give different perspectives on a topic that had tickled our minds. Since Elnia has quit there won't be anymore posts in this series. However, before leaving, Elnia sent me a last idea for a Tickled post. He never finished his part, but since I’ve done mine I could as well publish it. So here we go, tickled one last time!

Tickled Pink
The music is an integral part of Warcraft. From the choral chants of “Lamb of God” while in ghost form, to the swelling chords of Stormwind City, to the soulful punk of the new Icecrown Citadel music transforms the playing experience. In fact, the Blizzard developers have stated that half the size of recent patches is taken up by sound files alone. So what music leaves you Tickled Pink?

Larísa: To be honest I’ve missed out a lot of the music in WoW, if not most of it. There are several reasons for this. One is my former wreck of a computer, with its horrendous lagging. I had to take every possible measure to decrease the strain on the system as I was playing WoW. Apart from putting the graphic settings on a minimum, minimum, this also meant that I had to turn off the music or even the entire game sound, at least as long as I was raiding. It didn’t help much, but it helped a little and every counted.

This problem is gone, and nowadays I can turn on the music as much as I want. But I still miss a lot of it.

Partly I blame my non WoW-playing family members for this. One of the things that annoy them most is when I’m playing with my headset on, since it shields me from taking part in any conversation or noticing when they’re calling on me. When I’m raiding I have to use them, and they accept it since it’s something we’ve agreed on. But at any other time, I try not to use my headset as long as there are people around me. Since the computer is situated in the living room, this is often the case. The more discrete I can be in my playing, the better. So letting the sound come out of the loudspeaker is of definitely out of the question.

But what about the raids then? I surely could listen to the music then, since I have my headset on? Well, I could. But on those occasions I have so many other things to listen to – the instructions and discussions in the vent channel, but also alert sounds coming from a bunch of addons. Even if I do keep the music turned on nowadays, I tend to have it on a very low volume, not to distract me from more important sounds. This means that I don’t notice the music all that much, which probably is a shame.

However, if I was to choose the one piece of music from the game that meant most to me, it wouldn’t be the majestic music from a raid instance. No, it would be the most basic, childish, simple one you could think of: the default music in Elwynn Forest. To me this represents the heart of WoW. It reminds me of my first, innocent, struggling steps in WoW three years ago and it makes me feel cheerful, happy and positive for some reason.

No matter if you’ve had one of those nights when nothing worked the way that you hoped for and you just feel worn out, empty and disappointed. Enter Elwynn Forest, hug a cow, smell a flower, say hello to one of the guards, grab a beer at the inn, listen to the music and remember once again that Azeroth is a wonderful magic fantasy world where anything can happens.

This little melody speaks to me, telling me that there may be heroic deeds to be performed in far distance countries, but in the end every adventurer wants to return one day to the merry, sunny pastures we call “home”.