Last edited by Lahis; 2017-07-21 at 02:52 PM.
we bid you farewell russel.
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2017-07-21 at 02:54 PM.
Not true for huge projects like WoW. Most of modern day WoW soundtrack is performed and recorded live and only bolstered with high quality sample library mockup parts and synths. Low and mid budget projects rely on highly skilled people who are able to mock up pieces with sample libraries that sound fairly convincing to the layman's ears, but big budget productions - with good reason - still use real orchestras and performers in the final production.
Either way, this has no bearing on needing - or not needing - a guy like Brower. You can have the best commercially available, or custom-produced virtual instruments on earth - they're just high-quality sounds, they won't compose any music for you. Further, Brower wasn't "just" the composer - he was actually the lead of all things audio at Blizzard. Like an art director in the music department. He was largely responsible for the artistic direction, cohesion, quality insurance and overall organisation of all audio contributors and assets.
Giving up in-house art teams and leads is generally much more cost-effective, but product quality and identity almost always take a huge blow as a consequence, so I'm not sure if this was wise of Blizzard. They always had absolutely exceptional audio, probably the very best in the industry. Another company who employs inhouse audio in many of their studios - and it really shows - is Ubisoft. Not exactly encouraging to see a company like Blizzard apparently cutting corners here.
Last edited by Pull My Finger; 2017-07-21 at 03:00 PM.
He didn't leave Blizzard, he was laid off. I have no idea what sound decentralization means though, if the music was the one thing that always stayed good about WoW I don't know why they would want to mess it up.
"The one thing that always stayed good about WoW" =/= People having different opinions on what constitutes good music. Plenty of WoW music has been deemed rubbish depending on whom one asks.
Besides, changing things =/= "messing it up". Much like Hans Zimmer ain't the only good movie composer, Russel Brower ain't the only good game music composer.
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I'm not one for conspiracy theories, I'm merely stating facts about the profitable state of the game. A source of revenue pulling close to 1 billion USD on a bad year, and over 1 billion USD on good years, is not exactly something to scoff at.
And you seem to focus on 1 aspect. Character transfers are, like subs, not the only source of income. I've for example not paid real money for character services in 4 years.
Last edited by Queen of Hamsters; 2017-07-21 at 03:01 PM.
Did they seriously just lay off the only good part about legion?
In all honesty, it's no exaggeration for some. I played with one of those trial accounts that you used to get when you bought pre-paid time that a friend gave me, and the music in the Night Elf starting area, grabbed the living shit out of me. I still love that song, doubt I'll ever forget it.
It's certainly one of the main reasons why I started playing with my own account in Vanilla.
If he's the guy that made the alliance garrison music, i'll cry, if not, i dont care, always played wow with external music
It seems he loves what he does but something clashed with the developers which led to him having to leave.
Tokens, mounts, services, stuff for OTHER Blizz games, etc. Everything can be bought w/ WoW token.
In NA each purchased WoW token earns them extra $5, someone else has to buy it for $20, you redeem it for $15.
People are much more eager to purchase stuff from Blizz store if they pay w/ B.net balance, in their minds they pay w/ in-game gold and not w/ RL currency.
For instance, I'd never pay €150 w/ RL money to transfer my chars to another realm, I didn't really need to do so, my prev realm was okay-ish, but I play AH a lot and I had enough gold to do so. So I bought 12 tokens (someone bought from Blizz for €20), redeemed them for €156 (12 * €13) and I spent €150 for B.net balance. Blizz got a nice bonus of €84 (12 * €7) just because I chose to pay for stuff w/ "gold".
People also redeem tokens for game time
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BTW, fun fact, people here are saying that they started playing in Vanilla because they liked the music. Vanilla was the only time in WoW history when Blizz actually didn't use live orchestra to record the soundtrack. Everything was synthesised.
Did he compose the Anduin theme ?
The amount of chance that anyone here knew who this guy was numbering over ... I don't know --- 10% of the community --- is unlikely. However, I enjoy the BLIZZARD IS DYING comments just the same.
Keep up the good work being negative, unintelligent and basically just yourselves, MMOC community.
Sounds likely they split the sound department out into team-based cells instead of one big central department.
He probably left because he wasn't able to have a new position where he could contribute to every game at once. By being a freelance artist for Blizzard, he can still do that.
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Is he the guy who did those goofy blizzard raps on Youtube? If so, dude's certainly a talented improviser (even if I hate rap), and I don't think anyone's ever had a bad word to say about the sound & music in the game so kudos to him. He'll do fine anywhere.