I’ve had Guildwars 2 for about a month and one of the main aspects of the game that I absolutely LOVE is that the world is SO immerse and SO huge that it is like a never ending journey of exploration.
Proposition
With that being said, I feel that the game lacks the BGM/MUSIC/OST to go along with the VAST variety of visual content it has to offer.
One thing I realized while exploring the world is that different contents have the same “ambient” music playing in the background, and this can often be inappropriate in certain circumstances. For example, I was standing in this forest/flower/peaceful area and the environment was absolutely stunning. Yet the music that was playing was rather something that was more relative to a rocky/dark desert area. This kind of killed the mood for me because I kept wondering, was I in battle? Or… was this area suppose to have this kind of music?
I am aware of the “jukebox” function where you can create your own playlist under the documents guildwars2 folder. This however, does not give us the function of WHERE we want the music to be played. Every area of the game should have the unique feeling of something new and exciting yet to be explored. Having an animation background myself, I can safely say that Audio is just as important as Visual. So why provide so much variety in visual, but so little in audio?
Recommendation
I am aware that creating new content of music would be both costly and time consuming for Arenanet, so that would not be a viable choice. However, all Arena net has to do is elaborate on their current “jukebox” function. Instead of only having 7 playlists to choose from:
Ambient
Battle
BossBattle
City
MainMenu
NightTime
Underwater
-Arenanet should give us the function to choose our own music for each specific AREA and TOWN. The areas in GW2 are very obviously divided on the World map. With this function, players can customize their own game audio unique to their own playstyle (which is a very big factor in replay value). This is just like making mods in the game Skyrim, except we do it with Music.
Let me know what you guys think? I think this is a win-win situation with low cost to Arenanet and huge benefit to the players.
