“A melody is worth a thousand words?/i>

Acoustically, there抯 not much to say about World of Warcraft. There are many tracks that are remixes from the RTS games and a few original pieces; all of which are quite good. There are the requisite epic orchestrated pieces, filled with horns and brass. There is a large selection of more ambient pieces with periodic vocal effects, such as the background music in Ashenvale forest. These tracks are some of the most enjoyable, but they are very short. Unless the player chooses to loop them in the options, the silence is deafening.

Sadly, many melodies are repeated elsewhere in the game; for example, the haunting siren song first heard in Blackfathom Deeps is also the music for the Tanaris desert. Another large faux-pas lies in the fact that there are entire dungeons with no background music at all, such as the Temple of Atal’Hakkar. With so much obvious effort placed upon the artwork and settings, it seems a gross oversight to have put the music on the back burner. No matter how dramatic the artistic visual presentation, a lack of music lends to a bland experience ?a lesson every developer should have learned by now.

Thankfully, the character voices present in World of Warcraft are not only superbly acted, but lines aren抰 reused. Unfortunately, this caveat is extremely limited in scope. Players who enjoyed repeatedly badgering NPCs in the Warcraft RTS games to hear their silly quips will enjoy the fact that they can continue to harass poor peons in WoW. Outside of this, each player race has a collection of vocal emotes ranging from social to “”suggestive.”" Avatars will grunt when hit, scream when killed, having a rather small range of combat speech limited to sound effects. Thankfully, almost every boss encounter in the game has some vocalization such as a taunt, and is quite menacing: the challenge issued by Hakkar, blood god of the Gurubashi Empire, is simply bone-chilling. Sadly, the buck stops there ?outside of the opening cut scene for each of the eight races, there is a lack of speech of any length.

Even though the scope and range of the score in World of Warcraft is very limited, for a game in the MMORPG genre, the performance is commendable. Most adventurers tire of the stock soundtrack within a month, no matter how commendable the orchestration. The voice-overs again, while limited, are impeccably performed. However, the blatant recycling of music in several different regions of the game is inexcusable. Hopefully Blizzard will consider patching new music in these duplicate areas, or adding tunes to liven up the bland soundless dungeons.

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