Doublehex
05-31-2011, 08:44 AM
THE WITCHER EXPANDED SOUNDTRACK
Play Length: 3:59:33
124 Arranged Tracks + Street Players + Dandelion Ambience = 160 .mp3 files
Converted from .OGG files to VBR-0 320 .mp3
https://mega.nz/#!yNgTkT6Z!eZgNq9VAwA89PzXh7nlGY325_Ze_SOjaQhV_ayfLcmU
About the Music:
My God, this has been a long time coming. It was way back in 2007 when I first heard the music of The Witcher. As an avid PC Gamer I knew all about The Witcher. It was one of those few games that hardcore crowd at RPG Codex thought was actually good – and that was probably the best review any game could ever get. It was a game that emphasized morale choices that weren’t cut and dry. At the time I was an avid Bioware junkie. Come 2008, when I finally got to play the game, that changed forever.
But I’m not here to talk about the game. This is supposed to be about the music. The Witcher is a fantasy game – but it doesn’t sound like one. In terms of music for Fantasy…anything, we are still feeling the impact of Poledouris’ Conan and Shore’s The Lord of the Rings. Those two scores had distinctly stated how fantasy should sound like. Just like how John Williams (Star Wars) and Goldsmith (Alien, Star Trek) discovered how Sci-Fi should sound.
The Witcher may have chorus, but isn’t optimistic, nor does it ever dominant soundtrack. Only a couple tracks (probably increased to a little bit more than half a dozen in my rip) has any sort of chorus. Even then, it is not organized and “pretty” like in The Lord of the Rings. It is a beautiful, chaotic mess. In Last Batte, the chorus intermingles with harsh drum beats, and appears only at the beginning and end. With To Arms “Rebellion”, the chorus has a few short words, and they are almost akin to shouts and battle cries than a daintily organized chorus.
With the music, the two composers (Adam Skorupa and Paweł Błaszczak) showed the Northern Kingdoms as a pretty terrible place. Rarely is there a piece of music that puts you at ease. Rape is common place; women have no real sense of authority. Most people live in dumps and tumbling hovels. Humans possess hatred for the non-humans, and the elves and dwarves are fighting a losing battle for freedom. Most victories are pyrrhic at best.
If I had to use a single word to describe the Witcher score, it would be Slavic. The game is heavily influenced by Slavic mythology. You can tell by the journal of the monsters – Drowners are corpses of those that drowned and kill others by drowning, Ghouls are the raised corpses of those that were cannibals in life. The music doesn’t sound epic: it sounds down to earth. The soundtrack uses instruments that would sound out of place in a regular fantasy score but is perfect here.
That said, the Witcher is good, not great. It doesn’t reach the level of excellence of some of its associates. The score is lacking in motifs, and as such lacks cohesion. Each piece stands alone, isolated from the rest. There are reoccurring musical pieces, but they are mostly used as stingers in cinematics. We also rarely get a chance to understand the characters musically. The music focuses so much on showing just how much the world sucks that we don’t get to hear what the characters think. Many character’s homes, which would be a great place to give them their own personal theme, shares music with other zones in the game. The composers trading narrative cohesion in exchange for world immersion. It would be hard to say if they made the wrong choice. After all, The Witcher may be fantasy, but it so unlike so many other fantasies out there.
In conclusion, the Witcher is a good score. You could argue it is even great. But it is not excellent. Despite how unique it sounds, and how it manages to pull of such a dark fantasy score without falling into clich�s, it lacks narrative cohesion at the end. But don’t let that stop you – I didn’t spend three months working on this rip on a terrible soundtrack. Take a listen and enjoy it.
About the Rip:
The rip is long. Very long. It’s not as long as my Age of Conan rip: at a few seconds short of 4 hours, it is 30 minutes behind my first rip. But I would argue it was a harder rip to do because the Witcher’s music had a very distinct rhythm that sort of “merged” together when you were dealing with a hundred different .mp3 files. Age of Conan was split over three very different civilizations, and so it was easy to get an idea as to where an .mp3 went.
Despite the fact that I had beaten the game before, I mostly used Let’s Plays on YouTube as a guide. I would watch them, and assign .mp3s as I heard them. Since in many of the chapters you can see cinematics and hear music at different times, that means you’re “canonical” ordering may be different from what I have.
Also, you will see that lots of the tracks have a title and the parentheses. The parentheses contain the title of that track from the soundtrack release and the game file name, in that order. If there is just one title in parentheses that means the soundtrack didn’t have it on disc.
All of the files were taken from the game’s folders as .OGG, and then using dbPowerAmp converted to .MP3 files at 320 VBR V-0 settings.
Play Length: 3:59:33
124 Arranged Tracks + Street Players + Dandelion Ambience = 160 .mp3 files
Converted from .OGG files to VBR-0 320 .mp3
https://mega.nz/#!yNgTkT6Z!eZgNq9VAwA89PzXh7nlGY325_Ze_SOjaQhV_ayfLcmU
About the Music:
My God, this has been a long time coming. It was way back in 2007 when I first heard the music of The Witcher. As an avid PC Gamer I knew all about The Witcher. It was one of those few games that hardcore crowd at RPG Codex thought was actually good – and that was probably the best review any game could ever get. It was a game that emphasized morale choices that weren’t cut and dry. At the time I was an avid Bioware junkie. Come 2008, when I finally got to play the game, that changed forever.
But I’m not here to talk about the game. This is supposed to be about the music. The Witcher is a fantasy game – but it doesn’t sound like one. In terms of music for Fantasy…anything, we are still feeling the impact of Poledouris’ Conan and Shore’s The Lord of the Rings. Those two scores had distinctly stated how fantasy should sound like. Just like how John Williams (Star Wars) and Goldsmith (Alien, Star Trek) discovered how Sci-Fi should sound.
The Witcher may have chorus, but isn’t optimistic, nor does it ever dominant soundtrack. Only a couple tracks (probably increased to a little bit more than half a dozen in my rip) has any sort of chorus. Even then, it is not organized and “pretty” like in The Lord of the Rings. It is a beautiful, chaotic mess. In Last Batte, the chorus intermingles with harsh drum beats, and appears only at the beginning and end. With To Arms “Rebellion”, the chorus has a few short words, and they are almost akin to shouts and battle cries than a daintily organized chorus.
With the music, the two composers (Adam Skorupa and Paweł Błaszczak) showed the Northern Kingdoms as a pretty terrible place. Rarely is there a piece of music that puts you at ease. Rape is common place; women have no real sense of authority. Most people live in dumps and tumbling hovels. Humans possess hatred for the non-humans, and the elves and dwarves are fighting a losing battle for freedom. Most victories are pyrrhic at best.
If I had to use a single word to describe the Witcher score, it would be Slavic. The game is heavily influenced by Slavic mythology. You can tell by the journal of the monsters – Drowners are corpses of those that drowned and kill others by drowning, Ghouls are the raised corpses of those that were cannibals in life. The music doesn’t sound epic: it sounds down to earth. The soundtrack uses instruments that would sound out of place in a regular fantasy score but is perfect here.
That said, the Witcher is good, not great. It doesn’t reach the level of excellence of some of its associates. The score is lacking in motifs, and as such lacks cohesion. Each piece stands alone, isolated from the rest. There are reoccurring musical pieces, but they are mostly used as stingers in cinematics. We also rarely get a chance to understand the characters musically. The music focuses so much on showing just how much the world sucks that we don’t get to hear what the characters think. Many character’s homes, which would be a great place to give them their own personal theme, shares music with other zones in the game. The composers trading narrative cohesion in exchange for world immersion. It would be hard to say if they made the wrong choice. After all, The Witcher may be fantasy, but it so unlike so many other fantasies out there.
In conclusion, the Witcher is a good score. You could argue it is even great. But it is not excellent. Despite how unique it sounds, and how it manages to pull of such a dark fantasy score without falling into clich�s, it lacks narrative cohesion at the end. But don’t let that stop you – I didn’t spend three months working on this rip on a terrible soundtrack. Take a listen and enjoy it.
About the Rip:
The rip is long. Very long. It’s not as long as my Age of Conan rip: at a few seconds short of 4 hours, it is 30 minutes behind my first rip. But I would argue it was a harder rip to do because the Witcher’s music had a very distinct rhythm that sort of “merged” together when you were dealing with a hundred different .mp3 files. Age of Conan was split over three very different civilizations, and so it was easy to get an idea as to where an .mp3 went.
Despite the fact that I had beaten the game before, I mostly used Let’s Plays on YouTube as a guide. I would watch them, and assign .mp3s as I heard them. Since in many of the chapters you can see cinematics and hear music at different times, that means you’re “canonical” ordering may be different from what I have.
Also, you will see that lots of the tracks have a title and the parentheses. The parentheses contain the title of that track from the soundtrack release and the game file name, in that order. If there is just one title in parentheses that means the soundtrack didn’t have it on disc.
All of the files were taken from the game’s folders as .OGG, and then using dbPowerAmp converted to .MP3 files at 320 VBR V-0 settings.
