More Music, Ambient Noises, and Musicians in game

[alexinawe]

The soundtrack is great, but it makes up only 50 minutes of total run time. Meanwhile, the game itself is hundreds of hours of play time, minimum. That leaves a lot of dead time when it comes to music. And maybe it's just me, but I don't recall there being much in the way of ambient sounds, though as of the 0.96.XX releases, I have been mostly adventuring in the desert so that may limit my exposure to the game's sounds.


Tl;dr and breaking this down in simple points:

1. Add another batch of songs, at least another 50 minutes worth.
2. Overhaul or add in more ambient sounds.
3. Evaluate the options menu "music frequency," (I'm not sure that it works, or works as intended)
4. Wishlist item 1: Instruments and Musicians in bars.
5. Wishlist Item 2: Player musicians and potentially a music skill

Going into more detail on each number:

1. More songs - Pretty self explanatory. Add another dozen or so songs, 50-70 minutes would be great. Bonus is that it can be added as another "DLC" so that people can purchase it, both raising more money for the game and paying any musicians working on the new soundtrack. Hopefully the original artists are still available, their music is great.

2. Ambient sound overhaul - Again, this could be me or just because I've been wandering through the desert areas too much, but I don't recall there being a whole lot of ambient noise. So I'm wiling to concede this point for my lack of experience. The way it is now, a lot of the songs have the ambient noises built into them. This makes the music great, but it also greatly reduces the variation that one gets in the game. It would be nice if there were more audio added to the existing ones. I.e. weather, animal sounds, armor/walking, etc.

3. In the options menu there is a slider called "Music Frequency." I have had little luck with this slider. I'm not sure it even works as I have been playing with it and haven't figured it out. I'm not sure if that's a bug or if I'm just not understanding it, but I've googled and found other threads where people have had a similar difficulty in getting this to work or seeing any noticeable difference.

4: This is a pure wishlist item and might take too much to develop, but adding in Musicians who start up playing (or pay for a small price) in bars would be a great way to increase the amount of music. I hope that would not be too hard to implement.

5: Diving further into the wishlist... Having instruments and musicians in the game would be awesome, but why not go one step further? If there is a musician skill added and you could train one of your guys to be a musician. This could be a huge addition to the lore/feel of the game by allowing players to play their instruments in bars or town squares and earn a very small amount of money. I see it as a way for new players to get started and another way for player settlements to make money. For balancing, musicians will make next to no money and it shouldn't scale well for late gameplay as this is primarily a combat game.

I see the music skill a lot like the Sims and Star Wars Galaxies. The higher your skill, the more songs you can play. Simply equip a musical instrument and play music is a job option, either anywhere or one can build a stage or another generic music playing spot. If you really want to go in depth it could be leveled up with a speaker or something. I think this would greatly add to the game feel and story. In my current play though I've been running a traveling trade caravan and traveling with a musician would be amazing!

Summary:

Obviously 4 and 5 are pure wishlist items and I could be mistaken about 2 and 3, but I would greatly appreciate number 1 being fulfilled. The current soundtrack is a very strong part of the game and I would love to hear more music. I would definitely purchase a new soundtrack and I don't think I'm alone in that aspect. Would anyone else buy a second soundtrack to help pay for the additional songs?