Those eagle eyed of you who dwell on the test server or may have visited it today for the mass test may have spotted a new option in the in-game menu. Can you see it?
Did you spot it? To be honest, no, neither did I, before someone pointed it out on reddit – so here is a close up.
This may seem a insignificant change, and of course the ‘Eve has sound?’ meme has made its rounds yet again, but for many players who are fans of the vast selection of in-game music that’s been created by CCP over the last 12 years, this is a welcome return as seen by the comments on the reddit post breaking the news.
To understand why this is probably an important topic for older players, we have to look back at the old Jukebox feature which still has an active Evelopedia page for it. The original jukebox was a tool that allowed players to listen to Eve’s huge library of original music. At the time of its removal from the game there were 69 unique tracks with a total running length of approximately 6 hours. It also featured the ability to add tracks so you could create your own custom Eve Soundtrack to play to. It was a well-loved feature.
Indeed, the feature was so well loved that when CCP decided as part of a sound overhaul in the 2012 Retribution Release to remove it in favour of simplifying and reducing the engineering time to maintain the feature it was met with almost universal criticism. Instead it was replaced with a ‘Dynamic’ music system which would play tracks depending on your location is space in order to set a tone and mood. This meant in highsec you would hear music that matched the tone of the regions Empire, in lowsec it would become darker, until eventually once you enter null and wormhole space the music became a singular moody track.
As an alternative CCP move the soundtrack to CCP’s soundcloud page. This only provided further evidence of the soundtracks popularity, amassing nearly four million individual track plays since the end of 2012. This equates to over 3,500 tracks played per day with ‘…But Still We Go On‘ and ‘Below the Asteroids‘ clocking up 261,000 and 195,000 plays respectively. The tracks are regularly used in pod-casts and player made videos.
To honour the original soundtrack, CCP organised for Fanfest 2013 a showcase of Eve’s best music as played by the Icelandic Philharmonic Orchestra.
It was only natural after calls for the session to be immortalised on CD as part of the Second Decade Collectors’ Edition.
Three years since its removal, it appears the original composer of the music CCP RealX, has requested that an option be made available in the client that would allow people to listen to the now expanded library of 74 tracks. It is this option that now appears on the test server which replaces the ‘Dynamic’ music system with the glory of the original tracks.
While this isn’t the return of the jukebox of old, it is still a welcome feature for the fans of the Eve Soundtrack. Maybe its time again to play the game with music, even though no one can hear you scream.
