There’s just one more day until the next game in Firaxis’s wildly popular strategy series, Civilization, releases. Civilization Beyond Earth will be available on October 24th, and Firaxis has been building anticipation for their title since the beginning of October by livestreaming the game on the company’s Twitch.tv channel. Today, strategists got another reason to look forward to the game.
Earlier today, David Hinkle, a Community Manager at Firaxis, announced that upon release, Civilization Beyond Earth’s entire soundtrack will be included with purchase of the game. This is fairly unusual for games on Steam, as many companies choose to sell a separate bundle for their game that include the game’s soundtrack. Civilization Beyond Earth’s score has been composed by Geoff Knorr(Civilization 5 + DLC, Galactic Civilizations 3), Griffin Cohen(Civilization 5: Brave New World), Michael Curran(Civilization IV, Civilization V + DLC), and Grant Kirkhope(Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning). Firaxis posted two of the most popular songs from the livestreams, “Promethean” and “Xenomalleum,” on YouTube, which you can listen to directly above and below this paragraph. Both tracks feature orchestral, swelling sounds, meant to give the listener a feeling of grandeur. Appropriate enough, considering the concept behind Beyond Earth’s planet-hopping adventure.
When discussing video games, music and sound design are often lost in a sea of gameplay features and graphical fidelity, so it’s quite nice to see Firaxis putting a spotlight on the importance of a good soundtrack in a game. Their choice in adding Grant Kirkhope, a composer extremely well-versed in creating music for a variety of video games, to their already-talented team also emphasizes their commitment to giving Civilization Beyond Earth the best voice that they can. It will be interesting to see if other developers and publishers begin including soundtracks with their games as a result of this move by Firaxis. I certainly hope that the answer is yes.
Do you appreciate Firaxis’s inclusion of the soundtrack with purchase of the game, or is music just background in your opinion? Should other companies follow suit? Let us know in the comments!
Source: David Hinkle’s Community Post