Dev Blog #134: Soundtrack of the South

We’re back with an audible bang this week as we take a listen to the upcoming additions to the Battle Brothers soundtrack by Breakdown Epiphanies. Let’s hear in their own words what they’ve been up to!

Soundtrack of the South

The ‘Blazing Deserts’ DLC is going to make the world of Battle Brothers feel more diverse and rich in culture, and this of course also goes for the game’s soundtrack. Today we are going to share a sneak peek into the musical direction in the form of short snippets of four of the new pieces that await you once your company starts to explore the new content. These tracks are all still work in progress, but they should give a good impression of the atmosphere you are presented with battling the new enemies and visiting the opulent city states.

Our montage starts out with a new town theme and opens up with one of the Middle-Eastern instruments that we incorporated for our latest addition to the Battle Brothers OST, the Oud, a type of Arabic, fretless lute that has been used in the Middle-East and North Africa for millennia. Musically, this piece ties together with the rest of the soundtrack by means of a motif you are probably familiar with: the Battle Brothers main theme that plays in the main menu, on the world map and in northern towns. This time, though, we gave it a new spin by moving it into a key typical for oriental music.

The most prominent instrument of the second snippet you hear is a Bağlama, which is a type of Saz, a long-necked lute used in traditional music from the Balkan over Turkey all the way to today’s Iran and Afghanistan. It introduces us to one of the two battle tracks that are going to play when fighting the troops of the southern city states and the bandits in the surrounding deserts. Aside from the main motif on the Bağlama, this track features deep and heavy low string riffs that are reminiscent of the undead battle tracks (the city states are built upon the remnants of the old empire after all) as well as a more majestic brass section similar to the ones we came up with for the northern noble house battle music. The Bağlama also fills the role that the guitar did in those northern realms tracks.

The next transition brings us to a title that is going to play when fighting the new kinds of beasts introduced in the ‘Blazing Deserts’ DLC. As usual for our beast themes, the music is very heavy on percussion and the use of melodic elements is very sparse although we decided to let a flute play a bit of a more dominant role to convey that oriental atmosphere.

Finally, we have a piece that is not part of the southern deserts lore but expands the musical selection when travelling north since the new late game crisis might entail such ventures as well. This new world map track is like a more lush and open variant of the music we made for Warriors of the North, featuring the Nyckelharpa as well as deep and powerful northern choir.

This concludes today’s presentation and we hope we managed to stir your appetite for the contracts and stories that await your company in the southern realms.