EverQuest II Soundtrack

EverQuest II Soundtrack, Laura Karpman, 2004

In some respects, EverQuest II ended up between a rock and a hard place. Its predecessor, EverQuest, together with Ultima Online, had helped establish the MMORPG as we know it. Expectations for EverQuest II were therefore high, to say the least. To Sony Online Entertainment’s credit, the developer delivered a polished, accessible product and one of the finest MMORPGs released up to that point. It simply was not the kind of quantum leap that EverQuest had represented. Then World of Warcraft arrived and changed the genre forever. EverQuest II was by no means a commercial failure — it peaked at 325,000 subscribers — but it could not compete with World of Warcraft and the millions it attracted. Even so, the game retained a dedicated fan base, with the sixteenth expansion, Reign of Shadows, released in 2020, fully sixteen years after the base game.

The developers also invested heavily in the game’s audio. Reviewers commented on the impressive quantity of recorded dialogue, delivered by high-profile actors including Christopher Lee and Heather Graham. For the EverQuest II soundtrack, Sony turned to Laura Karpman. Making her video game debut, Karpman was an intriguing choice. A classically trained composer and jazz performer, she had written for the concert hall as well as for film, television and theatre. By the time she came to EverQuest II, she had already accumulated several Emmy wins and nominations, with her most significant assignment to date being the score for Steven Spielberg’s television series Taken. EverQuest II marked the beginning of a productive career in video games for Karpman, even as she continued to work across other media. In 2016, she became the first woman elected to the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors.

Karpman joined EverQuest II in the early stages of development and initially had very little information or visual material to work with. As she later recalled, however, there was “a really creative art director that gave me some groovy guidance, like ‘write music that is Fascist Babylonian.’” Karpman evidently relished both such prompts and the creative freedom she was given. With no strict limits on cue length, she approached the EverQuest II soundtrack “more like compositions and movements of a large symphony more than film or video game cues.” Every in-game location was given its own distinct musical identity; in her words, “every cue […] with the exception of the attack cues, is like a main title of a movie.” Or, as she put it elsewhere, “EverQuest II was like composer Disneyland. I had so much fun. I got to do my thing with a big orchestra.”

And indeed, the EverQuest II soundtrack sounds like what happens when an exceptionally gifted composer is given a first-rate orchestra — in this case the FILMharmonic Orchestra Prague — and allowed to run with her imagination. Things begin promisingly, if on a somewhat conservative note. Opening track “Main Title” emerges as a spectacular curtain-raiser, recasting the original EverQuest main theme as a brassy display full of Korngoldian swagger and gloriously lustrous string writing. From there, the score only grows more impressive. Admirers of heroic fantasy music will find that Karpman has written one of the most brilliantly orchestrated and dazzlingly colourful game scores ever conceived. She does so to such a degree that “Character Creation”, with its scintillating woodwind writing, acquires a positively Straussian splendour and becomes a miniature tone poem in its own right.

Other examples of Karpman’s command of the late-Romantic orchestral idiom abound. “Qeynos” is one of game music’s most magnificent town themes, developing its melodic material with perfect assurance as it moves from graceful poise to full magisterial grandeur across five minutes. “Freeport” — that “Fascist Babylonian” idea mentioned earlier — receives a far less uplifting treatment. Taunting melodic figures launch a monolithic, suffocating march that builds towards a crushing finale, its discordant piano chords hurled into the thunderous mass with a violence that recalls King Crimson’s “The Devil’s Triangle”. “Antonica”, meanwhile, balances delicate, vivacious woodwind lines and lively string rhythms against bombastic outbursts with virtuoso control, all unified through ingenious use of waltz metre. Throughout these displays of orchestral brilliance, Karpman remains true to her claim that these pieces unfold according to their own strictly musical logic. Each cue rises and falls along its own impeccably judged dramatic arc.

If the entire EverQuest II soundtrack consisted solely of these perfectly executed high-fantasy gestures, it would still rank among the genre’s supreme achievements. But Karpman has further ambitions. Drawing on her love of modernist classical music, she pushes EverQuest II into territory few game scores have explored. “The Enchanted Lands” retains the score’s extraordinary tonal richness, but its heady chromaticism turns those lands into something enticingly intangible and mysterious. “Nektulos Forest” moves a step closer to mid-20th-century modernism with its nocturnal, Lutosławskian string textures, interrupted by massive orchestral discords: a masterclass in subdued underscore that never becomes less than fascinating. Other modernism-inflected pieces are more jagged and cerebral. “Lavastorm”, and especially “Temple of Cazic-Thule”, are driven forward by relentless string ostinati reminiscent of the Allegretto non troppo from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony.

Despite the soundtrack’s astounding stylistic breadth, it retains a striking coherence. This is because Karpman shapes her experiments as natural, progressively bolder extensions of the late-Romantic sound that forms the score’s base, a language already subtly destabilised from within. From the pieces above, it is only a short step to the still predominantly orchestral yet increasingly disjointed vistas of the supremely eerie “Fallen Gate”. “Everfrost”, meanwhile, turns modernism’s fondness for fragmentation into a clear expressive asset, capturing a location that is as fascinating as it is threatening.

The score’s final stylistic destination lies in the surprisingly numerous sound collages that see Karpman break beyond the strictly orchestral realm, revealing a genuinely modernist interest in manipulating acoustic material and blending it with electronics. “Permafrost” ventures closer to musique concrète than perhaps any other fantasy game score, building icy synth textures and random female cries atop what seem to be found sounds captured on tape. Crucially, such experiments are never ends in themselves, but always serve the music’s narrative and atmospheric purpose. The finest example is “Stormhold”, which distorts its nostalgic trumpet notes until they resemble a ghostly echo, surrounded by spectral voices and an aimlessly wandering snare drum. It is a subtle and exact way of underscoring the ruins of a once-great place, trapped within the memory of a glorious past that has since turned tragic.

Most fantasy scores, no matter how fantastical the worlds they accompany, feel surprisingly familiar. They tend to rely on relatively straightforward Romantic-orchestral idioms derived from well-established film and classical traditions. Perhaps this is simply a reflex: a way of grounding unfamiliar worlds in sounds players can immediately recognise. EverQuest II is far bolder. It dares to create a fantasy world that genuinely feels different from our own — a realm of unfamiliar sights and sensations that may intimidate and terrify one moment, then enchant the next. It does not necessarily make for an easy first listen. Yet through its astonishing instrumental imagination, harmonic daring and countless subtleties, the EverQuest II soundtrack evokes a vaster, stranger and more compelling world than almost any other game score in history. It is a masterpiece through and through.