Just a Moment to Appreciate the Haunted Trail Ride
Okay, so Halloween has, I think, always been my favorite SSO holiday, particularly with Galloper’s Keep. If I remember correctly, the first year they added the Keep, the Halloween soundtrack has ended up in my “most played/repeated songs” playlists on Spotify at least once. Because I love it, especially the Keep track. I’d just throw that puppy on repeat and have a grand time. Even when it was distinctly not Halloween to, y’know, the general public.
So yeah, that’s great, Halloween music, love it, but anyway, my actual point I wanna mention here is the Haunted Trail Ride.
It’s a neat little experience. I haven’t run it to death between being a full time college student + working part time on top of that, and there’s definitely a little extra jazz to doing it with the newly obtainable Raven pet from the collectibles on the trail ride, and all of those are cool points that make it an enjoyable feature, but what I think really sells me on it is, you guess it, the music.
Clear the air, I’m not a music major. I have very minimal music knowledge - whatever was taught to me in school, and, let’s be real, I didn’t retain a lot of it. But what is so stinkin’ cool about the Haunted Ride music is how it’s adaptive.
You have your base Haunted Trail Ride music that starts up at the beginning and does play through most of the ride, but - it fades in and out and changes dependent upon what encounters you get.
The newest, shiniest example is the Songsorrow’s song, which I really hope to have individually one day because I think it’s one of my new favorites. So, if you don’t know, a Songsorrow can spawn along the first stretch of beach you can access shortly in to the ride. She is accompanied first by a ghost looking out over the water towards the village that you’ll spot first - he mentions how his daughter went missing by the sea one day, and how, before she disappeared, she was always humming a haunting melody.
When you approach the Songsorrow, your usual music fades out to a much more somber, sorrowful tone, and you can just sit there and listen to it for a while if you want. Then, of course, you can interact with the Songsorrow, and there’s a couple added sound effect beats here and your usual change in music indicating something dangerous is happening before you’re spat back out on shore back on your horse, and it’ll play the little sad tune again for you so long as you linger in that little beach area.
Back on the trail, your main theme picks up. If you head left up the path towards the cave where you can find Bob always hanging out for some reason (in the case of a Songsorrow spawn, this is the trail branching left away from the wolves that surround what I think is a male adult figure and a younger girl(?) Hard to tell exactly because they vanish when you get too close), your music will change again into something a bit more mysterious and dark.
And there’s a couple more instances of this throughout the ride. This sort of fade out and in is actually relatively prominent in most of their Halloween event instances. Another time I notice it is during your pumpkin hunts. There’s obviously a full track there (it is available on their Spotify Halloween album, I believe), but it’s generally timed to fade in and out rather well with the stages of your pumpkin hunt. And it’s just another really fun upbeat fun little track for a fun activity.
So, anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on why SSO Halloween music is some of the coolest in the entire game.
tangentwithtanner
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