Composed by Johan Skugge and Jukka Rintamäki (luckily this is not a podcast), the original soundtrack of the last delivery of the saga, Battlefield 4, could not miss out rimmed-glasses breaker electronic section. These DICE boys never fail to keep bringing things to a next level, and their central theme of this OST is not less. Both of them had work before in the previous installment, Battlefield 3 and had been quite successful in giving this iconic track a new face for the future to come. In the Soundtrack department there is no other videogame (or at least first person shooter) that achieves this quality and consistency pulling every 3 years a new iteration to help to transmit the idea of “ultimate saga installment”.
There are a lot of similarities with the Battlefield 3 theme but what was their approach? In their own words:
We spent a lot of time discussing the theme with the audio department at DICE and the initial idea was to make something warmer and more organic when compared to Battlefield 3. This was our goal not only with the Battlefield 4 theme but the entire soundtrack of the game.
So sure, you can appreciate the differences at the first listen but if you wanna reach the core of the OST you have to take the hole package. The first thing you will notice on the record is another version of this main theme called “Warsaw” that is the actual main theme composed by the Swedish duo, this is the hardest version. The commercial one (featured in the video above) is composed by Rami, another Swedish producer with a long history. Now, the fanbase may be a little divided when choosing the best version but for sure they are creative and yeah, there is some people who appreciated these enhancements with a bit of humor.
In general, Johan and Jukka have achieve something very hard in the videogame soundtrack industry, and that is bringing together the best of the past and polish it to look like new, much like the same title itself. As a personal opinion, all i can say is so far so good, let’s see if they can keep up the good work for the next battlefield instalment.
If you are a fan of this series, you might want to check out Soundcloud, they have all the new tracks for all the DLC’s and special stuff, another hat tip for the community.
