I’ve been watching a lot of hardcore classic wow and I can’t help but feel emersed with the zone or dungeon’s aesthetics and feel like I exist there.
in retail there is a little bit of that but definitely not like classic, I even tried to max ambiance in the settings and it’s just not the same.
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It’s a lot easier for classic to use sound and music to set an atmosphere, as everyone is actually riding around on the ground, traversing the zones naturally. Not just flying across them in half a second.
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This is true.
Retail’s music, especially, has taken a big dive over the last two expansions. It’s not a difference with “Classic”; the break came with Shadowlands and Dragonflight.
It’s not that the music is bad, so much as it is not well fitted to the zone and sub-zone. The music no longer fits the game. And for some insane reason, they have taken music out of caves altogether. 
Honestly, I have a suspicion that the music for TWW is just made up of rejected pieces from earlier expansions that have just been sort-of assigned to sort-of not-entirely-inappropriate areas.
But go back to Legion and BfA, and you will still get well-fitted, atmospheric music in the zones and sub-zones. OK, there might be a few misses - I didn’t think much of the selection for Stormsong - but mostly the sound mapping holds up very well.
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The only good track in TWW is the Inn Music. Otherwise, it has been pretty bland.
You could take all the music in The War Within and put into a generic fantasy game and no one would notice it was World of Warcraft they were listening to. It would slot right in.
It’s just fantasy music now. There’s nowhere there’s that piece that make you go: “Aha! I recognize that! It’s Warcraft!”
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Just wanted to add that, Russell Brower, one of the original composers for WoW was let go last year, right after the acquisition by Microsoft. Meanwhile, Jason Hayes, the other major key composer for the game, is still officially with Blizzard but hasn’t contributed since BFA.
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WoW music has been mediocre for some time. Guess they ran out of ideas. Everytime a new expansion releases I level to max with music on, but I can’t remember the last time I really enjoyed the music. BfA had maybe 1-2 good tunes, but nothing special.
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