Rock Band 3

[WDOgF0reL1fe]

re: Rock Band 3

Probably not going to happen...
But it would be amazing if they integrated the Keyboard into past DLC, RB1, and RB2 songs (final countdown as one that sticks out)

[boomhauertjs]

re: Rock Band 3

I wonder if there will be a version with just the game and the keyboard because that's all I'll probably get.

[CaptainZombie]

re: Rock Band 3

I wonder if there will be a version with just the game and the keyboard because that's all I'll probably get.

Yes there will be. I was at GS yesterday and they already had a pre-order sku for it.

[aukevin]

re: Rock Band 3

I wonder if there will be a version with just the game and the keyboard because that's all I'll probably get.

Yes there will be. I was at GS yesterday and they already had a pre-order sku for it.

Cool, that's the version I'll want as well.

[Hooe]

re: Rock Band 3

I think Rock Band Pro mode just sold me on this game.

[CaptainZombie]

re: Rock Band 3

Cool, that's the version I'll want as well.

They told me that there are only 2 Skus:

Rock Band 3 game only
Rock Band 3 w/keyboard

I guess there isn't going to be a new set of guitars or drums. In a way this is good so they can concentrate on the game itself.

[Mizzou23]

re: Rock Band 3

Wow, sign me up for a preorder on this sucker. There are some great songs on the RB3 tracklist....any hair metal is a godsend for this series.

The pro modes look interesting....but I'm not sure how much I will get into it. The fun of this game is how relatively easy it is to rock out compared to playing a real instrument. I dabbled with a real guitar and learned some basics last fall, but haven't picked it up on months. To each his own though, it will be a great mode for some.

[mgoblue]

re: Rock Band 3

I think Rock Band Pro mode just sold me on this game.

If it's actually a halfway decent way to learn guitar I may have to get the fender for Rock Band Pro.

I have my own Fender Strat Squire I try to learn on, but I'd really have to take lessons to get a lot better. Something like RBP would be a cool way to learn guitar with all the RB songs.

[Steel5]

re: Rock Band 3

Rock band Pro=SOLD

Looks awesome!

[shon]

re: Rock Band 3

They told me that there are only 2 Skus:

Rock Band 3 game only
Rock Band 3 w/keyboard

I guess there isn't going to be a new set of guitars or drums. In a way this is good so they can concentrate on the game itself.

Mad Katz has the rights to build all of the official Rockband hardware so they may have the Pro instruments for sale by themselves. I hope they have a Midi apapter so I can connect my Real drums to since they are adding 3 cymbals and the GH drums I'm using now I won't get the full functionality.

[myghty]

re: Rock Band 3

First DLC just announced:

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[Steel5]

re: Rock Band 3

Joystiq hands on

Hit to link to see a trailer for the game, not embeddable apparently.

Harmonix has reimagined their premiere title. They've fixed problems with the game (including the biggest one you didn't even know you had), smoothed out the rough edges, and added a ton of little extra features and fun. From the menu screen on, Rock Band 3 is very clearly, as the developers said during a pre-E3 event a few weeks ago, "a clean slate design of Rock Band. Nothing was sacred," they told us. "We decided to build the ultimate music game."

Get this: the menu screen shows not just some random tattoo graphics, but behind the game's user interface, you can now see your band in action. As you progress through the campaign, your band (all custom avatars) will fill the background, and you'll see them running to gigs, tuning instruments, putting up posters and so on. Even in the background of the first menu you see, your custom band is there in full motion.

Across the bottom of the menu screen is something Harmonix calls "the overshell" -- for every member of your band, there's a little popup menu where players can set, using their own instruments, their login name, their instrument track of choice, their own difficulty setting, lefty mode, and any other options. That's right -- no more will your Rock Band parties feature one awkward person yelling out, "Guys! Don't touch anything! Just let me set it up!" Everything works seamlessly -- as one person navigates to the right play mode, everyone else sets their own tracks up and chooses their own options. Additionally, the overshell allows drop-in, drop-out anywhere, anytime during the game -- as Harmonix told us, "this isn't a separate team mode or a party play style," it's everywhere in the game.

The menu itself has new and fewer options -- there's a new mode called Career, which is "a goal-based system" where single players can master the game by meeting hundreds of goals like playing medium across all of the instruments or scoring 100% on guitar. As you meet goals, you earn fans, and having certain amounts of fans opens up new features in the game, like the ability to have a band van, or go on tour in a new area. "It's essentially Rock Band your way," said Harmonix. "You can choose how you want to beat Rock Band."

There are also Road Challenges, described as "Band World Tour meets Mario Party." Instead of putting one band together in a long world tour, you can set the length of a multiplayer experience, and then play through it with your band in one evening. You can tour around town through a six-song playlist, or tour around the East Coast in twenty songs, and you'll have to deal with various challenges like a bored crowd (entertained by deploying as much overdrive as you can) or a panel full of judges, who will be watching your chorus accuracy or a how good a certain instrument is being played.

The music choice screen has also vastly improved -- with so many songs in the library, the devs said, just flipping through titles wasn't good enough. So now there's a filter system -- you can choose all songs with five star difficulty for guitars, or all songs from the 80s, or all songs from RBN or Rock Band 2 (RB3 will allow you to import previous games' and downloadable songs, though not all the details are worked out quite yet), or all songs with a certain length or all songs of a certain genre. You can combine filters -- if your party wants to only play songs rated five stars with a short length from Rock Band 1, you can. Once you've chosen a song, a redesigned song info screen has lots of new information, including past performance stats and even your own custom ratings (which will then be used in the game -- if you never want to see a song come up in the random playlists again, rate it badly, or vice versa).

Playlists can now be saved, and once they're saved, you can give them a name and an icon to play again later. You can save your favorite albums, and play through those all at once. You can even share playlists both in the game on RockBand.com, and you can turn them into custom battles, inviting your friends to play the same songs and try to beat your score.

And all of those changes are even before you play a single note of the game. The 80-song list (progressively revealed as we get closer to release) already contains bands like Huey Lewis and the News, Queen (finally, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is in Rock Band, just in time for vocal harmonies), Smash Mouth, and Rilo Kiley, with more songs to be announced later. The keyboard peripheral is cool -- you'll see more of it at E3, along with the Pro mode (which looks exceptionally complicated, but if you're the kind of person that has ever uploaded a full clear video of "Green Grass and High Tides" to YouTube, you'll probably love it). Those are the big changes that will get the press and kick off the message board discussions of whether or not real instruments are better than plastic ones.

But what really gives this game the plus one is everything else -- all of the little UI tweaks, ingenious little features, and gameplay refreshes that Harmonix has apparently crammed away in the various modes and menus. Rock Band 3 isn't just a new song list or a new game mode or even a brand new peripheral, although those things are there. It's really a whole new game.

Instruments:

[elicoleman]

re: Rock Band 3

That trailed looked badass. I can't freaking wait for October.

[Steel5]

re: Rock Band 3

Joystiq Interview

In terms of the keyboard: how difficult do the keyboard tracks get? Are there "Flight of the Bumblebees"-level challenges? In the Pro mode, I imagine it goes pretty much 1:1.

One of the things that's really nice about Rock Band 3 and the keyboard is that we have the classic keys mode," which is just the five-line simulation, and then we build all the way through to Pro, easy through expert. That actually affords a very graceful ramp through the content, through the songs. The funny thing about Rock Band Pro is that it scales to the hardest songs we have, but just because of the immense amount of information that we're throwing at the game player, even songs that are sort of considered easy, it's a completely new experience for people. I think we were able to address stock difficulty to Rock Band Pro without having to actually go after, you know, 200 BPM songs that were not necessarily... the gameplay is where a lot of that difficulty ramp lives, not necessarily in the content.

In terms of the drum kit: the cymbals are available now, but all they do now is duplicate some of the existing pads. In the Pro mode for drums, those cymbals will actually be two new inputs?

Yeah, up to three new inputs. Basically, except for the snare, you have three lanes that will pull double duty between toms and cymbals, and the gameplay differentiates, rewards you for hitting cymbals instead of toms and toms instead of cymbals and then also, in terms of raw, life through the level, if you don't hit the right things you'll have a harder time getting through the end of the song.

Talking about, kind of, redoing the Rock Band platform and rethinking it, did you spend a lot of time on vocals? I know complaints about the earlier games have been in regards to voice recognition, that basically as long as you're saying something, it's fine. Have you guys done much work on that in Rock Band 3?

Yeah, actually, we focused a lot on the singing experience; not just bringing over harmonies, which is a big thing and played into our track selection in a pretty big way. But also, we have revised the way we do note detection and also non-pitched vocal parts; we've also added some technology just to help people sound a little better, we've looked at the game structure and the whole chain of balancing out volume and input volume and output level. We've added some technology in there that does some pitch correction on your vocals. We're trying both to try to improve the gameplay side of things so that it's a little smarter, and the intent from the player is a little more clear, in terms of our scoring mechanics, and then also on the output side, we want to make singing as accessible as possible, and so there's a lot of technology in there that's designed to make you sound better.

Older songs that had keyboards -- Freezepop's "Brain Power," for example -- are those being revamped for the keyboard?

We're sort of thinking through the legacy songs now in terms of how we support them in Rock Band 3. We know that all DLC and most of the disc songs will be able to be imported into the RB3 library. But in terms of how we augment tracks for Pro and also for keyboards, expect information forthcoming about that stuff. It's complicated.

Will there be multiple difficulties within Pro? Is Pro mode a bucket for a new level of difficulty or a new type of experience, or is it just the difficulty level and it's a fixed, known quantity?

We consider Pro to be a mode unto itself, and so it supports four difficulties the same way that everything in Rock Band does -- there's easy, medium, hard, and expert. And so, while we're sort of holding it up as the mode for the player that's beaten everything in the Rock Band universe, one of the things that we're most proud of is that it has a really soft barrier to entry, where it's a new experience, so skills that you have learned in standard guitar gameplay don't necessarily carry over, but it's not that you need to be a guitar player or an expert music game player to be able to get into the Pro stuff for guitar, keyboards, or drums. All of that is supported with a very low-key easy mode.

I think you've said there would be two separate Pro guitar experiences. There going to be the Fender guitar, and there's also going to be a 120-button plastic guitar? Can you explain the gameplay differences between those two experiences?

Sure. I mean, really, there's only one gameplay difference, which is that the Fender guitar has more frets on the top end, and so we have basically author for either 17 frets or the full 22. Aside from that, which is actually a pretty subtle difference, they function the same. One of the key things that the game really needs to understand is what your left hand is doing before you strum. With the Mustang, players press buttons down and it can either be like, "now i'm playing an open string," or "I'm playing that low E string on the third fret to play a G," or "I'm playing power chords or barre chords or open chords" or whatever, but you're pressing the buttons down and then strumming to actuate. That's manifest in the Squier as well, where there's technology in the fretboard that allows the game to know what your fretting hand is doing, and then with your right hand, you strum to actually trigger the chord or note.

It's like a pressure-sensitive fretboard.

It's not just pressure sensitive. There's some technology in there that -- we can get into some of those particulars at E3. It's a lot easier to show you than it is to describe it.

How about any of the existing instruments? Are you guys tweaking the existing Rock Band 2 guitar or drums? Or is that stuff pretty much staying the same?

From a functional standpoint, or just core functionality, I think we've been careful not to change things. We want to make sure that the people who have invested in guitars and drums over the years don't necessarily feel pressure to upgrade those. Again, you probably do want to talk to Mad Catz about specifically what kind of products they plan to bring into the marketplace. Certainly on the software side, we are fully supporting the legacy peripherals that exist in the marketplace. So there's no new gameplay built that's relying on an upgraded plastic guitar outside of what we're doing with Rock Band Pro.

You mentioned before about importing, that all the DLC will import fine and most of the songs on the disc will import fine. Is that process the same as it was from Rock Band 2 to Rock Band 1 -- are you going to be buying a $5 license? Is that process built in now? It seems with Rock Band 2, you were sort of figuring out as you went along, and with Rock Band 3 you've been able to plan for this type of functionality a little better.

From a software side, it's pretty well understood, but there's a lot of paperwork behind it that we're actually still trying to hash out.

The goal would be, I'm assuming, that Rock Band 3's the only disc you need to keep around ...

We're designing Rock Band 3 to be the library that holds all of your content in the Rock Band space. That is our ambition.

[Blzer]

re: Rock Band 3

Wowza! Those instruments can't be cheap.

What was the missing thing that we didn't know about? Oh, and I love the new look with one exception, and that's the 60s hippy background look. I'd prefer seeing the arena with the crowd and such instead of the effects, but that's just me. Too much purple, orange, and green on screen at one time.