Rock Band 2 Musings

Well, the inevitable has happened.  Harmonix announced today the sequal to last year’s break out music rythm game hit, Rock Band.  IGN has an interview with Dan Teasdale, featuring all the news that’s ready to be announced on the title (not much).  The gist is:

• DLC will be cross game compatible.  Hallelujah!
• RB1 controllers will work with RB2
• New controllers will be wireless
• There will be new gameplay modes and ways to play your DLC
• New features to World Tour Mode, with Online World Tour hinted at but not confirmed
• You’ll be able to opt out of certain DLC for random setlists

On the subject of user generated content, Teasdale had this to say:

Harmonix believes that user creativity and user-generated content has an important role to play in music games especially since it is a company made of musicians – either in currently touring bands or in the past notable ones — and we strongly believe in the possibility of giving every-day people the chance to create their own music. In fact we’ve been pioneering this since our earliest music games like Frequency and Amplitude – I recommend checking out YouTube for some of the crazy remixes people have done with our previous games.

The one thing we’ve learned from both doing this in previous games and seeing the efforts of homebrew composers at places like ScoreHero is that it takes time to develop tools if you’re serious about building a platform for people to express themselves musically.

We believe that a feature like this would have to be done in just the right way to hit the broadest demographic possible from professional music composers to the most casual gamer just trying something new so the result is a truly robust feature that educates the player and enhances the total music experience for the user. If we’re going to do it, we want to do it right as our goal is to create a fully-realized, fully-integrated way for people to become real musicians and release quality music through Rock Band.

Translation:  No user generated music this time around.  That may be the thing that puts Guitar Hero over the top.  Honestly, I’m getting sick of the competition and release of SKU after SKU, but on the other hand, I do believe that each company is pushing the other not to settle.  Which is good for you and me.

Rock Band 2 is set to release this September for 360 and on all other relevant platforms by the end of the year.

–WG