What’s up welcome to rock-gamer I am back from my week and a half vacation and I am
still jet lagged I just got back from Europe late last night and a lot of rock band 4 information
came out when I was gone.
I probably chose the wrong time to go on vacation but lets get caught up on what happened in
the past week and a half.
So on May 15 we had the live stream that showed off the first gameplay footage for rock band
4.
I really want to stress guys that what we saw was pre-alpha footage.
A lot of people were not happy with what they saw because you know the graphics were not
that good the game was not running at least the visuals were not running at 60 frames
per second.
You have to recommend.
I think we’ll see a better build at E3 hopefully and the game still has another 6-7 months
of development and they’ve also said that the new systems and new platforms allow them
to enhance the graphical capability like we haven’t seen them before.
So don’t let the first gameplay reveal let you formulate your entire opinion on the game.
So let’s get started with what was shown so the first thing that was shown and the
first thing I noticed was that But they were playing on the playstation 4 but they were
using the playstation 3 instruments.
That was said during the livestream so basically it shows that legacy instruments work so if
you have ps3 instruments lying around you can use them on the ps4 and same with the
360 if you’re playing on the xbox one.
Really good news.
The other thing that was shown was the Show Mode which I ugess that replaced the Gigs
mode that IGN referred to.
The show mode is a new name for the gigs mode and the show mode allows you as a band to
collectively choose what song you’re going to play next through a voting system.
So if you’re playing a set of 2 songs and you’re done playing those songs you can
then vote as a band as to what songs you want play next.
It’s supposed to streamline the quickplay experience so normally you play your setlist
go back to the menu and choose your songs and then start up all again.
This way you can just keep playing and you can just vote.
You can either vote during the song it appeared from the live stream or you can wait until
the end of the song and then vote on which songs you want to play.
The one thing I was curious about is how they decide tie breakers because you have four
people and you can tie with 2 vs 2.
I am guessing the singer’s vote probably carries a little more wait, but that was shown.
Another cool thing about that feature is that the crowd can give you song requests.
It wasn’t clear as to whether those song requests actually show up when you vote for
songs but we’ll have to see as more details about the game come out.
The other thing we saw was the vocal improv feature.
So the vocal improv feature allows you to add your own personal touch to each song if
you’re a vocalist so as long as you’re singing in key you can play around with the
melody a bit or at what appears to be the melody from what I saw and It appears that
the vocal improve feature is backwards compatible.
It works with your old DLC songs because during the live stream they played a couple old DLC
songs like Aerosmith, Boston, Pat Benetar and this feature was evident in that gameplay
footage.
The other thing I noticed is that the vocal improve feature is prompted whenever you see
a vertical line of dots.
That’s where you can do your vocal improve.
And even from watching the live stream that’s where it appeared the score meter showed vocal
improv on the screen.
I know a lot of people are dissecting that on reddit and the rock band forums.
The other thing that I noticed is that you can interact a lot more with the audience
at the beginning of a song.
So if you’re a vocalist you can actually talk to the audience and be like hey guys
are next song is so and so.
You’re really going to love it or thank you for being such a great audience or so
forth and the guys from harmonix if you don’t talk to the audience they tend to sort of
stop paying attention to you and they are not going to be as loud as they normally would
be if you were talking to them.
The other big feature we saw is the new drum fill mode.
The drum fill mode is being completely overhauled so normally when you play rock band 1 through
3 you get to the overdrive section and you can just free form those fills and you can
still do that if you want or you can just turn drum fills off, but with the new system
you’ll get to overdrive and there’ll be a pre-determined number of fills you’ll
have to play before activating overdrive.
It looks pretty fun and difficult from what we saw.
So it also appears that this feature is backwards compatible just like the vocal improv feature
because on the old songs they played on the live stream you could see the drum fills thrown
in the overdrive section.
The other thing that was mention was that you don’t have to play all the fills they
throw at you in overdrive you can skip a fill or 2 and you can still activate overdrive
as long as you hit the green crash at the end of the section.
The one thing we unfortunately did not see during the live stream was the drummer count
in.
I don’t remember seeing that during the entire time.
The other thing I noticed during the live stream is that now you can change your song
difficulty on the fly.
If you played rock band 3 you’ll remember that if you wanted to change your difficulty
you’d have to pause the game and then everybody would have to stop playing you’d have to
go find your difficulty and sort through it.
From one of the songs I saw, whoever was playing guitar I think it was on the avenged sevenfold
song the guy was just able to do it mid song while everyone else was playing and choose
his difficulty on the fly.
I am not really sure how that affects scoring but that is a nice feature to have.
The other thing that was announced was that the crowds will actually, sing-alongs are
basically back.
So if you loved that feature in rock band 1 and 2 that feature is coming back . And
I am super excited about that feature.
The other thing they announced is that the music store will be accessible on day 1.
As well they also said that not necessarily all your old DLC will transfer over on day
1 you may have to wait a bit until all your legacy DLC transfer over.
Because it is a lot of stuff to port over.
The other thing they talked about is that there is no song limit this time around.
If you played rock band 3 then you’d know there was a bug where you could only download
I think it was 3,200 songs and you couldn’t download any more than that.
Well that’s not going to be a problem this time in rock band 4.
The other thing they talked about is that they haven’t announced whether the ion drum
kit would be supported.
That is something they are actively working on.
And the last big information they talked about was Rock Band Network It will not be returning
because there was an infrastructure in place to support rock band network.
It’s not around this time.
They even hinted that your rock band network purchases may not transfer over to rock band
4.
That’s the just of what I got from the live stream . I was a little bit maybe disappointed
by the live stream.
It’s just that there was so much hype about harmonix talking up rock band 4.
I am still going to buy the game but I was just expecting a little bit more.
But they did say there are still a ton of new features that they still haven’t announced.
And IGN is still going to have more coverage on the story mode as well as the new instruments
later on this month.
I’d like to know what were you guys thoughts were you guys disappointed by the live stream
or was it about what you expected.
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Take care.