What’s going on I just wanted to do a video about rock band 4 and guitar hero live now
for those of you who didn’t see the announcement today the first shots were fired in the next
generation rhythm game war between Activision and Harmonix.
Now let’s talk about Guitar Hero Live which was announced today.
Now I am going to go through each category and compare each game based on the information
we know to date and as time goes on like when E3 comes I’ll do another video to serve
as an update.
So let’s talk about Guitar Hero Live that was announced today.
It’s going to be coming out for all current and next generation platforms including the
Wii U which is unfortunately something Rock Band 4 is unfortunately not doing.
It’s only coming out for the PS4 and Xbox One.
So let’s talk about what Activision announced today.
So the game is being developed by Freestyle Games, the same guys who made DJ Hero so Neversoft
is not returning ot make Guitar Hero and a lot of people from what I read online were
really disappointed by that news.
The other thing they announced too is that the game is no longer a full band experience,
it is strictly a guitar game and it comes with a new guitar peripheral which has 6 buttons
instead of five and the button configuration is changing too.
There’s going to be two rows with three buttons on each row.
There’s going to be a row of black buttons and a row of white buttons and the developers
have done that because it sort of simulates a player playing different chord shapes together.
So the note highway when you watch the gameplay footage it’s just basically three frets
and you’ll either be playing the black or the white or the black and white together.
The other thing that’s been announced is that as you can see from the trailer behind
me is that the entire game takes place in front of a live crowd so everything you see
like your bandmates on stage the crowd is all live so there’s not that animated screen
anymore and the band you see on stage is actually playing the real song you’re playing so
it’s not just one take that they’ve repeated for every single song in the game and the
crowd reacts based on how you play.
If you play really good they’ll be cheering and they’ll be singing along and if you
don’t play so good they’ll be getting upset at you and same with your bandmates.
And the other thing they’ve announced too is that because all the gameplay footage is
all real video I guess you really can’t customize your character and I think that’s
going to disappoint a lot of people because character customization is something we’ve
known to love from the guitar hero franchise as well as the rock band franchise.
Let’s talk about DLC support and backwards compatibility.
It was pretty apparent from Activision’s announcement today that your old guitars will
unfortunately will not work and all your old DLC you bought from Guitar Hero 3 all the
way through to the last Guitar Hero Warriors of rock will not be compatible either.
So I think one thing you will see with the new guitar hero is a lot of returning tracks
we’ve seen before in so many games whether it’s Rocksmith, Rock Band and Guitar Hero
whereas Rock Band 4 is going to support all the DLC you’ve purchased to date it’ll
only be compatible cross platform so if you have an xbox 360 you can’t bring all your
DLC over to the ps4 and it’s the same for a ps4.
The other thing that harmonix has announced or at least they’ve seemed to indicate is
that all your old instruments will work.
So let’s talk about setlists and the setlist for rock band 4 we have no clue what it’s
going to involve and no songs have gotten leaked so far, but they’ve said it’s going
to be pretty top tier and it’s going to have artists we haven’t seen before in rock
band and I think it’s going to be more focused because keyboards are no longer supported
in rock band 4 they are going back to the core experience just featuring 4 instruments.
It seems like harmonies are up in the air I’m guessing harmonies may not be included
from the information we’ve seen so far and that allows harmonix to be more focused on
catering to a certain genre of rock rather than bands we saw in Rock Band 3.
Seeing artists like Lady Gaga, Elton John or Billy Joel . I don’t think some of those
artists will return whereas Guitar Hero has been pretty open about the artists who will
be in the game.
It’s going to be pretty eclectic and it’s going to be a lot different than what we’ve
saw in past guitar hero games which I think may upset infact a lot of people.
Some of the artists announced today included people like Skrillex, which I think is a rather
interesting addition to Guitar Hero.
There will be Green Day who had their own game if you remember back in 2010, there’s
going to be Gary Clark Jr., there’s going to be Fall Out Boy, There’s going to be
American Authors, there’s going to be Of Monsters and Men.
So there’s a pretty broad variety of artists we’re going to see and compared to previous
Guitar Hero’s the previous Guitar Hero games have always been very focused they are usually
on the harder rock side.
This one seems to be catering to what the developers have said a festival of Coachella
proportions the kind of artists you would see at those festivals I think it’s trying
to lean more towards the poppy side, but you know we’ll see what comes with their actual
setlist announcement at E3.
Let’s talk about the DLC after it is released after Guitar Hero and Rock Band 4 are released
and Activision announced something interesting what they call Guitar Hero TV now it’s basically
going to allow you to jump in and out and play along to music videos of different songs
and they are separated by genres as well and they didn’t elaborate any further on that
and they didn’t announce what the pricing model for that would be but they have been
really adamant about saying hey we aren’t going to release yearly Guitar Hero games
like we did on the last generation of consoles so it looks like Rock Band and Guitar Hero
are going to be releasing one game for this platform at least as a platform for this generation
of consoles and keep supporting it with DLC> Harmonix has said while they are going to
release songs as DLC they are also going to be upgrading the gameplay experience which
is something that is a stark drastic difference between both franchises . The thing I fear
with guitar hero is that the gameplay is going to get stale and maybe the songs will keep
the gameplay fresh, but when Harmonix is improving the gameplay experience based on what the
player’s feedback is I mean that says a lot about keeping the game fresh and brand
new.
While we haven’t got any more details past that we’ll probably see more at E3 being
announced.
I think it’s safe to say that for DLC support it’s going to be Harmonix once again.
They supported Rock Band 1-3 with over 256 or 258 consecutive weeks of DLC and and that
song library has grown to over 2000 songs, most of which will transfer over to Rock Band
4 . Harmonix has talked a lot about making the core band experience much more realistic
and more interactive and they haven’t really elaborated on that but they have said that
they want to basically make the way a band interacts much more realistic and be able
to interact more with bandmates as well as put your own personal mark on each and every
song and that’s all the information that’s been released to date about Rock Band as far
as we know.
We know that both games will be coming out this fall.
Personally I feel like I am leaning more towards rock band 4 I feel like you know guitar hero
I feel like they have a really good opportunity to do something new and innovative and you
know to me it feels like they are going back to where their roots are and they are not
really bringing anything new or different that could take the genre in a new direction.
It feels like a rehash of what we saw in the first three guitar hero games.
But I am open minded to seeing what Activision is going to be bringing this fall and I am
definitely going to be playing the game.
We do know that activision’s game will be $99.00 with the guitar bundle.
Harmonix hasn’t really announced pricing for their game but there will be a couple
bundles available including one with the guitars well as the full band bundle like we saw with
rock band 1 and 2 I’d like to know what are you’re guys thoughts.
Which game are you preferring and which one are you leaning towards.
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Thanks for watching guys and take care.