Guitar Hero: World Tour Comments by Keza MacDonald

/taps X like a madman

Veto, veto!!

WANT

Cor. Wasn't expecting all this studio stuff. Thought it would just be a Rock Band clone.

I'm thinking that creating music using this would be more painful than fun

I want this quite a lot. Looking forward to making my first album of near unlistenable stuff for people to not play.

Straight to the top of the list it goes.

I've pre-ordered it from play and got my free bass guitar... talk about living the dream!

Tried out the instruments with Rock Band at all? I'm interested to know if they're definitely compatible - EA's terrible mishandling of the Australian release has lead me to the decision to buy GH:WT (it's substantially cheaper and stuff) for the music creation and the instrument peripherals, and then buy the standalone Rock Band for the actual gameplay. The irony being that buying it this way will work out the same price as just buying Rock Band's instrument pack + game. :\

Being a musician myself, this is a very intriguing prospect. Me wants this. Now. :)

Not to interested in music creation but was wondering if people would create clones of existing music that people could download for free and not have to pay for. I.e Nirvana's Nevermind and call in NRVNA - Nvrmnd. Just wondering

Also as I have RB dont want to buy more plastic instruments so was curious if the drum kit would work on this?

At least this studio mode will enable people to put some queen into rock band seems insane that killer queen is the only one that they seem to think deserves to be in it.

will the price be more reasonable than Rock Band?

A page and a half on music creation tools that are only going to be of interest to people with the talent, knowledge and patience to do the same sort of thing on professional music-creation packages and therefore don't need this game, barely a paragraph on the game itself. Thanks for that.

Cross-compatibility of instruments is something that should be applauded, though, and it'll probably turn GHWT from "Not A Chance" to a "Soon As It Can Be Got For 20-25 Squid" purchase for me. Shame so many songs are duplicated in RB2, though.

Is it me or it isn't mentioned in the article that you can't record, like,... the singing part. So you'll only be left with instrumental tracks.

Sounds interesting anyway, I wish you could have had a go at the RB2 instruments.

@johnnybrn
Yes, your RB drum will work on GHWT. I am just waiting for the official pricing in the UK

prediction: This will cost the GDP of a small country in EUR if Rock band 1 pricing is anything to go by.....

@Rodafowa

They are writing about what they were shown. Can't really expect more can we.

I'm actually a little bummed this 'hands on' didn't have more about the game portion. The music editing is nice and all, but to some of us (certainly me), it's just an extra we may not even delve into.

I'm in it for the Tool, tbh.

at the mo it's £150 for the full kit.....

The studio will be a much-hyped and never used feature. I doubt many people could be bothered with it. Also how do they go about the fact that the drum pads share instruments in the game? For a start you can't play without at least a crash, ride and hats, but there are only two cymbal pads. Which means you'll have to go in and manually edit the sound triggered by some strokes and not others. And suddenly it ends up becoming very long winded. And the lack of vocals I think makes it a non-starter. If Harmonix focus on getting their great note charts, having a massive track list, have a consistent stream of well-priced DLC and online band world tour whilst Neversoft put all their efforts into a short-lived novelty, I think it's pretty obvious which one will be worth buying.

'at the mo it's £150 for the full kit..... '

Does that include the game?

@ kangarootoo

I don't, really. I'm just frustrated that so much of the focus of this game appears to be on a feature that I (and, I'm betting, a vast majority of people) will end up having a 10-15 minute fiddle with and then ignore. Given how much was wrong with GH3 - the ridiculous, joyless difficulty spikes, those bastard boss-battles, the casual misogyny - I'm far more interested in finding out if those issues have been sorted than in reading about the bloody music creation mode. Again.

johnnybrn, yes it does include it :)

Thanks, thats sweet

@ Rodafowa

If GH: Aerosmith is anything to go by they've certainly addressed the difficulty spikes. Finished it on expert in about 3 hours with only one or two retries. And I can't even finish GH3 on hard!

This coming out on Wii?

Ooh, screw this, I just pre-ordered it... Now I need a way to pass this from my wife undetected... Maybe I should sell Rock-Band-in-a-Box to make room for it, what do you think? I never really felt comfortable with RB's guitar.

/is a wimp

BUT HAVE THEY SORTED THEIR NOTE CHARTS?

@Erinan

No vocals in music creation, can't remember where I read it, but Neversoft said it'd be too difficult to moderate content (racist lyrics etc).

"at the mo it's £150 for the full kit....."
"Thanks, thats sweet"

I'm kinda wondering why people are just accepting this £150 price tag, when Rock Band was £140 from Play/Amazon at launch (once you'd added the game) and people were going batshit mental about it. Ok you get a 'free' bass guitar if you pre-order, but if you already have a guitar from GH3 that's not much use to you. eBay better be ready for the flood when this comes out ;)

Ah, the fickle intertubes....

@Rodafowa

I see this sort of thing kind of like YouTube, insofar as the number of viewers massively outweigh the number of contributors, but the system as a whole works for everyone.

I expect that quite a small percentage of GH users will actually get stuck into this and create decent music, but we can be sure that some people WILL create fantastic music with this and their reputation should float them to the top of the inevitable pile of nonsense, just as it does in any game editing scene (assuming it includes a decent user ratings system, which it kind of has to).

In the end, everybody gets a free supply of new tunes whether they want to create any of their own or not. RB2 might have a larger catalogue of known artists, but there is the potential for hundreds of quality user created tunes to play all all styles.

The non-inclusion vocals is a real shame though. I can understand that recording and uploading your own vocals is a non-starter because of the huge increase in storage requirements it would cause, but being able to include your own lyrics and pitch information in a track would made the studio complete.

@yupyup

"but Neversoft said it'd be too difficult to moderate content"

That seems a bit of a cop out. Other services (such as YouTube and SingStar) get by ok by giving players a "report dodgy content" option. Don't see why GH couldn't do the same thing. I can understand their fear, but its quite a massive limitation that they are putting in place to protect themselves.

@yupyup

Well, the voice channels on all the FPS games have plenty of racist insults so why not just put a "rating changes with online interaction" sticker on it and be done like they do.

@metalnut:

Rock Band's original price suggested by EA was GBP 129.99 / EUR 169 for the instruments bundle plus GBP 49.99 / EUR 69.99 for the game, which totaled to GBP 180 / EUR 240, a *bit* more than the 169 USD they were asking for the full package (instruments plus game) in the US.

The fact that retailers lowered the price to a more reasonable GBP 140 came second to the uproar :)

Isn't the point of these games just to play along to the music you love?

Seems weird to create music in them, as they're going to be veyr much defined by what sounds the game allows you to make. It's more of a level editor than anything else I guess.

@ kangarootoo

For sure, I can see what it adds to the experience but I primarily play Rock Band as, er, a band with the rest of the family. The only role that's always filled when we play is the vocalist, largely because my wife and daughter aren't really interested in any other instrument, so something that adds content that'll always be sans vocals is of limited interest to me.

Yeah, it'd be nice if someone could throw together a good version of Purple Rain or Another Girl Another Planet for me to have a fiddle with, but a wide range of well-put-together and reasonably-priced DLC is much more important, personally speaking. Also - no word yet on how this stuff integrates with the main game. One of the small but excellent ways the structure of Rock Band was superior the Guitar Hero games was that it treated bonus and downloadable songs the same as the "main" on-disk tracklist in terms of in-game incentives to play them. Will GHWT follow suit?

Given that the song-creation tools are probably only going to be of interest to me in terms of what other people are doing with it, another preview primarily covering how that mode's going to work is particularly redundant - as I said, I'm way more interested in finding out whether any steps have been made to sort out the problems with GH3's actual gameplay before worrying about the extra frills.

just less shite american tunes would help. and i really mean a lot less.

Sounds cool, but I'm wondering how it'd handle anything more complex than basic chords. How are they going to implement the equivalent of palm-muting fr'instance? I'm sure they've thought of this stuff but if I'm going to have to wiggle a little lever about it's going to be a bit clunky.

@coastal: Where do you think the best rock and metal comes from? China?

@JonFE: yeah I know, but they were still bitching about it long after the game was available for £140, continuing to whine like crazy in the Amazon comments about the actual price, not the theoretical RRP. And yet no-one bats an eyelid at the £150 for GH:WT - maybe coming out second means the community outrage is all used up already ;)

"just less shite american tunes would help. and i really mean a lot less. "
"Where do you think the best rock and metal comes from? China? "

Britain. I agree there's a little too much US influence, but that's entirely down to the size of their audience, not musical merit. British bands are still a bit underrepresented in these games in comparison to their influence.

If you have the Rock Band 1 drum kit, does that mean you can buy an extra drum (as I see there's 5 instead of 4)

I remember in an interview they said the rockband drums will work and they have included something which remaps to the 4 pads, they also said that when you RB drums brake you can buy theres :-)

I am yet to invest in either so it looks like this is the one for me and then I can buy the rockband games, win win for me!

@coastal

I think this comes down to the kind of music you like. Britain might have a lot of bands making the kind of music you like, but I think Lemming81's point was that when it comes to the kind of music that GH has at its core, the US has the best bands. Now maybe you think GH should change its musical direction, but that isn't really to do with the bands' country of origin. The US has lots of good bands doing all kinds of music.

in reviews of Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2, I'm really interested in how they stand up as guitar only games. I don't have a house full of people who would be interested in playing all the instruments so some feedback in the reviews as to how they stand up as single player games would be helpful

Guys, there is a good video on ign demonstrating the music make, and it does seem really good! There are plenty of amp models so you can get the sound you want. As for palm muting! Yes they thought about it! and yes! you can palm mute! The guitar has a bridge piece, which also acts as a button, if you press it while strumming, it mutes. So it's practiiclly just like playing a real palm muted note.

From what I have seen and played of this game, it is a world apart from guitar hero 3. And I cannot wait for this game. The singleplayer has been refined, and the general layout of the game has been polished, which will please some people.

For me the music creator excites me, because me and friends can create songs and share them between each other. At first we will probably see some stupid things that are impossible to play, but activision have already said they will pick one a week or so as theire favourite... Something to aim for!

As for the note charts. Activision have employed a lot of people just to create this game, they have thousands of people working on those note charts. One of the main men at activision metnioned it in an interview recently, how activision has pumped a lot of money into the franchise to take it to a level beyond rock band.

I just hope their efforts are not wasted and people really do get stuck into the music creator.