Directional Pad

Guitar Hero 2 officially announced

We've known that Guitar Hero 2 was in development for quite awhile now. Markus Henderson - one of the main guitar gods at WaveGroup, the company responsible for all the Guitar Hero recordings - spilled the beans about it way back last year, when he mentioned he was on the song choosing team. Now it's official, and has a tentative releasedate of November 2006.

Earlier today, RedOctane - Guitar Hero's publisher, and the crew responsible for making the awesome Guitar Hero SG controller - posted a press release officially announcing the sequel. The press release was standard press release fare, "Rah! Rah! Our game is amazing! Our game wins awards! Now you'll need to buy more!", but there were a couple useful tidbits inside.

First, they confirmed something that leaked out last week in the latest issue of Game Informer: multiple tracks. GH2 is going to feature audio tracks for Lead, Rhythm and Bass Guitar, adding several new dimensions to gameplay. John Tam, executive producer for Guitar Hero 2, elaborated on this in an interview with IGN:

John Tam: For the sequel, for every song, there's going to be two streams. Some of those second streams are going to be rhythm guitar, and some of those streams are going to be bass guitar. So there's not three streams, there's actually two streams. But with two guitars you'll actually be able to play co-operatively and you're not playing the same exact track, like sharing the lead guitar track. You're actually playing your own track.

IGN: So this is more of a multiplayer thing rather than a single-player feature?

John Tam: Yes. For single-player, Guitar Hero is always going to be about being the lead guitarist, because that's what the illusion is, that you're a lead guitarist in a band.

I'm really excited about cooperative multi-track multiplayer, since it means multiplayer won't be lame like the original's, one of the only things I could find wrong with the game. It also means there'll be a multiplayer option for differing skill levels, so if you know what you're doing and have five-starred everything in expert mode, you can play lead, but if your friend has never touched the game before, well, he can play rhythm on an easier difficulty setting. It is, however, slightly disappointing that there doesn't seem there'll be an unlockable single-player Bass Hero subgame.

Another thing new to GH2 is a practice mode. Practice mode was originally slated to be in Guitar Hero, but was cut at some point. Essentially, it lets you load up a certain song, and loop a certain part of it. So if you want to spend some time practicing an especially hard solo, you'll be able to without having to slag through the whole song to get there.

The tracklist is still a carefully guarded secret, but the press release says it's going to have more than 55 songs, all of which will be new. By comparison, Guitar Hero had 48 tracks: 30 standard songs, 17 unlockables and one super secret bonus hand-breakingly difficult song. Again, we don't have any confirmed songs so far, but in that interview, John Tam let on a bit more about what they've got kicking around. Specifically that with the first time around, it was hard to get a lot of big names like AC/DC, Metallica, etc for a number of reasons. Sometimes the licensing was just cost-prohibitive, sometimes the bands just didn't Get It because there wasn't a game yet to show. That's changed now, even moreso since the game has won so many awards, so they've got more ammunition with which to pursue the big names they missed out on last time.

Finally, it was pretty much expected that RedOctane would be pimping out Guitar Hero 2 at E3 since they booked a ton of space at the show, but now we've got confirmation on that too. They'll be at E3, Guitar Hero 2 will be at E3, and we'll be at E3, so you'll be getting first hand coverage from us next month. [Further details on our excursion to E3 2006 can be seen over on our forums.]

Discuss this article on the forums.