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Guitar Hero III Good News and Bad News

Update: 31 MAY 2007 @ 19:46:55
Looks like IGN just completely dropped the ball last night. They pulled the videos, and replaced the one of My Name is Jonas with a 100% run (to hide the fact that the full audio track was cutting out), and replaced the one of Slow Ride with a section that had less screwups.

Additionally, one of the Neversoft devs showed up over at Scorehero to say the following:

"Please Read this, Numerous times. Repeat as necessary.

Guitar Hero 3.

This game is not done, nor is it any where near. As you see in demo's, most videos and previews, a good journalist will tell people that this game is still in early stages and alot of things will still be changed. The graphics, venues, characthers, the HUD, everything will be fine tuned, tweaked, focus tested, focus tested again, and focus tested some more, until we get a good feel, good look, and even better look.

When it comes to the videos on IGN, the audio lag isn't in the actual game, it's a mistake in encoding the videos on IGN's side. Hopefully this will be rectified, and there are *crosses fingers* Much better videos to come. (With me in them ) as IGN is having a 3 day GHIII special.

IGN talking about the "note hit window" It's actually not bad, but is infact getting tweaked still, but testers, developers and the like, we've gotten very good at the game and I feel, being a active Guitar Hero player, the note tracks and songs are amazing, fun and has that same Guitar Hero feel and I've 5 star'd every song on GH1 and 2 (aside from Jordan)

IGN talking about difficulty... could have been MUCH better phrased. The game isn't trying to be all, "God, this game is impossible". The game will still be just as hard as GH1 and 2, but yet more accessible to newcomers as well on easier difficulties. Expert players from the past are not going to come into this game and be like... what the hell this is too damn easy. Trust me, I'm an expert player, I only play expert. And I am one of the very few Note Trackers that work on the songs you will be playing and I make sure my expert tracks (as well as all the other difficulties) are going to be a challenge, but yet fun and playable, to those expert players coming back and newcomers alike. We arn't dumbing the game down, We're just finding a great balance to where everyone, no matter the difficulty in which you play, will have fun. And please, we won't take the Jordan's away from the people that love them. It's honestly become a staple of Guitar Hero gaming.

The setlist is a mutli-layered plethora of everyones dreams and wishlists, and like IGN said, it literally looks like it.

This game is early in development, it still needs quite a bit fine tuning, as any early game does. But come this fall in release, it will be a well polished, well oiled, hard rocking fine tuned machine. Good things are coming. Don't turn your back just yet. Wait till it's release and the final reviews that are released to do that."

And then, regarding bonus song difficulty, and if we'll get anything approaching Jordan:

"Bonus songs are bonus songs. They are that extra little treat that people get to earn. Not everyone is going to be able to beat Jordan, it's unfortunate. But for those guitar-hero virtuoso's out there, it makes teh game that much better. Songs like Jordan are not part of a main progression for a reason, not everyone needs to be able to beat every bonus song, and the drastic range in diversity has always made Guitar Hero's bonus songs that much more enjoyable, it's what makes the game fun for EVERYONE."

Furthermore, IGN posted another preview with some further details about songs. Of note is the fact that they completely clarified the stance on getting multi-track original recordings, and confirmed that they'll only be using originals only if they can get multi-track audio. Plus that sometimes, if they can't get multi-track audio, things like this happen:

The Living Colour song, Cult of Personality, is a track that people have been wanting in Guitar Hero for a long time. There was a slight hitch with it though. The master track was nowhere to be found. Instead of getting a cover, Living Colour came in and re-recorded the song just for the game. And they threw in a wicked solo that makes this song on expert just plain ridiculous.

A harder solo in Cult of Personality? Goddamn.

They also announced two additional Original Recording tracks, Pearl Jam's Evenflow and Priestess' Lay Down. Pearl Jam we know, and is great, and Priestess is apparently a Metal group no one's ever heard of, but here's a video to fix that.

So we all apparently need to just breathe deeply and hope for the best.

The original much more pessimistic article follows after the jump.

Originally posted 30 MAY 2007 @ 23:49

So IGN got an exclusive first-look at Guitar Hero III. I'm not going to water it down. If what they were shown was indicative of the final product, I'm scared.

Lets get the good news out of the way, since there isn't much:

• Remember all those tracks announced last week? Did you notice that in the press release they didn't say "As Made Famous By". That's because they're all original recordings. Neat.
• The wireless tech was officially licensed from Microsoft, making the GH3 controller the first third-party 360 controller. This means it should hopefully work as well as the official 360 controller, with no lag. Very neat.
• They added a streak-o-meter, which pops up on the left of the screen after you nail a certain number of consecutive notes, and keeps counting up as you go. Also neat, but not incredibly useful.

Sadly, that's it for the good news. On to the bad:

Neversoft had to rewrite the game from scratch. Apparently since MTV's Harmonix is now working on Rock Band, a competitor to Activision's Guitar Hero III, MTV and Activision aren't playing nice anymore, so while all the game concepts and rights transferred to Activision, the deal didn't include any game assets or code, meaning GH3 is a ground-up rewrite.

As a rewrite, it currently has all the problems we saw over the past year or so in fan-created PC ports like early builds of Freetar Hero and Frets on Fire. Timing is weird, and the game doesn't quite feel right yet. Granted, this should almost definitely be fixed before release. If it doesn't, I will gladly lead the angry mob's march to Activision HQ.

Original recordings are great and all, but it looks like Neversoft has different standards compared to Harmonix. See, there are two reasons why the original Guitar Hero had no original recordings from big-name artists.

1) Original recordings are way more expensive than just the rights to the song itself.
2) Original recordings aren't always available in multi-track format (eg, the lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums and vocals are all separate tracks which can have their volumes controlled independently.)

That second bit is important, since being able to just cut the guitar track when you screw up a note adds significantly to the level of immersion provided by the game, so a multi-track cover ends up being better than a single-track original. Harmonix, in fact, had previously gotten clearance to use the original recordings of some Black Sabbath songs for either GH1 or GH2 (I can't recall which), but they turned it down because multi-track recordings weren't available.

But apparently Neversoft doesn't feel the same, and thanks to this, GH3 sounds like any of the PC clones that have been released. When you screw up, the whole song dims in volume, but keeps going. Goodbye immersion.

It also seems they have weird thoughts about how co-op should work. Neversoft is changing co-op into a stripped-down career mode, where only the "fun" multiplayer songs are available for you, plus some "surprises that you [w]on't find in the single player career". This is distressing for two reasons. First, because if it's career mode, I can only assume it'll have four distinct difficulties like normal career mode, and that totally ruins one of the best features of GH2's co-op mode. What made GH2's co-op mode so great was that if you're a super mega guitar hero badass you could play lead on expert, a difficulty level fun for you. And then you could have your friend, who might only be a casual gamer, play the bass line on easy or medium, a difficulty level fun for them. Secondly, co-op exclusive tracks? Are they insane?

At the very least, what they showed was pretty, and it certainly is a rather significant feat to have come this far having re-written the game from scratch, but they still have a long way to go if they're going to live up to the video game perfection that was embodied in Guitar Hero 1 and 2. But I guess we'll see, and we'll see soon, since the game is still targeted for a giant release later this year.

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