Lots of info today!!! Can't wait!!!
Gamespot behind the scenes:
some gameplay impressions:
IGN:
Eurogamer:
gameplay:
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/14/8406517/guitar-hero-live-ps4-xbox-one
Activision has announced Guitar Hero Live will be coming this fall to consoles and mobile (the $99 box will get you the guitar controller and a platform-specific game).
But this isn’t the same Guitar Hero as before. Developer FreeStyleGames, whose past work includes the unique DJ Hero series, has rethought huge swaths of the familiar Guitar Hero formula (as well as creating its own 24-hour playable music video channels). From what we’ve seen and played so far, it’s a legitimately exciting proposition.
The biggest change, in that it breaks with all past guitar titles, is a new button layout for the guitar controller. The classic five rainbow-colored buttons are gone in lieu of a three-by-two vertical grid. It’s a small step toward actual guitar positioning (i.e. two strings and three frets). Accordingly, each fret now shares one of three on-screen lanes differentiated by black picks pointing up or white picks pointing down.
Picture this: if the lane of notes has a black pick followed by two white picks, your pointer finger would be on the top first fret, your middle finger would be on the lower second fret, and your ring finger would be on the lower third fret. Chord shapes!
Guitar Hero Live’s main campaign is designed to play out from the first-person point of view of a rocker on stage, with actual humans both in the audience and on stage with you.
Think of it as two parallel dimensions that you keep hopping between in real time. If you’re playing well, you get the "good" version with the audience going crazy and the band nodding favorably. Start playing poorly and the screen will briefly distort and switch to the "bad" version, where the band starts giving you incredulous looks and the audience gets increasingly irritated as the song goes on. (We also noticed some poster board signs change — a smiley face turned sour, for example.)
FreeStyleGames shot each performance twice using a motion control camera rig that could replicate the exact same movements multiple times over so that you could jump from "good" to "bad" at any point and maintain the same first-person continuity and choreography. We had a chance to play through two different venues — each with its own pre-performance build-up, literally walking from the green room on stage and onto a stage in front of hundreds or thousands of fans. The effect is cool in action (assuming you pay attention the background at all while playing), but we’ll have to see how many venues are included in the final build. We could see it getting pretty repetitive.
And then there’s Guitar Hero TV, an online experience that lets you play along with various "channels" of music playlists that run 24 hours a day. GHTV eschews the first-person background for official music videos. It’s Guitar Hero Live’s de facto online multiplayer / offline party experience, and it’s so integral to the game that the guitar controller has a dedicated button for jumping in and out of the mode. "Out of the box you can go play on the channels to your heart's content without paying any kind of subscription fee," FreeStyleGames’s Creative Director Jamie Jackson told us. If you’re wondering about potential premium channels / premium à la carte tracks, that’s something the company isn’t talking about yet.
Guitar Hero Live will arrive on the quintet of major consoles — Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PS3, and Nintendo Wii U — as well as "select mobile devices." Interestingly enough, Activision confirmed that the mobile version would be as full-featured as the console counterparts and could optionally connect to a television, giving you the same console experience but without the bulky hardware. (Activision did not elaborate on specifics here.) You can now theoretically play Guitar Hero on a flight, because why not.
The remaining Guitar Hero Live details will be revealed at E3 in June. Whether or not there’s an audience for plastic guitars, be it GHL or Rock Band, will be revealed this fall.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/04/14/guitar-hero-live-wants-to-give-you-stagefright
But at its core, this is still Guitar Hero. It’s a rhythm-action game, in which you have to press the right buttons at the right time using a guitar-shaped peripheral. But unlike Rock Band, which was recently announced and is hoping to support existing instruments, Guitar Hero has a redesigned guitar, which thanks to some subtle changes has quite a big impact on how it plays. Instead of five differently-coloured buttons lining up side-by-side, the new guitar has six buttons arranged in two rows of three. The top row are the black keys, while the bottom are the white ones. The main pieces of information you now need to interpret is whether it’s the left, centre, or right note, and whether it’s on the top or bottom. In truth, this simplification doesn’t make anything easier, and actually gives rise to more complex and realistic fretwork as it’s now possible to create patterns resembling chords. Also, just the way in which your fingers now move around the frets is closer to the real thing.
In addition to Guitar Live, which functions as the game's single-player mode, there’s also Guitar Hero TV, a 24-hour music channel accessed through the game, which essentially turns any music video into a playable Guitar Hero track. Of course, it strips away all of the dynamic performance stuff you find in GH Live, but has bespoke tablature created for each song. Don’t like a particular track? You can skip between a couple of channels within GHTV. It also serves as the game’s multiplayer component, with you being able to compete locally against friends and people online, but also as a sort of party mode. It’s the first step towards Guitar Hero as a service, which seems like a logical evolution given the fatigue that eventually grew around the series.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/04/14/guitar-hero-lives-new-instrument-is-not-what-you-expect
Guitar Hero Live abandons the series’ usual five-fret, five-color system for creating chords. Green, red, yellow, blue, and orange buttons, each set to a single slot on the fret board, are a thing of the past. Guitar Hero Live’s guitar uses just the top three frets, divided down the middle to create one button on the inside, and another on the outside of each fret. The six buttons are then divided in a binary black/white, rather than singular colors. The buttons on the inside of the fret board are labeled black, and the outside frets are labeled white.
It’s a strange mental undertaking to rethink Guitar Hero in this way. Not only are the colors we’ve relied on for so long completely replaced, but the instrument includes an additional button – and all of this in a new, tighter location. But it all makes sense, both from a psychological perspective, and in terms of making Guitar Hero feel like a new game again.
The binary color scheme simplifies the way your brain interprets the iconography on-screen – you’re seeing in twos and thinking in threes. Black automatically means the three buttons on the inside, limiting how the note track can psych you out. A sudden orange after a string of reds, blues, and yellows could break your rhythm. Guitar Hero Live eliminates this issue entirely. Also, the different textures on the black/white columns let you know where your fingers are set so you don't have to look at your hand if a finger slips.
The new guitar design makes pressing the fret keys feel more like playing an actual guitar – rapidly moving my fingers up and down and across a small space approximates hitting actual D, C, E, and power chords in an excellent way. And it means I am learning Guitar Hero again for the first time in 10 years.