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Guitar Hero Xbox One

4K views 47 replies 13 participants last post by  onlysublime 
#1 ·
thought it'd be fun to post this. Now rumors are strong that both Rock Band and Guitar Hero are coming back to next-gen!

I'm definitely down for more Guitar Hero. I grew up on GH so I kind of stuck with the franchise over RB (though I do own a ton of RB discs that I picked up on the cheap when both franchises were retired). Would go well with Rocksmith.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/02/24/new-guitar-hero-game-coming

Kotaku has learned from two separate sources that Activision has a new Guitar Hero game in development, reportedly for this year.

The new title, which one source says will be announced at E3 this year, takes a "more realistic" approach than previous Guitar Hero games, all of which have had a cartoonish visual style. Crowds and performers will look more in-line with real life. We were told that there are new guitar peripherals in development for the title, and both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were mentioned. It is reportedly due for an E3 announcement and a full release before the end of the year.

Although neither source told us exactly which developer is looking after the new Guitar Hero, it was indicated that it's one of Activision's West Coast studios, which would rule out Vicarious Visions.
 
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#2 ·
After rocksmith, if the games don't use real instruments might as well forget it...the plastic guitar days are kind of over. Rockband/GH with full band support? Now that would be awesome. I owned almost all of those games and would never touch one again after playing rocksmith, it just kind of makes the plastic instruments look ridiculous now.
 
#3 ·
I'm going to do it.

As much as I like Rocksmith, I'm still awful at a real guitar. I just want to cut loose to some good music. As long as they're not expecting $200+ from a band kit like the last generation, I'm fine. I don't think I'll get a whole kit anymore, but who knows.
 
#4 · (Edited)
The problem for this or a Rock Band revival is still going to be peripherals. I'm sure there are a lot of people like me with a ton of plastic instruments hidden away in a closet somewhere who don't want to have to buy even more of them... except since the 360 and the Xbox One use different wireless protocols, I doubt there's going to be much of a choice there.

If they somehow managed compatibility (I guess maybe if Microsoft let them, they could use a wireless dongle or something, but I doubt that'll happen), I'd be very interested. Without that, there is zero chance I'll buy a new one of these games.

As for the comparison to Rocksmith, I'm sure Rocksmith is a great learning tool. I'm not really looking to learn the guitar though. When I load up one of these games, I'm looking to have a fun time with a group of friends and that's it (okay, sometimes alcohol is involved for some of them too :D ). Having to learn the guitar to do that kind of defeats the purpose.
 
#5 ·
Well. I loved playing both games. I'm more of a Rock Band person though, but I still played the Guitar Hero games. I've played guitar in bands, so games like Rocksmith don't interest me since I know how to play. I enjoyed playing mostly because I'm a guitarist that wishes he was a drummer. I bought that ION drum set and played the heck out of it. I also bought that PS3WarBeast guitar and converted it to a 360 Wireless one. Good times. Also my wife loves singing, so its something we both can enjoy doing with rock band. I think they need to be smart about bringing both games to the new consoles because a lot of the people that played it before don't want to completely start over with new instruments and DLC. I would say if they cannot get older instruments to work or cannot get my DLC to import then I will not buy into either of them.
 
#7 ·
A new generation of gamers would need to buy the existing DLC. :) To recapture the last gen of us who have huge libraries is a little different: we're probably already sold but we don't want to rebuy it all.

In any case, I think both GH and RB coming out at the same would be foolish and will cut the market. If they could combine somehow into one title would be best.
 
#8 ·
The problem I see ( besides the obvious 2 competitors for a small market) is they've licensed every possible song out there that can be licensed. Rock songs are a dying breed. Also I wonder about whether the licensing deals have expired since some of them were negotiated at the peak of the genre.
 
#9 ·
I should probably elaborate on my statement above. Basically, before Rocksmith it was pretty acceptable to have plastic guitars because the technology to use a real guitar didn't exist...now that it does, it takes away a lot of the appeal of the older games as they're outdated in that respect. Sure, some people may want to use the old plastic guitars but honestly the real thing isn't that much different than the plastic in terms of initial difficulty (obviously, the real guitar eventually becomes way harder to master). However, for drums and singing the old versions are still fine. I don't think $200 sets of instruments are going to fly on the new systems, the novelty is gone. I think a better approach would be to use cables like rocksmith and add real drum and keyboard support, aim for a slightly different market than the casual party crowd.
 
#10 ·
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.
 
#11 · (Edited)
Thanks


I'm in! I really like the more realistic control and visual approach.


Please, please, please let us import all of the few limited but awesome GH exclusives and not pay for them again! Jimmy Hendrix and Metallica in particular. Still have the disks...


It sounds like that will be the case but I'm not seeing the RockBand level commitment there. Maybe I'm missing it.
 
#12 ·
I'm really liking how the online aspect seems to be coming together. Music channels that you can switch around, see other people playing the music, music videos, etc.

I'm curious how they're making money. They're not going to sell DLC via a download store. There's no disc of songs to buy. There's no subscription.

There has to be a way to have the songs you really want at your fingertips any time you way versus just a flavor of the moment situation.

My flavor of the moment is a song I hope is going to be there: Shut up and Dance with Me by Walk the Moon. A guilty pleasure for me.
 
#13 ·
I predict that the GH TV thing will end up being a subscription, and that the bundle that includes the game plus the guitar plus GHTV will be a limited time GHTV sub.

The title of this thread is now incorrect as GHL is releasing on both last and current gen, as well as phone and tablets.
 
#17 ·
Both!



I like the new guitar design/interface, so I will be buying this. I will buy Rockband as well, for the drums. Just hope they both have good tunes and don't pull that exclusive stuff again. All songs for all games!
 
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#18 ·
The idea of "chord shapes" is pretty good, but I would definitely miss moving my hand up and down the fret for that real air guitar feel. I imagine two by three must already be a lot to handle or they would have done the more logical two by five. I don't like the real people approach either but I won't knock it until I've tried it I guess.

I wish them luck with it. If I was a big retailer I'd be nervous about starting to make room for stacks of big boxes with plastic guitars for all the different console formats along with even bigger boxes with the full kit for Rock Band, considering how much of that crap they must have got stuck with after the big crash.

P.S. I think if I buy this I'd need to pick up a bottle of Acetone also to try to melt the words "HERO POWER" off that plastic button so I wouldn't be too embarrassed to even press it.
 
#23 ·
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/07/guitar-hero-live-guitar-deep-dive/#continued

Engadget has a new article and more details:

excerpts:

Guitar Hero Live's new guitar isn't licensed and wasn't inspired by any real-life model; it's simply the Guitar Hero Live guitar. It's sleeker than the original designs, black and tan with white trim and a faux-wood neck. There are no "candy-colored buttons" like on previous Guitar Hero controllers. Instead, the far end of the neck has a row of white-edged buttons directly below a row of black-edged buttons, their surfaces blending into the traditional design almost seamlessly.

On the guitar's body, there's a long Hero Power button at the base of the strings, serving as an update to the game's previous "Star Power" bonus-points system, plus a whammy bar and a menu button. That last one is primarily used in Guitar Hero TV, a new mode for the series featuring a stream of playable music videos.

The space between the buttons and the classic strumming bar is the same, Dunn says. Plus, the spacing between the buttons themselves is the same as in the old controllers. We noted a few other things that felt familiar when we tried out Guitar Hero Live in April, including the weight and shape of the guitar.

Another similarity to previous Guitar Hero controllers is the power source -- the new guitars run on two AA batteries -- and the latency. Meaning, there is no latency, Dunn promises. "Only once did we ever really get a version that we felt had that latency and really wasn't quite what we were looking for, and that was just a matter of tuning some new components in the guitar. Honestly, I don't think we've ever really had issues where we thought, 'Well, this is something we need to improve upon.'"

Plus, Coppard and Nate say the new guitar plays the same across Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. It's the same guitar, just a different wireless dongle for each platform. "We want everyone to get the same experience, regardless of the platform they're playing on," Coppard says.
 
#25 ·
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-16-guitar-hero-live-gets-an-october-release-date
Guitar Hero Live gets an October release date

Guitar Hero Live will be out on 20th October for PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Wii U, Activision has announced.

The game bundled with a new guitar controller will retail for $99.99 in North America, so we expect that to be somewhere in the neighborhood of £70 in the UK. We'll update when we get the official UK pricing.

Activision also released a trailer detailing GHTV, the "world's first official playable music video network." This feature allows players to play along with hundreds of curated music videos.

 
#27 ·
http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/19/a...-guitar-hero-revival-and-skylanders-vehicles/

GamesBeat: Why was this the right time to bring back Guitar Hero?

Hirshberg: We had the right idea and the right execution. We set a very high bar for ourselves internally. It’s obviously a strong brand and a strong franchise. It’s something people had a lot of love for. But it was clearly also out of gas. It was in need of meaningful reinvention. We made a deal with ourselves that we wouldn’t bring it back just to bring it back. We wouldn’t bring it back unless we felt like we had reinvented it for the next generation of gamers and hardware, and we have.

It’s a very different game built on a very familiar set of core principles and fantasies. Every bit of it has been reconsidered. The live audience that responds to you in real time, that’s visceral and immersive. The six-button guitar, with the two rows of three, introduces both more advanced gameplay, more combinations and more challenging gameplay for the advanced player, as well as more approachable gameplay for the beginner with the three-button mode.

And we have GHTV. One of the things that we always wanted to introduce was the ability to keep the music fresh. We’ve done that in such an elegant way, where we just have this stream of music videos you can play. That allows us to keep the music fresh and allows you to compete with your friends online. It makes it an even better party game than it was before.

GamesBeat: I like how the cloud seems to address the problem previous generations had with the consumer exhaustion of having to buy 50 more songs on another disc. All they really wanted was more songs. The cloud seems to make a big difference.

Hirshberg: It is Guitar Hero TV. It’s like MTV when we were growing up, except now we can play it. It has that curated stream of videos that pass. The only difference is that now it’s a video game.

GamesBeat: Was that idea almost cooked independently of the game itself?

Hirshberg: I remember when Freestyle brought it to us. Live was the original idea we got excited about. At the end of one of our greenlight meetings, they said, “We have this other idea we’ve been playing with, what do you think of it?” Everybody just sparked to it. For a while they almost became competing ideas internally. We were looking at GHTV and wondering if that was the big idea all on its own.

The more playtesting we did, the more we realized that they were very complementary ideas, though. We took a deep breath and did both of them. Live and the live audience gives you that super immersive, high production value, novel experience that games do so well, where they put you into an experience that you can’t have in real life. It’s very vivid and very real. TV does something very different. It keeps it current and fresh. It lets you compete online. It makes it social.
The two of them work well together in that campaign/multiplayer way that we’ve seen in Call of Duty. One of them is a visceral, high production value experience. The other is something you can do for months or hopefully years with your friends.
 
#28 ·
Currently Announced Song list:

Year Song Artist(s) Genre
2004 "American Idiot" Green Day Pop Punk
2013 "Another is Waiting" The Avett Brothers Indie Rock
2003 "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" Jet Hard Rock
2013 "Asleep at the Wheel" Band of Skulls Indie Rock
2011 "Bangarang" Skrillex Electronic
2012 "Been Away Too Long" Soundgarden Hard Rock
2005 "Before He Cheats" Carrie Underwood Country
2013 "Best Day of My Life" American Authors Indie Rock
2013 "Bitter Rivals" Sleigh Bells Pop Rock
2014 "Bones Exposed" Of Mice & Men Metalcore
1980 "Breaking the Law" Judas Priest Metal
1994 "Buddy Holly" Weezer Alternative
1996 "Bulls on Parade" Rage Against the Machine Metal
2001 "Chop Suey!" System of a Down Nu-Metal
2004 "The Clincher" Chevelle Nu-Metal
2011 "Come with Me Now" Kongos Alternative
1990 "Cowboys from Hell" Pantera Groove Metal
2013 "Cry of Achilles" Alter Bridge Hard Rock
2010 "Diamond Eyes" Deftones Metal
2000 "Disposable Teens" Marilyn Manson Metal
2010 "Don't Owe You a Thang" Gary Clark, Jr. Blues Rock
2011 "Everybody Talks" Neon Trees Pop Rock
2011 "Feel So Close" Calvin Harris Electronic
1998 "Freak on a Leash" Korn Nu-Metal
2014 "Going to Hell" The Pretty Reckless Hard Rock
2011 "Gold on the Ceiling" The Black Keys Blues Rock
1990 "Got the Time" Anthrax Thrash Metal
2014 "Gravedigger" Architects Metal
1999 "Guerrilla Radio" Rage Against the Machine Metal
2013 "Harlem" New Politics Alternative
2014 "A Heartbreak" Angus & Julia Stone Pop Rock
2014 "High Road" Mastodon Metal
1989 "Higher Ground" Red Hot Chili Peppers Funk
2012 "Ho Hey" The Lumineers Pop
2012 "I Gotsta Get Paid" ZZ Top Southern Rock
2014 "I Have a Problem" Beartooth Metalcore
2013 "In Due Time" Killswitch Engage Metalcore
2012 "In the End" Black Veil Brides Hard Rock
2014 "Kathleen" Catfish and the Bottlemen Indie Rock
2012 "King for a Day" Pierce the Veil Post-Hardcore
2010 "The Lazy Song" Bruno Mars Pop Rock
2014 "Leave It Alone" Broken Bells Rock
2014 "Left Hand Free" alt-J Indie Rock
2013 "Lies" Deap Vally Rock
2014 "Little Monster" Royal Blood Blues Rock
2012 "Love Bites (So Do I)" Halestorm Hard Rock
1977 "Lust for Life" Iggy Pop Punk Rock
2013 "Mind Your Manners" Pearl Jam Modern Rock
2013 "Move Shake Hide" Marmozets Hard Rock
2013 "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)" Fall Out Boy Pop Rock
2010 "Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)" My Chemical Romance Pop Punk
2012 "Nuclear Family" Green Day Pop Punk
1966 "Paint It Black" The Rolling Stones Classic Rock
2015 "Pedestrian at Best" Courtney Barnett Indie Rock
2013 "Right Back at It Again" A Day to Remember Pop Punk
2014 "Rimbaud Eyes" Dum Dum Girls Pop Rock
2013 "Shadow Moses" Bring Me the Horizon Metalcore
2014 "Sing" Ed Sheeran Pop
2014 "Sometimes" Blitz Kids Pop Punk
2013 "Sounds Like Balloons" Biffy Clyro Pop Rock
2013 "Stone" Alice in Chains Hard Rock
2013 "Strife" Trivium Metal
2009 "Sundial" Wolfmother Hard Rock
2013 "Sweet Remain" Vista Chino Hard Rock
2012 "Temper Temper" Bullet for My Valentine Metal
1992 "Thunder Kiss '65" White Zombie Metal
2006 "Thunder on the Mountain" Bob Dylan Blues Rock
1976 "Tie Your Mother Down" Queen Classic Rock
2014 "Tragedy + Time" Rise Against Punk Rock
2001 "Tribute" Tenacious D Hard Rock
2011 "Under Cover of Darkness" The Strokes Indie Rock
2014 "Under the Pressure" The War on Drugs Indie Rock
2013 "What Doesn't Kill You" Jake Bugg Rock
2006 "When You Were Young" The Killers Alternative
 
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