Behind the Scenes with Harmonix and Rockband

The folks at XFire passed on a link to their recent interview with the people at Harmonix. Now working on hit of E3, Rock Band, the company's senior designer at Harmonix, Community Developer, and Associate Producer answered questions from the XFire audience about the upcoming title. "shrouded: Can you tell us about the challenges of designing the drumset? ... Answer: The hardest part was satisfying all of the stuff we wanted - we're a company of musicians, including a sizeable chunk of drummers. I think we spent at least half a year making sure that the pedal felt almost exactly like a real drum pedal, and not just some switch. We also had a bunch of non-negotiable things that we had to get in, like using real drumsticks. I could go on forever, but the basic summary is that from day 1 we wanted this to be as close to an electronic kit as possible, with as few compromises as possible."

Comments

Controllers xbox / ps3

[Anonymous Coward]

It was my understanding that MS made the xbox guitar for GHII. If this is correct (I could be totally off) then how is the design / quality going to differ from the ps3 version of the drums guitar etc... and the xbox drums guitar etc... Any ideas ?

electronic drum adapter...

[Groghunter]

is what I'd like to see. If they can pull off the vocal detection, an adapter that let's you use a real electronic drum set should be easy, and would be great for those of us who have one...

Re:Efficiency at its best

[Scrameustache]

Being a drummer myself, the kit for the game looks passable, but most drummers I'm sure will find it somewhat lacking. Lol, Tom Sawyer on one pedal and 4 pads hehe. You lose a lot when you map all the extra bits down to 5 triggers. The fun for drummers certainly won't come from playing your favorite songs on this kit, that will always be better served on a real kit. I'm pretty sure real plumbers found Mario Bros to be somewhat lacking too ;-)

Fidelity of game experience

[corvair2k1]

Why does the drum set have to feel like a real drum set? When looking at, say, the guitar hero controller, did they attempt to make the guitar controller feel as much like a real guitar as possible? The "strum" functionality is just like a switch, as opposed to the sensation of actually taking a pick across a string.

My point is, you don't have to have an ultra-realistic experience for this game to be fun. It might even help a little if it's a bit less realistic.

Re:Efficiency at its best

[flitty]

"Lol, Tom Sawyer on one pedal and 4 pads hehe."

I bet it's just like playing a 24 fret, 6 string guitar on 5 buttons.

Re:Price

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

You can pick up a used six string for 100 and change then spend 5 years getting good enough to play some of those songs, instead of being able to have fun for a few hours playing a puzzle game with some friends.

FIXED!

speaking as a guitarist of 6 years and a bassist of 4, I enjoy guitar hero because it is a fun thing to do with my NON-MUSICALLY INCLINED friends without having to spend 6 months teaching them to play real instruments. Not one of them wants to actually learn guitar, they just want to have some fun playing some videogames. GTFO my internet, elitist-troll.