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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."
Yes, it would have. That's almost assuredly exactly what they did. The catch is that a switch doesn't 'feel' like hitting a base drum head at all. Try putting a drum pedal up against a wall and hitting it...doesn't feel right at all. The pedal needs to have some give, like a drum head provides a real pedal.
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. However, in the game setting, it should suffice for it's needs.
Tricky controller to develop for a game, has to be extremely cheap while emulating somewhat closely a real kit. Not an easy task!
No Comment.
I'm a big fan of all the GH games from Harmonix, and am looking forward to Rock Band. The one thing that I have been wanting to know about the game (but still haven't heard a peep about) is how Harmonix plans to approach the issue of explicit song lyrics.
In GH 1 and 2, the words were edited to obtain the "T" rating that will naturally help boost the sales of a game of that nature. One glaring example is the removal of ~20 "fuck"s from "Killing in the Name." With the karaoke-style gameplay that Rock Band is adding to the formula, how are they going to handle a similar situation, but where many die-hard fans are going to want to scream the work "fuck" as loud as possible during that moment? Will they edit the word out and count off your points for saying it since it would be akin to a missed note? Will they give you the option to leave the songs intact, curse words and all?