How important are the background visuals (really)?

[bandaddy]

I pretty much make a character, to involve myself with it, then just play and never really notice or care about it. My wife likes to take quite a bit more time customizing a character, and quite often mentions what they are doing in the background during or after a song, etc. While I really take no notice of it at all while playing, I think having something there is better than if it were just blank. So even though I'm not much into it or really care what's going on in the background or how creatively it's done, if there were an "on" / "off" mode, I'd probably leave it on just cuz a plain background would be...well....plain.

[nuttzo31]

Im not someone who equates graphics , high def visuals and custom character creation as the be all and end all of a game, however the background visuals make you feel like you are part of a live band and you get to feel a part of the atmosphere and there is nothing better than playing a song for example, freeze frame by j geils band and having the strobe light effect snapping in time to the camera shutter noise it is these sort of visual effects that would be lost if you had to play with a black background and i feel it would be a step backwards for rock band.

[jeronemitchell]

I voted that I would still play, and I have a story why:

Last week I was singing on vocals when my wife came in and watched. Our default band has my best friend on vocals, her best friend on drums, me on bass, and her on guitar. She was very pleased to see she and I jamming out together on the screen in, well, any of the interactions between the bassist and the guitarist... and it lead to a great bonding moment within the game.

So, why did I vote "I would still play"? Because this is the first time the graphics really came up with us since the game came out. If it took THIS long to really notice (and I can't help but believe that's because there were no note highways on the screen)...

Also, I actually LIKE the music video shoots. I do wish we could pick our venue in this light, as I would play with them pretty often. I understand why other people's mileage may vary on that issue, though.

[Funk-n-stein]

For me rock-band is more of a learning tool and fun way to practice guitar than an immersive game experience, so I would still play just as much without the background graphics. I can see how having no background/character graphics would pretty much destroy the 5-button experience though.

[Dentata]

I would pay for DLC that gave me a black background. Many of the backgrounds add a degree of difficulty and I will quit and restart songs that appear on the worst of them.

[Markeroo]

I would pay for DLC that gave me a black background. Many of the backgrounds add a degree of difficulty and I will quit and restart songs that appear on the worst of them.

Agree. Although many of the band backgrounds are (mostly) unobtrusive, some of those "trippy" ones make the game more difficult - and not in a good way.

[dog037]

I don't miss the fretboard backgrounds of the Guitar Hero games, especially Guitar Hero III and Aerosmith.

[jibjqrkl]

I don't miss the fretboard backgrounds of the Guitar Hero games, especially Guitar Hero III and Aerosmith.

Every time i did Quickplay in that i would just do awful on a song because it gave me a character with a bad fretboard background :P

[Jadiou]

I would not play Rock Band without background visuals. Without them the game would be bit boring, because I like to watch "music videos" with my custom characters while playing. One big reason why I like GH more than RB is that GH has better BG visuals and I don't care if they always do the same thing every time you play the song. I like actually prefer that if the motion capture is well done and the characters look "realistic" and awesome.

[mikeyts]

I posted a poll with similar intent at the end of December: "Why do you play RB? Scoring or Band Simulation/Touring?". I think that the background animations are part of pretending to be a member of a touring band (or members, when playing in a group), which is the reason why many people play these games. My poll had five answers, being "only scoring/skill-building" (is important to me), "scoring/skill-building mostly", "both equally", "band-sim/touring mostly" and "band-sim/touring only". To collapse that some, 41.14% said that scoring and skill-building were most important to them, 22.78% said that they enjoyed both aspects equally and 36.8% said that band sim/touring was the most important part of the game. To collapse it a bit more, a little over 85% said that band-sim/touring aspects were at least a little important to them.

I do think that the band animations give me to something to look at during lulls in the chart that I'm playing. While I'm playing Expert and Hard 5-lane charts on a guitar controller, I don't have attention to spare to look at that stuff. It'd be nice if they avoid the strobes and if there was a persistent option to disable the nauseating "music video venues".