Weekly HMX Dev Rock Blog - 6/30 to 7/4

[S1ckH4nds]

This particular part of the Q&A is troubling:

I want to find a way to have a Bass Tour, but without having to play through 40 simple songs to get to 20-30 awesome songs.

Speaking for those of us that typically play bass and enjoy it, I'll just say right now; DO NOT GIMP THE BASS TOUR.

If I remember correctly, the reason you guys didn't put it in the first game was because you thought "it wouldn't be fun" or "it would be boring" or whatever. I personally have a lot more fun playing bass than I do playing guitar a good 95% of the time. I enjoy the challenge of attempting to get gold stars on these songs with their unforgiving paths... one missed note, or a badly timed OD activation, and that gold is gone.

Please stop trying to "protect" us from something that we don't need protecting from. I don't know about other people, but I would rather be able to play through the entirety of the songs on bass with all the features of the solo tour (earning money for my character, tracking scores, tracking stars) without having only 1/2 (or, if you're saying 20 songs, more like 1/4) of the songs at my disposal and having to go into Quickplay to do the rest.

Please please please please PLEASE think it over before you make a bad decision.

[DikRodnum]

I agree about having a Bass tour. IN a game where the main purpose is to give the players the feeling of being in a real band, excluding the bassist just makes it seem like thats' not a very loved or needed part of any group. But yet tracks by Rush, The Police ( both groups having a bassist who sings), all of the Southern Rock tracks, March of the Pigs, Hysteria(sp), and then upcoming tracks by RHCP and SoaD...? C'mon you got proof right there that the Bass tracks can be awesome.

And as far as order of playing through 30 easy songs, just to get to 20 rockin songs...It doesn't matter. Those who WANT to play the Bass tour should be able to accept what they are getting into.

I for one would not be 'that' driven to go thru a Bass tour, but I do agree that there is a demand for (since GH2) and NOW is the time to address it.

...but the sad thing is with Sept. being the release timeframe, RB2 should almost be ready to go gold...

[DB6896]

As Apples commented in the Q&A blog I was suprised to see the Grateful Dead tunes get so much flack. Hopefully this won't delay the remaining 12 tracks even further...this is still one of my favorite packs so far. I'm curious though, were they painful because the developers are not fans of the Dead & their music, poor quality masters, difficult music to chart.....?

*EDIT* After reading part two it's a little clearer...the rest of the Dead tracks will come at some point but I don't picture many devs volunteering for the task of coding them!

[Jorm]

This particular part of the Q&A is troubling:



Speaking for those of us that typically play bass and enjoy it, I'll just say right now; DO NOT GIMP THE BASS TOUR.

If I remember correctly, the reason you guys didn't put it in the first game was because you thought "it wouldn't be fun" or "it would be boring" or whatever. I personally have a lot more fun playing bass than I do playing guitar a good 95% of the time. I enjoy the challenge of attempting to get gold stars on these songs with their unforgiving paths... one missed note, or a badly timed OD activation, and that gold is gone.

Please stop trying to "protect" us from something that we don't need protecting from. I don't know about other people, but I would rather be able to play through the entirety of the songs on bass with all the features of the solo tour (earning money for my character, tracking scores, tracking stars) without having only 1/2 (or, if you're saying 20 songs, more like 1/4) of the songs at my disposal and having to go into Quickplay to do the rest.

Please please please please PLEASE think it over before you make a bad decision.

I could not agree more with the above sentiment. So far, that's the only bit of RB2 news that has thrown up a red flag for me (sorry, PS3 users, I play on the 360, this is not to diminish the magnitude of suck y'all are experiencing).

Personally, some may call Bass 'boring'. For me, that's a feature, not a bug.

[killerewok]

For the causal player, and not the wanna-be bassist, I can see bass being a boring strumfest of simple progressions. All he was saying is that they wanted to make the bass tour more fun, and finding a song order that would accomplish that while getting progressively harder is challenging for them. I wouldn't expect it to be "gimped", I just think it's going to be slightly different then the guitar tour.

[internetguy87]

That's why the casual player has guitar tour and quickplay options. Bass tour will be for those who really want to get into it and perfect their scores and playing, really master bass. The casual players still has access to Bass in many other forms, QP, BWT, OQP, etc, but adding a Solo tour without every song would just be disasterours.

[daprovida]

I agree. I would not buy it if you were REQUIRED to have the RB2 peripherals. I would hope there would be some way to play the songs from RB1 disc with RB2. it is good to hear that the DLC will transfer over.

[Kalerado28]

Hi, HMX Devs-n-Bloggers!

Since tournaments and competitions have become a major motivation to some folks for purchasing rhythm games such as "RockBand", in "RockBand 2", would it be possible to incorporate XBOX360 System-Link play for synchronized Full Band Vs. Full Band multiplayer (tug-of-war and/or score-duel) gameplaying AND 4-player score duels (instead of just 2-player)???

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/sy...herconsole.htm

For tournaments (in particular), this feature would significantly cut down the time spent on elimination rounds and, consequently, make more time available to include more contestants (which, in turn, will make more people happy per songplay!).

Any thoughts on this, anybody?

[billmcdougal]

Hi, HMX Devs-n-Bloggers!

Since tournaments and competitions have become the major motivation for purchasing rhythm games such as "RockBand", in "RockBand 2", would it be possible to incorporate XBOX360 System-Link play for synchronized Full Band Vs. Full Band multiplayer (tug-of-war and/or score-duel) gameplaying AND 4-player score duels (instead of just 2-player)???

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/sy...herconsole.htm

For tournaments (in particular), this feature would significantly cut down the time spent on elimination rounds and, consequently, make more time available to include more contestants.

Any thoughts on this, anybody?

Those aren't bad ideas, but since when are competitions and tournaments the "major motivation" for purchasing Rock Band?

[Kalerado28]

Those aren't bad ideas, but since when are competitions and tournaments the "major motivation" for purchasing Rock Band?

When you are a club/bar/restaurant owner who is trying to find more contemporary and appealing ways (than lame ol' karaoke) to increase patronage on "dead" weeknights...

That's how.