Written by Jeff Buckland, 7/22/2008
At Activision's E3 press conference this year, those who got to attend saw Guitar Hero: World Tour in action. Many gamers who have read the announcement that they're building on what Rock Band achieved last year have been wondering whether they can out-do Harmonix, and from what I've seen, I'm not sure they can. But at the very least, there's going to be some great competition in the music genre this fall.
GH: World Tour includes a new guitar that has the ability for the player to tap near the bottom of the neck, allowing a kind of slap bass. There's also a new touch panel just below the fret buttons on the neck, allowing for easy sliding of your fingers up and down for those pesky sequences of buttons you'll see in many of the songs in GH as well as Rock Band. The drums should look somewhat familiar to those who have played Rock Band with a couple of unique changes. First, there are only three drum pads, and now there are two cymbal pads raised up - much like a real drum set. The snare's on the left, two toms are on the right, while the hi-hat is up and left and the crash cymbal is up and right. There's a single bass pedal down below and it can sit anywhere between the set's legs, as there is no metal bar down there to hold it in place (this could be good or bad depending on how you play). The drumset has ports in the back for additional expansions, although the Neversoft guys weren't really ready to talk about anything solid.
The mic is pretty much exactly what we had in Rock Band. All this together adds up to an interesting set, but the question is who is all this new hardware going to appeal to? Activision's already said that Rock Band's instruments will work inside World Tour, even if it's with some kind of reduced functionality, and those who already have that equipment probably won't want to bother spending a bunch of money on new stuff - especially if they're looking forward to Rock Band 2 and its own new instruments this year.
And unlike Harmonix' own offering, GH: World Tour doesn't seem to have quite the same focus on adding music. They've got a ton of tracks to go into World Tour and there are some great bands going in that haven't been seen in a music game (Van Halen and Bob Dylan, to name a couple), but they instead seem to be relying more on making your own music than downloading new stuff. Their schedule for new music hasn't been quite as ambitious as Harmonix', and unless they ramp it up, we won't see many new major-band tracks added to the game. There's a whole music studio built into World Tour, though, and you can even set up new drum lines, keyboards, and guitar licks from the guitar controller and then use a simplified yet full-featured editor to put your song together. Toss in the ability to upload your song to a new song-sharing network that Activision is setting up and then rate other people's songs, download them, and play them as a challenge like you would any of the built-in songs, and it could mean a lot.
But it might not, too. The demo we saw had the Neversoft rep playing a few of the hundreds of unique additional styles you can attach to your licks - like funk bass versus metal bass, or modern vs 70s style guitar effects - but he didn't play a full song made with all of this. I really do question here whether a good-sounding song can really be made with the editor, and whether people will want to download and play it. Compared against Rock Band's schedule of releasing big-name bands' music every week, I'm starting to think that gamers would rather play stuff by bands they know than by internet musicians they don't know. Of course, the GH stuff will presumably be free, while Rock Band tracks cost up to two bucks a song, so there's also that.
The end of the demo was a lot of fun. Four guys from Neversoft got up there and played Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher". Two of them played on Expert and did pretty damn well, and overall it looked like a lot of fun. It looked about as fun as people had playing Rock Band 2 at the show, so at the very least it looks like Activision will catch up this year. Their song creation system is a really iffy thing to me and it comes down to just how similar to real music one can make their in-editor creations. We'll find out before long, as Guitar Hero: World Tour will hit the Wii, 360, PC, PS2 and PS3 this coming October, around a month after Rock Band 2 is released on the 360.
