Polygon was recently given an opportunity to go hands-on with Guitar Hero Live, and published an extensive report about the game. We’ve rounded up a ton of details below, though you can find the full article here.
– Fist-person perspective live-action video
– Always online music
– Game comes with one guitar
– In development for about 3 years
“Guitar Hero created this pop culture phenomenon. Really, I would argue, it was one of the first titles to transcend our entire category and become this household name. But it’s been a while. It’s been five years since the last release. There’s so much emotion and passion around the Guitar Hero brand at the company. It’s something we always intended to bring back, when we had that legit innovation that would transform the way you play the game in a fundamental way. It’s taken until now to have that. FreeStyle delivered that vision. I believe this truly is the reinvention of Guitar Hero.” – Tyler Michaud, senior director of product management at Activision
“We always knew, like Tyler said, if we ever brought Guitar Hero back it had to be because we came up with some great innovation and made some big changes. The way we started it, we took it right to its core, its base. We said, what was it about Guitar Hero that was so cool in the first place? Why did it become the game it became?” – Jamie Jackson, creative director and studio head at FreeStyleGames
– The team was examining the game and plastic controller, and felt they could make mastering the game easier/deeper with a more prolonged experience
– The new guitar keeps the whammy bar and strummer of the original
– This version shifts all of the buttons to the top of the neck
– Controller has 6 buttons in 2 rows of 3
“This idea came from quite a few different places. First off, I guess, we wanted to make this hand do something that most people thought a guitarist does. By taking the buttons and splitting them in two rows, we have lots of different button combinations we can hit. We can hit chord shapes, which are familiar in guitar playing. We wanted people to come into this Guitar Hero Live and have something to play that’s very simple. It’s totally basic, just those three buttons. It’s all you need to worry about, the bottom row.” – Jackson
– Trying to address issues there were with having to use your pinky/move hands with the higher difficulty from previous games
“So we wanted to build a game that would let in that idea of play that everyone’s very comfortable with, using the three fingers to play. But we also really cared about the people who are expert players, hardcore players. They want a new challenge as well. They want something different. So going back, at a base level it’s very easy to learn, but at the top end it’s difficult to master. That was a mantra we had internally. Getting that base level, those three buttons for the medium, and then from there on you start to use the top row, which means that this hand is starting to do things a bit more like a guitarist. Then at veteran level, I have chord shapes and so many different button combinations we didn’t have before. We wanted to come up with a new game. It had to be a new challenge. We didn’t just want to regurgitate the old gameplay. We wanted to give you a new challenge. We wanted you to come back and want to play again, but we wanted you to have depth, almost reset you a little bit and make you go and learn something new.” – Jackson
– Black and white buttons on the controller
– Black buttons are the top row buttons
– White buttons on the bottom row
“We had these colors, and one day my head of the UI team came to me and said, ‘I’ve come up with this idea I want to show you. I’ve taken the colors out.’ I was like, ‘Well, you can’t take the colors out of Guitar Hero. That’s Guitar Hero. Everyone knows the colors.’ He says, ‘No, check it out.’”
– The team also started thinking about how they wanted the experience of playing the game to look
– Felt like things needed to be shaken up a bit
– Wanted the player feel more like a rock star by turning the camera around and changing to the player’s perspective from the stage
– The team then decided to shift the focus of the music played to live performances because it is so impacted by location and is so dependent on the crowd
“The crowd brings a level of atmosphere with them. That was something that we thought was really cool. We wanted to bring that. We wanted to give you that live experience, the experience of stage fright. That was a phrase we had internally for a while. We wanted to give you stage fright. We wanted you to walk out on stage in front of thousands of people and play. So we thought, screw it, let’s just make a movie. Let’s film real people responding to you. Let’s have real crowds cheering along if you’re doing really well, singing the lyrics back to you, but also giving you shit if you get it wrong. So that’s what we did.” – Jackson
– Players are shown a film that plays from the perspective of a guitarist about to take the stage
– After a few seconds in a backstage room, the faceless guitarist makes their way through the roadies and backstage crew, past other band members and finally on stage
– Audience/bandmates react to how you’re doing
– A flash indicates a change in mood and also seems to hide the shift in video from, say, a happy crowd to an increasingly annoyed crowd
– The transition can happen at any point in your music session
– “robot cameras” were used to film all of the video
– This allows a camera to shoot a completely perfect second take on the same shot, making it easier to transition between takes during the game
– Same tech was used in The Hobbit
“It was really cool. It blew our minds a little bit. We were like, ‘OK, these cameras shoot exactly the same frame every single time. We could use that, because we want to switch between a good performance and a bad performance.’ The biggest jarring thing you’ll get is if you have a few frames out. The frame’s never out on this. It’s exactly the same. The only difference is, the performance from your band members, the performance from the crowd, that changes to be either positive, and they’ll give you some good vibes, or not so positive and they’ll give you bad vibes.” – Jackson
– Jackson then used a VR camera that would allow him to look around the stage while inside a studio and position people in the right place in real time
– System lets the game have a good track and bad track
– It also made enlarging the size of the concern audience much easier
– The team could take a crowd of 200 to 400 people and turn them into 4,000 to 5,000 people
“We’ve put as much detail into the audio as we did into the visual impact. We’ve designed this 3D sound system. If I’m over playing by the drummer, I’ll hear more of the live drums coming through. If I run over into the crowd, I’ll get more of the crowd vibe coming through. If it’s in a good sense, they’ll perhaps be singing the lyrics back to me or cheering me on. If it’s in a bad sense, they could be doing anything from hurling abuse to just silence, which is almost as bad as abuse, sometimes I think. We wanted to kind of take you on a journey with each of these songs. Each crowd, each set, has been built to fit that song and feel like it’s the right one for the song.” – Jackson
– With the medium setting, you need to shift between the top and bottom row of buttons
– You can’t fail in Guitar Hero Live no matter how poorly you’re doing
– Campaign mode is built around a story
– Story will be revealed at E3
– Story is “perhaps not what you might expect.”
– Guitar Hero TV is a 24-hour music video network that lets players jump into a song and play along with friends over a song’s official music video
– Get into GHTV by pressing a button on the guitar
– Supports drop-in and drop-out local and online multiplayer
– GHTV will have a number of pre-programmed themed channels that you can flip through,
– Whatever channel you were last playing on will be the one that pops up when you return to GHTV
“It’s our massive multiplayer online part of Guitar Hero. It’ll match-make you against people immediately and you can just be playing against them immediately. You can stay in that show as long as you want. You can play that song, convert to another song, play that other song. But let’s say that music isn’t for you. You’ve jumped into top-10 pop hits and you want to play something different. We can take you to another TV channel. You do that by hitting the same button. You get a TV guide. You can change the channel, jump into a different show. It might be a totally different set of music. Again, it’ll match-make you against other people so you can play competitively. Again, you can stay there and play as long as you want.” – Jackson
– GHTV has programming that goes along with each channel
– Channels will be curated
– GHTV’s TV guide shows you what’s playing on each channel and breaks down how well you’ve done on each song, the difficulty of the songs available and tries to introduce you to songs you may never have heard of before
– No subscription for GHTV
– GHTV will be continually updated
“You’ll go there and there will just be new music for you to play. I think that, for me, is a really important thing to give our fans, to allow them to discover that new music. Some of it we will curate and try to introduce you to new music. Some of it, we’ll look at what you love and make sure you get more of that new music as well.” – Jackson
– Not saying how they may or may not monetize this constant stream of new music
– More details at E3
– Polygon noticed that a coin tally was shown during a video summary of GHTV
– Team doesn’t see Activision annualizing the franchise.
“We think there’s so much we can do with updating and continuously adding to GHTV. With the consoles being connected we, we don’t need to ship a disc every year. This is a completely different way of doing things.”
– Hundreds of playable songs
– Broad range of music
– Will have “some surprises”
