Guitar Hero: World Tour Gets Awesome Music, Terrible Gameplay

Wed, Sep 3, 2008

The constant battle-of-licensing-the-bands rages on! Following last week's Rock Band DLC announcement including the likes of Foo Fighters and Megadeth, Guitar Hero: World Tour has confirmed a few choice names of their own. GameSpot attended an Activision press event in New Zealand, at which the publisher confirmed four tracks to be included in the GH:WT soundtrack: "Prisoner of Society" by The Living End, "La Bamba" by Los Lobos, "Scream Aim Fire" by Bullet for My Valentine, and "Our Truth" by Lacuna Coil.

Activision then went on to issue a press release this morning, confirming that MC5's Wayne Kramer, The Sex Pistols, and Motörhead had all re-recorded exclusive new GH:WT versions of "Kick Out the Jams," "Pretty Vacant," and "Overkill," respectively. Activision is, naturally, thrilled about all of these major artists:

"We set out to deliver a soundtrack for Guitar Hero that envelopes as many genres, styles and artists as possible without limiting scope," said Tim Riley, Vice President of Music Affairs for Activision Blizzard. "When highly respected artists such as MC5's Wayne Kramer, Motörhead and The Sex Pistols are willing to go back into the recording studio to re-record their music exclusively for the game, the fans win by getting a unique experience of old yet new legendary sounds."

Indeed, getting bigger and bigger artists to appear in music games can only spell wonderful things for the future of the genre. Unfortunately, a few new revelations from Joystiq makes us wonder whether anyone will want to play these awesome new songs.

Activision has confirmed to Joystiq that GH:WT will not include the "No Fail" option featured in Rock Band 2, which allows virtual virtuosos to play as terribly as they want without fear of a jarring "game over." As Joystiq points out, though "No Fail" is certainly a more party-friendly gameplay option, this isn't a terrible decision in and of itself -- Rock Band 1 didn't have it, after all, and folks seem to enjoy that well enough. What's extremely troubling, however, is this further detail:

Also interesting is that you can't save your bandmates should one fail; instead, you can comparatively miss more notes than in RB and stay alive.

So instead of "No Fail" mode, World Tour is enforcing a "Don't Fail" mode. Am I overly picky or biased, or is this a stunningly poor design choice? Maybe it's unfair to judge World Tour based on the band-game precedents set by Rock Band, but if you're going to make a four-player cooperative game, it seems like you ought to provide some means of cooperation. Using overdrive in Rock Band to keep a struggling band member in the game -- or to rescue them after a failure -- is a great feature, providing for a real sense of camaraderie during the tougher songs, but since we've never known any other option, it's never really occurred to us to contemplate the alternative. Imagine, if you will, what the game would be like without such an ability.

We've asked Activision for clarification regarding these issues, but as of yet, we don't know what the consequences for a single failure in a four-player band will be. Losing a bandmate may end the song for the entire band, or it may not, but neither scenario sounds like much fun to us. If a failing bandmate terminates the song for the entire ensemble, World Tour can kiss its social elements goodbye once the game progresses beyond a basic level of difficulty. Putting together pick-up bands online will become an exercise in pickiness and elitism, and even groups of real-life friends will find themselves avoiding difficult songs that have notoriously difficult, game-ending sections on one or more instruments. Most tragically of all, though, new players and non-gamers will be hugely discouraged from playing. Enthralled onlookers will be driven away from personally trying the game more than once or twice, after their amateur attempts bring the game to a grinding halt for the entire group. Keeping a bad bandmate afloat in Rock Band is a hugely enjoyable part of a first-timer's experience -- it lets a new player rock through an entire song, even if they're utterly terrible. Instituting a one-strike-you're-out policy may encourage players to get better at the game, certainly, but it's precisely the wrong way to try and ensnare new, casual players. Forcing people to have to practice alone before they're good enough to enjoy the game in a group is completely contradictory to the social nature of the band game, and will be devastating to the pick-up-and-play attraction that Rock Band has enjoyed. Imagine breaking out World Tour at a party, but having to stick to the first tier of songs all night long because nobody wants to play their favorites for 30 seconds and then fail.

The other option, of course, is not failing out the entire band due to a single bad performance, but this doesn't seem much better. Imagine an enjoyable song which happens to begin with a particularly difficult guitar solo: The guitarist struggles valiantly but fails out, and then gets to spend the remainder of a 3-5 minute song doing absolutely nothing. This will again lead to arguments over which songs the group will be allowed to play, and will similarly discourage new players from trying the game more than once or twice. One does not foster an enjoyable group experience by excluding one member from the group for extended periods of time -- it's not very fun for the player who's on time-out. Without any mechanics allowing one to positively impact your fellow players' performances, in fact, World Tour may not even be a cooperative game -- it might just be a handy venue for impressively good players to play at the same time, performing independently of one another in close proximity.

We haven't spent any hands-on time with World Tour, so at present, our complaints are purely speculative. Nothing would make us happier than to be proven completely wrong, and to find that World Tour has plenty of cooperative mechanics that completely make up for this design choice. We're awaiting answers to a few questions from Activision at present, and we hope to update this post soon with more details.