Crave Online: Rock Band is well oiled machine, where do you go with a sequel?
John Drake: Our design philosophy is to innovate, which is like the full band game coming to your house, and then perfect. So Rock Band 2 had to be a second generation music game that's going to perfect what Rock Band 1 set out to do. So we took a lot of fan feedback. Sean and I are sort of the front lines of fan feedback, whether it's "My cousin Vinny's band should be in the game and you suck." So we take a lot of fan feedback and so many people were playing the game, we actually learned a lot about different stuff. Most importantly, this wasn't all fan feedback. This is just sort of what we do. The game's about the music first and foremost. You don't want to play a music game with shitty music.
Crave Online: Having all masters is great, but wouldn't it be worth having a classic song even if it had to be covered?
John Drake: We actually haven't had a cover even for downloadable content in a while. We've had all masters for a while.
Sean Baptiste: There are so many songs. Right now, we can get so many kickass songs instead of having a sh*tty cover of a good song and actually just get a good song.
John Drake: And we're not infinitely resourced. We still have to pick and choose our projects. We have so many people that work. If we could work on this A song that's a master versus this A song that's a cover, we'd prefer to do the one that's a master, assuming that all things considered there's a balance.
Sean Baptiste: As long as we're still covering our spread of genres.
Crave Online: Why does it cost five bucks to import Rock Band 1 songs?
John Drake: We have to pay for the rights to the song again. So you buy a token and then it copies all the songs from the disc onto your hard drive so you don't have to swap your discs in and out. And there'll be a validation process to make sure you're not just passing a disc around to everyone and stealing music, which would be bad.
Crave Online: What were the biggest criticisms from fans?
Sean Baptiste: One thing people wanted is they wanted to be able to play World Tour online. They wanted to play World Tour by themselves. They didn't want to have to have the rest of the band to play World Tour. Solo bass tour which wasn't so much a whole lot of people complaining about that, but it's a very vocal group.
John Drake: World Tour in Rock Band 1 was frighteningly successful so we made World Tour thinking it was like the campaign for our hardcore gamers. Like who plays the campaign in Halo 3? Everyone's just there to play multiplayer and hang out. Some people are really playing the campaign. Everyone wanted to have the experience of touring a band and going from venue to venue and playing different cities and stuff like that, so we had a lot of constructive feedback for what they wanted to see in Rock Band 2. First and foremost, World Tour is now online so you can play in a persistent band in a campaign with people who don't live in your house. People who live in different cities or countries, you can play with them and you can still tour and get bands and money and have all that stuff stored on our server. You can also now play it in solo mode. Before, if you were doing solo, you just play through the songs. Now Solo Tour exists so you can actually take a solo project out and still get that world tour experience by yourself. It's more cities. We didn't take away your favorite venues. We didn't take away your favorite clothing assets or the clubs you could play at. We just added more.
Crave Online: How about the response of the instruments?
Sean Baptiste: I think it's not so much even that but that was stuff we wanted to do. By the time people got around to sending us feedback on the hardware, we were already 10 steps ahead of that. We're constantly adapting. Even when your stuff's good, you want to make it better.
John Drake: Even in the Rock Band 1 product line, we would make changes in the factory. We were like, "We could do this better."
Sean Baptiste: Most of the stuff that we ended up using or really rethinking was more software side. A lot of it had to do with the World Tour. A lot of it had to do with solo play. Then one thing that people said once we started putting out albums, there was no convenient way to play that album. You could pick a song, play it, go back, to the menu, go to All Music, find out what the next song on the track list was. It just doesn't make any sense. That's a terrible way to play through an album so those headers in there or just the ability to pick multiple songs.
John Drake: One of the changes we made is our Quickplay stuff. The Quickplay menu was where you picked your songs for Quickplay. To process all the songs, we need a little bit more space and some new ways of jumping around. Now as you scroll through, the album art will pop out sort of like a music store. There's all differentials for if it's a Rock Band 1 song or a downloadable song. You can tell what's what. As I scroll through, you'll see that if I go over a band with multiple songs, I can click on the header now. One of our ways to speed through the menus so you don't have to scroll through everything is our drop down menu. If I want to play all the songs by, say, The Who, I just highlight the header that says The Who, click it and it makes a set list for me of all 14 songs. If I want to play the songs from Live at Leeds, when we have more than one song from a record, it also calls that out so I just go to Live at Leeds and click that and play those songs. We want to give you more opportunities to play music, even if you're just sitting around playing with friends. We hate the idea that you play a song, talk about it, play a song, talk about it. That's f*cking lame. That also works for everything. If you have OCD and you want to play all the songs that start with the letter A, you can do that too. We also now let you sort by location. If you want to go right to the Rock Band 2 songs, there they are right there. All the Rock Band songs, all the downloaded songs, you can hop around there. We have a Make a Set list feature now so you can actually click this and just start picking songs.
Crave Online: And now they just play right in a row?
John Drake: There's a small break between songs where your score pops up and your band mates walk around, but you don't stop completely which is lame. It's a lot of these little things, so when we say it's a second generation music game, we mean we made the first one, it's not our first dance, and we've come back to really do it well so these little bits of polish are actually really important to us and we think they're going to be important to you too.
Crave Online: Were you getting any feedback on note tracking?
Sean Baptiste: Not really. We don’t really get complaints about it. The most people will be is like, "Why isn't this a billion times harder?" Well, because the song isn't a billion times harder. Our note tracking, how we do note tracking is to listen to the song and then have it accurately mimic how that song is played as close as possible. We never sit down in a song and then track out notes to be like, "How do we give you blisters?" We don't want to do that. We're not going to throw extra notes in there or severely dumb it down either. We just want it to be accurate so when you're playing it you feel like you're playing a song. We're not afraid of that. Panic Attack by Dream Theater is nuts. There's a song by Abnormality called Legions. That song is just punishing. I don't want to play it anymore because it's so hard it makes me cry every time I play it. We're not going to artificially make a song more difficult. We'll pick songs that are difficult and then make them accurately difficult. We would never want to put a song into a game and then be embarrassed by the way that we put it in. We don't want to do that because we're musicians kind of first before we're video game programmers. We're mostly musicians first and that's how we'll always approach it.
Crave Online: What's the new Battle of the Bands mode?
John Drake: We're really pumped with this. It's sort of our flagship feature. This lets your band compete against bands from around the world, every band for themselves. Other people might be talking about a head to head, your band versus another band. We think that's fine, sort of like a tug of war, head to head mode that we already have in the game with a full band. We want to make it a really global experience so we want to take it to the extreme. The cool thing about this is these Battle of the Bands, these competitions update every day, so there's new ways to play the game every day that Harmonix is designing and populating into your game if you're connected to Xbox Live. The general Battle of the Bands mode is our score versus another score, full band, one to one. I compete against the people on the leaderboards to get the best score. I'm not playing at the exact same time the other band is playing, but I do get real time feedback on how I'm doing.
Crave Online: What are some of the daily challenges going to be?
John Drake: We have full band battles, solo battles, all things. This one is solo players only, it requires a guitarist in your band. This is Bhodisattva by Steeley Dan. It's really, really f*cking hard. The special rules say there's no fail and expert difficulty is required, so basically it's saying you have to play this on expert solo guitar and we're going to turn no fail mode on. Good luck. It could be no fail mode, expert only or only easy. It'll actually update me in the Battle of the Bands, like "Oh, someone else has beaten your score. Go back and show them who's boss." You can tie that to your gamer tag on Rockband.com and it'll actually send you e-mail.
Crave Online: How long will each Battle stay active?
John Drake: I think the average will probably be between three to five days, if I had to guess from what Dan has done so far.
Sean Baptiste: I'm sure there's going to be something that's like epic that lasts a really long time. Weird things for holidays.
Crave Online: What improvements did you make to the instruments?
John Drake: Obviously, we were the first people to make drums for your house. This time around the Rock Band 2 drums, I can pick them up and bring them to you because they're wirelesss. If you've ever seen the Rock Band 1 drums, if I pick this up, that pedal would be dragging behind me on the floor. We made it so it stays on so you can swing it around and stuff. That's the kind of detail work we're putting in. We found that people love Rock Band 1 drums, they love playing on them, banging on them but neighbors f*cking hate them because they're loud as sh*t. They're like the loudest things ever. We didn't say that when we had Rock Band 1 out but now that we're putting Rock Band 2 out, man, Rock Band 1 drums were loud. These pads are a lot softer, they're a lot quieter, they feel a lot nicer so you get a good bounce roll out of them if you want, if you're into that. They're also velocity sensitive, so the harder you hit them, the louder the sound gets. You can be really expressive which is really cool. We also learned a lot about the average American leg and about how heavy it is. The answer is really f*cking heavy. So we've reinforced our pedal with metal this time around. We're really excited about that. That should be lasting a long time.
Crave Online: Does that give the pedal more or less resistance? I find it pretty heavy to press on.
John Drake: It doesn't really change the resistance at all because that's more the spring tension than the pedal surface. It does give it a lot more strength so if you stomp in the wrong place, your pedal's just likely to get stress fractures and snap. That's what it's designed to fix.
Sean Baptiste: And it just looks way better.
John Drake: It looks cooler. I like the design on it. I'm glad we went with that design. There were other designs I was not as excited about.
Crave Online: Are all the instruments wireless then?
John Drake: Not the microphone but everything else.
Crave Online: How are you competing with the other drum kits coming out for other games?
John Drake: We stuck with our four pad setup. Other games are making other drums. That's good for them. We like this four pad stuff because we think it's really accessible for that kind of common user. The normal person on the street can walk up and be like, "I get this. Hit these four things, step on this one thing." There's not stuff up in the air and stuff over here and multiple pedals. So keeping it really straightforward is important for the first time user. If you get really into them, we don't want to make you have to go back and buy a whole different thing to get a drum set with cymbals on it. So we've actually built an expansion port to the back of the drum set. They're right there. They correspond to the colors so high hat, ride and crash. We're going to sell a cymbal attachment pack you can snap right on to the arms. A real drum set has three cymbals on it. My drum set in real life has three cymbals on it. There's also a kickboard right below it so you can have double kick if you want. The other cool thing is in some of the drum modes, you can hit either the yellow pad or yellow cymbal, but in the drum fills and stuff, if you hit the cymbals it'll make a cymbal sound, the pad'll make a drum sound. The game can tell what you're doing and the game is totally backwards compatible with all of Rock Band 1 hardware. The third option with the drums is our high end premium drum set we're making with Alesis called the Ion Drum Rocker. That's a full electronic drum set. That's going to be $299.
Crave Online: The guitars look different too.
John Drake: The guitars are also really cool, Sunburst body. I think it looks a lot nicer, the wood grain neck and head stock both make our guitar look more like a real Fender Stratocaster rather than less. The buttons are a lot quieter. They're not silent but they're not as clacky. The strum bar's a lot nicer so there's a little bit more click to it so you can feel what you're doing. The coolest thing though is right here, that looks like another screw hole but it's actually a photo sensor and it's a microphone. It's actually now how you calibrate the game. You go through our calibration screen, you click a button, you hold your guitar up to the screen and a microphone picks up some beeps and matches the audio latency. Then the screen will flash white and the photo sensor will measure that. There's no more playing to a menu and trying to get it exactly right. It automatically does it for you.
