Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “How Harmonix remade Rock Band for virtual reality”.
If you’ve ever wanted to feel like a rockstar, you might have lived out that fantasy through a little video game called rock band. But what if you could do the same thing in virtual reality and make it feel more real than it ever has that’s what harmonic music system, which has made games like Guitar, Hero, rock band and Dance Central, is trying to do rock band. Vr, isn’t just the normal rock band chord it into the oculus rift, it’s a total rethinking of the system and what it actually means to play rock band and live out the fantasy of being a rock star. So we went to the Harmonix offices in Boston to check it out for ourselves. Rock band VR uses the same plastic guitar as older versions of the game, but it’s not the rock band. You remember, for one thing: you’ll be adding an oculus touch, motion controller which brings that guitar into the game for another you’ll be playing with a completely different system.
This is your classic rock band formula. When the song starts individual notes, start rolling down. What’S called a note highway to ace a song, you have to hit the right buttons on your guitar at the right time. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work in virtual reality on a normal TV. You don’t really care about. What’S behind or around the note highway you’re pretty much just staring in a box in your living room in a headset. The point is that you feel like you’re on a stage with your bandmates as it stands: you’re spending the whole time staring at that line, whether it’s floating in the crowd or coming out at the end of your guitar.
What harmonics came up with turns a game about notes into a game about chords instead of a highway, you can see the structure of the whole song with dots that represent different chords when one is coming up, your guitars headstock starts flashing. The pattern you need to play you’ll get points for hitting it on the bead and well, that’s it. If you’re doing the bare minimum the rest of the song, you can play whatever you want, or you can stop playing altogether in teleport around the stage for casual players. The game is more about having the rock star experience than nailing: guitar riffs, the VR crowd isn’t going to start booing and whatever you play, it’ll sound. Alright, the game also gives you specific. Optional challenges to meet being a high level.
Player means finding good rhythms for each song and staying on beat while still mixing up your chords and patterns, or at least that’s what Harmonix tells us. I didn’t have time to go deep into this. One of the great things about non VR rockband is that it’s such a social, approachable experience and right now, VR isn’t great at those things. Instead of a full band, rock band VR only has one instrument: the guitar you’ve got band mates inside the game, but the rift separates you completely from the real world.
If you get embarrassed by other people watching you rock out rock band VR will at least let you avoid seeing them. But if you like, putting on impromptu concerts with your friends, it’s a little isolating, and even if you’re totally alone, not being able to see your own fingers is weird in future generations. Harmonix wants to put the band back into rock band, but it’ll be a different kind of social experience. Instead of making you round up for headsets to play locally, the game will let you team up with people around the world.
If everything goes right, you’ll feel as close to them in VR, as you would with your friends in real life, but there’s still something intimate about playing with people in the flesh and VR hasn’t captured it. Yet rock band VR is a launch title for the oculus touch controllers and it’s one of the most exciting games we’ve seen for the rift not because it’s the most polished one, but because the underlying formula is so solid, but we still haven’t been able to answer. One big question: how much of a game will it be? Being a rockstar in VR is fun for a while, but without a challenge or with a challenge. That’S too confusing to meet it’s hard to imagine coming back to it over and over and that’s the kind of thing you can’t figure out in a few songs.
So are we fans right now? Definitely will we still be fans in October when the full game comes out, that we’re still waiting to decide? .