[E3 2010] Rock Band 3 Interview
We chat with Harmonix to get the straight poop on just what's different this time around.
Published: July 4, 2010
TPS: So as you sort of get bigger in the scope of where your little guys are going to be?
DS: Right. A lot of the scenes are sort of narratively connected to what you're doing; you'll start in sort of an abstract spot -- your band walking down a street. They're all basically drawn from clichéd band photos, so like the brick wall photo or whatever. It's your band hanging out and then you want to go to go play a show, so you take the subway to the show because you haven't done shit yet.
But after you've done a little bit stuff and now you're taking your little band and now you're in the tour bus and eventually you're riding limos and flying jets. So that's all told not just through the shell backgrounds but also through animated cutscenes that are interspersed through, based on different goals that you complete or achievements that you get. It's really more of an open system where at any time you can be doing something that says, "oh! You just graduated to the next level!" And you could just be playing Quick Play at a party and you click to that point and "ka-pow," you see your band with your characters -- the characters that you've created interacting in this cool way with our 3D environments.
TPS: That was always my big was that, especially when doing reviews or whatever it would be maybe just me or me and one of the guys in the office but of course there's the whole social side so we'd end up taking it over to someone's house and that's completely locked off. Especially in the first game, the set list is limited by what you'd played so far or whatever they wanted to do at the time, so I love that.
DS: Well, we really worked hard to sort of maintain that narrative appeal of the Tour itself, though, so that's actually represented with the new mode that we're calling Road Challenges and it fits into the Quick Play flow. We have a bunch of short -- well, they range, actually, in length from short to long based on how many sets they incorporate -- but the idea of the Road Challenges is that they're kind of mini-tours, right?
So it's like, "okay, now I'm going to go on my Northeast tour and we're going to play so many sets [that] are going to take 45 minutes and over that time span there's a beginning, middle and end," so it's a closed experience that sort of scales along with your career progression as well so that when you have the jet you can actually do the European Tour or the worldwide extravaganza.
TPS: So it's definitely going to based on where you band is in terms of popularity and success?
DS: Yeah, so all of that is sort of the RB3 that is sort of the reaction to RB2, it's like standard music gameplay. Most of the creative energy of our development team has been poured into the keyboard and the Rock Band Pro, which represent brand-new gameplay in the music game space in a format that has not really been done since Rock Band 1 introduced the drums. So it's a big deal, right?
It's had a very interesting impact on our set list. I feel like we have the strongest set list that we've ever put to together in any of the games that we've done. It's incredibly broad, incredibly deep. It's got a lot of coverage in terms of different genres, different time periods, but the thing that I'm happiest about is that all of the music, it's all A-list stuff and it's all just steeped in... it's all stuff that I like. You know, we have this perspective when we're choosing songs. We do a lot of focus testing and we try to study what the audience wants, where different cultural trends are headed, but really we're making a mix tape for people that don't know anything about music.
We wear our colors on our sleeve in a lot of ways. I'm like a hard rock/punk guy, that's represented. There's a lot of metal on the track and then we have The Doors, we have Queen, we have Jimi Hendrix, we have a lot of just huge names are sorta new to the video game work. You know The Doors have never been in a game before; "Break on Through" is a great track. [This very song was remixed by BT for Burnout Revenge, but has not appeared in its original form.]
A lot of that stuff, as we were developing for the keyboard, that actually was a pretty huge driver into our song selection. It opened up a lot of opportunity, actually. There are songs that would not have worked -- or they wouldn't have realized their full potential in Rock Band 1 or Rock Band 2, but with the addition of the new instrument, a song like "Break on Though" works. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is like a vehicle for Rock Band 3; it's got the harmony parts, it's got the keyboards, it's got all this stuff that is mechanically integrated into the Rock Band 3 gameplay.
DS: Right. A lot of the scenes are sort of narratively connected to what you're doing; you'll start in sort of an abstract spot -- your band walking down a street. They're all basically drawn from clichéd band photos, so like the brick wall photo or whatever. It's your band hanging out and then you want to go to go play a show, so you take the subway to the show because you haven't done shit yet.
But after you've done a little bit stuff and now you're taking your little band and now you're in the tour bus and eventually you're riding limos and flying jets. So that's all told not just through the shell backgrounds but also through animated cutscenes that are interspersed through, based on different goals that you complete or achievements that you get. It's really more of an open system where at any time you can be doing something that says, "oh! You just graduated to the next level!" And you could just be playing Quick Play at a party and you click to that point and "ka-pow," you see your band with your characters -- the characters that you've created interacting in this cool way with our 3D environments.
TPS: That was always my big was that, especially when doing reviews or whatever it would be maybe just me or me and one of the guys in the office but of course there's the whole social side so we'd end up taking it over to someone's house and that's completely locked off. Especially in the first game, the set list is limited by what you'd played so far or whatever they wanted to do at the time, so I love that.
DS: Well, we really worked hard to sort of maintain that narrative appeal of the Tour itself, though, so that's actually represented with the new mode that we're calling Road Challenges and it fits into the Quick Play flow. We have a bunch of short -- well, they range, actually, in length from short to long based on how many sets they incorporate -- but the idea of the Road Challenges is that they're kind of mini-tours, right?
So it's like, "okay, now I'm going to go on my Northeast tour and we're going to play so many sets [that] are going to take 45 minutes and over that time span there's a beginning, middle and end," so it's a closed experience that sort of scales along with your career progression as well so that when you have the jet you can actually do the European Tour or the worldwide extravaganza.
TPS: So it's definitely going to based on where you band is in terms of popularity and success?
DS: Yeah, so all of that is sort of the RB3 that is sort of the reaction to RB2, it's like standard music gameplay. Most of the creative energy of our development team has been poured into the keyboard and the Rock Band Pro, which represent brand-new gameplay in the music game space in a format that has not really been done since Rock Band 1 introduced the drums. So it's a big deal, right?
It's had a very interesting impact on our set list. I feel like we have the strongest set list that we've ever put to together in any of the games that we've done. It's incredibly broad, incredibly deep. It's got a lot of coverage in terms of different genres, different time periods, but the thing that I'm happiest about is that all of the music, it's all A-list stuff and it's all just steeped in... it's all stuff that I like. You know, we have this perspective when we're choosing songs. We do a lot of focus testing and we try to study what the audience wants, where different cultural trends are headed, but really we're making a mix tape for people that don't know anything about music.
We wear our colors on our sleeve in a lot of ways. I'm like a hard rock/punk guy, that's represented. There's a lot of metal on the track and then we have The Doors, we have Queen, we have Jimi Hendrix, we have a lot of just huge names are sorta new to the video game work. You know The Doors have never been in a game before; "Break on Through" is a great track. [This very song was remixed by BT for Burnout Revenge, but has not appeared in its original form.]
A lot of that stuff, as we were developing for the keyboard, that actually was a pretty huge driver into our song selection. It opened up a lot of opportunity, actually. There are songs that would not have worked -- or they wouldn't have realized their full potential in Rock Band 1 or Rock Band 2, but with the addition of the new instrument, a song like "Break on Though" works. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is like a vehicle for Rock Band 3; it's got the harmony parts, it's got the keyboards, it's got all this stuff that is mechanically integrated into the Rock Band 3 gameplay.
