Guitar Hero is BACK this year! I got hands on with the new guitar controller and a first look at their new mode, Guitar Hero: TV.
If you can imagine a TV station dedicated to playing music videos all day and all night, you already have a basic understanding of the core concept of Guitar Hero: TV. The idea is that you pick up your guitar and hop right in to a song, even if that song is already half over, and compete for leaderboard bragging rights. The upside to using music videos in this section of the game, is that most of the visual work is already taken care of for the GH team. They just create a note track, overlay their UI and arrange in a queue of never ending songs. Unfortunately this means that none of these tracks have the layered audio like the campaign songs have. I found that this takes away from the experience and illusion of being a rock star.
If you have been following the return of Guitar Hero you know that guitar controller is also much different from before. Instead of a single row of five buttons, the controller now features two rows of three buttons. This is a welcome change. While it took me a while to adjust to only using three fingers, the process felt rewarding being able to adjust and pull off a substantial note streak. The biggest adjustment is processing the exact position of the note. Instead of each column having a corresponding color like in previous GH games, every button in top row looks like a black guitar pick pointing up, while the bottom row are all white picks pointing down. Having to process whether the note was in slot one, two or three after determining the row took a lot more effort than just glancing at the color and knowing where button is. In the long run I can see myself finding enjoyment in mastering the new button layout, as long as it doesn’t prove to be too difficult at the start. The rest of the guitar felt familiar; A comfortable to hold piece of hardware.
What has turned me off from the entire Guitar Hero: Live and GH:TV ecosystem is how deep the microtransactions run. You can earn access to “premium” GH:TV channels by completing in game goals, or you can just buy access to it. If you are having a party and want access to all of the channels to play with friends, you can buy a time pass at different intervals to match your specific situation. They aren’t ready to talk specific costs, but be certain Guitar Hero: Live will give users plenty of chances to sink more money, past the initial $99 guitar bundle.
Guitar Hero Live launches on 20 Oct for every platform under the sun.
Dan Heffron
October 15, 2015 at 4:42 am
How did GH:TV handle when you played it. I am not nearly as worried about the microtransactions as I am about the potential problems of trying to play precise rhythms over a streaming song. Was there any problem with audio lag or controller input? Did you have to recalibrate the guitar a lot? Streaming usually has a delay (and beyond just a delay, it can have problems where audio and video have different delays, and it can vary from moment to moment), and I worry the mode will have a lot of problems, so if you got to test it out, I am really interested in how well it performed technically.
Austin Paul Adamson
October 15, 2015 at 7:55 am
Everything worked just fine, but I was playing in a test environment.I personally had no issues with any latency or streaming issues. As long as the songs are buffered in their entirety I doubt things will play any different from the main game (apart from them not being master tracks).
I specifically asked about input lag (huge deal for me) and even asked if I could calibrate manually. They say the game automatically adjusts by just playing it but they should have a manual option. Again this was a test environment so I am sure they had their TV and audio set up in the most desirable fashion.
I will hopefully be getting a review build of the game early, so if you’d like to see my impressions of the final game be sure to come back to the site! Thanks for the comment 😀