malvasia bianca

So: Harmonix announced Rock Band 4. I had mixed feelings when I filled out the survey: on the one hand, I claimed that pro instruments were most important to me, because that is after all how I spent most of my time in Rock Band 3, but, on the other hand: “pro instruments” probably really means “pro guitar”, and Rocksmith has done a much better job teaching you how to play guitar than Rock Band 3 did. And that’s not a coincidence, not just a consequence of the initial bet that each game made on whether or not playing on a real guitar would work: the choices that Rock Band 3 made in that area fit into the game’s design heritage, which could be hard to break away from.

That mean that, when Harmonix announced that Rock Band 4 wouldn’t support pro guitar, I was actually relieved: I can’t imagine them doing that well without effectively making two different games in one, without spending as much time on pro guitar as on the rest of the game; and, well, I’m not sure what benefit that would bring me given that I have Rocksmith. I am a little sad that they decided to drop keys, because pro keys was my favorite instrument in Rock Band 3, and it didn’t have the same mismatch as pro guitar; but I accept that I’m in a pretty small minority in preferring pro keys over other instruments, and with keys there was always the issue that lots of songs in the library didn’t have a keyboard part at all.

And, when it comes down to it: these days the part of Rock Band that I like the most these days is singing. I wasn’t seriously worried that they would drop harmonies, and, indeed, they won’t be. I really like singing with Liesl, or with Liesl and Miranda, or even by myself; so yay, I’ll be able to continue doing that.

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing about the instruments: will I bring over my instruments from the 360 (assuming they get that to work), or buy new ones? Given licensing problems and the existence of The Beatles: Rock Band, part of me wants to keep an escape hatch to make it easy to switch back to Rock Band 3; but the truth is that I don’t play that game very often at all these days, and so in practice it’s probably not worth worrying about? Though the flip side is that one of our fake guitars is a little dodgy; maybe I’ll end up buying another fake guitar and another mic, which would leave it easy enough to play on either system if necessary? Heck, I could even get a new drum kit: my current set of fake drums is a Rock Band 1 era Ion model, and while it’s clearly better than the original Rock Band drum kit, the Rock Band 2 model was a big improvement, and it could be fun having cymbals to play around with.

Who knows; I’m looking forward to playing the new game, and to seeing what the team thinks is important to focus on with this iteration.