Rock Band Details Released

Today I stumbled upon some details on Rock Band, Harmonix's garageband multiplayer title, from Game Informer. Most of the details were about rather small things, but there were a couple of things that jumped out at me.

One disk with 4 separate campaigns. Guitar, Drum, Bass and Vocal. Each can be played on its own from start to finish, in addition, a full band game is designed to allow for one huge co-op playthrough.
This will add a lot of replayability to the game as this is now essentially five games in one, if you buy every one of the instruments. For a game that is already famous for it's incredible replayability, the addition of four extra campaign modes is guaranteed to keep Rock Band in your PS3/360/Wii for a very long time.

Will feature full support for four player online play on both 360 and PS3. Any combination of on/offline play will work and each player can pick their own difficulty setting.
This is a must for me since one of my Guitar Hero fanatic friends owns a 360 and only a 360. Also, no other friends of mine that live near me own a PS3, so the cross-platform support is great to hear. This would be even better if you can combine online multiplayer with splitscreen because then I could form an entire band with just me, my friend, and his two brothers, one of which is also a friend of mine.


Flexible community system will allow you to find bandmates anywhere in the world.
This is also a great addition because most of the members GamerCast Network, the forum that I am a part of, live in the United States, while I live in Europe. Most PS3 games to date have had trouble with making worldwide servers, most notably Resistance: Fall of Man and MotorStorm, so I'm very happy that I will be able to play with anyone around the world.

Musical fret-boards are now transparent so you can see more of the background visuals. Guitar is on the left side of the screen, Bass on the right and drums down the middle. Vocals scroll from right to left along the top of the screen.
After sketching this out on a piece of paper, I noticed that this layout will actually work quite nicely when playing in a group to counter the splitscreen. When playing alone or by yourself while playing online, however, I would like to be able to take away all but my own notes, since I would probably find it distracting to have all of the notes streaming past at one time.

Guitars and Bass now have 10 frets. 5 for the regular sections of the game and 5 for the newly designated solo sections.
This is so cool. Not only will you look really awesome shredding close to the body of the guitar, but the notes for the solos are all hammer ons so there is no strumming required, which will make the solos a lot easier.

Drums are apparently insane. You use actual sticks and hit one of four colored pads in front of you, in addition to a kick pedal attached to the drumming unit. Drummers will also have the ability to do fills etc. in their own little free-form section, do well and you'll trigger the drummers version of star power.
I like seeing that there will be only five drums to stay consistent with the guitar and the bass, but I would have rather seen a cymbal replacing one of the toms just to have a cymbal on the set. I know that some of the songs will have the crash of the cymbal replacing one of the buttons, but I think it would feel better to have the cymbal on the actual set.

After the details were released, I was very happy with what I read. I'm starting to get excited about this game, but I have one concern. A game that ships with so many peripherals is bound to cost a fortune. Seeing that the Guitar Hero II for the XBOX 360 costs around $90, I would say that Rock Band may retail at $200 if all of the peripherals are included. I wouldn't be very happy buying Rock Band unless one of two things happen. The first would be that the game were to ship as just the game and you had to buy all of the peripherals separately. That way, I could get the things that I wanted. For example, I could get the guitar and the drums, and pass on the microphone. I may even buy all of them anyways, but seeing two $30 and two $60 price tags would probably hurt less than seeing just one $200 price tag. The second thing that I would want to happen is the game would depend on free DLC like SingStar. This would prevent me from buying everything until Rock Band 57 or whatever.