Update to Rock Band 4 coming on 12-8
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They should have been working on higher demand features like online multiplayer or non-leaderboard competitive play modes from the very beginning. Minutia statistics are extremely niche.
Yea that’s what I see still No E-drums. Not even mentioned that’s a bummer !
After upgrading my firmware through the RB4 drum kit USB port: why don’t they just make it appear as a USB MIDI device? Poof there’s your mpa3.
Presumably the development time would be extremely minimal on this
I wouldn’t bet the house on it, it doesn’t look like something that required little efforts.
They should have been working on higher demand features like online multiplayer or non-leaderboard competitive play modes from the very beginning. Minutia statistics are extremely niche.
HMX has said multiple times that their data indicates that online multi-player did *not* get a lot of overall use, and that was what influenced their design decisions all along.
It turns out that the supports of this feature are a very vocal minority, of course.
“Brutal Mode” looks like “Normal Mode” to me after I’ve been playing Rock Band for 3 hours and 8 or 9 drinks later.
I admit that while I wasn’t praying before bedtime every time night for Brutal Mode, it actually does look kind of intriguing. I’ve pretty much hit a wall with my skill level, so vertical improvement is probably not going to happen. But there are some songs that I can stop paying attention to and still gold star. I am interested to see if I have any chance to red star those.
I did once get 85% on Edge of Seventeen on Performance Mode, so there’s some hope
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />That’s so pedestrian. I changed out of my vault suit so quick I don’t remember seeing him in it. I rock a suit and formal hat, thank you very much. Just because the world ended doesn’t mean one can’t dress well.
Presumably the development time would be extremely minimal on this, but that just makes it a minor waste instead of a major waste of resources.
I can’t imagine this being used by more than 1% of players at most. Hopefully they still have in-game telemetry to show them how deluded they are. Eventually.
While I’m not interested in the mode, we should be careful saying they shouldn’t cater to 1%, because the people on this board ARE the 1% on a lot of things. So saying to not focus on anything that caters to a small group, would get us run out on things. I agree there are other things they could work on, and really something as big as you are suggesting probably takes longer than two months after release. So should they do nothing until that’s ready? or work on some more niche player items? As a niche player, I’ll take more.
Well, this is after they said things like, “We got rid of score duel, because only a small percentage of players ever used it.”
If that’s the logic involved, I’d say that FAR more people would duel than play brutal mode! You could score duel on lower difficulties, but relatively few people have a desire to play at Expert, let alone beyond.
This is backed up even further by their play telemetry. I went to a HMX post mortem on and earlier RB where they disclosed that a CRAZY percentage of players never made it past Medium difficulty. So if we’re dropping features (like score duel) based upon limited appeal, how did brutal mode make it through?
To which I still contend that Brutal Mode was comparatively easy to implement, so it was low-hanging fruit to give the feeling of forward momentum: “We’re still add features, guys! Look at this here thing we did!” (Seriously, if I had access to their codebase, this would take me maybe… two weeks to do, including learning where everything is. The gameplay engineer who is responsible for this typically could probably hammer it out in two days! The majority of dev time would just be QA.)
Of course one could contend that the series has already hemorrhaged all the Medium and lower player base away, leaving only Expert score-chasers. If that’s true, well, I guess that my totally-unfounded hypothetical “1%” would be substantially larger…
But that doesn’t bear out in my local sampling. It’s true that many people on this board are the 1%, but the majority of people just play the game and never go on a forum to talk about it, and that’s by the numbers HMX collected themselves.
I don’t necessarily think that the polls and whatever other metrics HMX used for RB4 were meant to decide on all features that will ever be put into RB4. From what I can tell, HMX was working with a rather tight schedule and budget, and had to prioritize things in order to finish development in time for release date. The metrics were used to inform that prioritization.
I’m not saying I agree with it; I’m mildly to severely disappointed in the direction that RB4 went.
But now that the game is out and the DLC revenue stream has kicked back in, more things are possible. I just wish I had a handle on the magic spell that would help me get the features I want back in game.
Vince Russo in the 90s described what the WWE was doing as the “wrestling bubble”, where the then WWF was being beaten brutally by WCW in the ratings because the WWF authors were basically self-referencial and lived in a “wrestling bubble” without connecting with the audience. Basically they were writing content THEY wanted to see but not the public. Vince Russo is and was an egomaniac but he was right on the money.
I love Harmonix and I’m 100% sure they are doing what they think is best for the franchise and the public and maybe they will be rewarded by sales number. However for some reason the wrestling bubble sprung to mind when I first was told of brutal mode.
So I had a chance to try this again today. I put it away ’til now because I found it unplayable with my RB3 setup (MPA/Rolands).
Updated, calibrated, jammed, and…
no cursing?!?! 
From my throne, they appear to have fixed most of the playability issues I was experiencing.
Good to hear, Dash. I’ve yet to apply the update myself. For that matter I have yet to apply the new Dashboard update that caused everyone’s songlist to be redone. I should probably turn on the XBone before I leave for work tomorrow and just let it sit all day doing its thing.
Big BrotherMicrosoft will be happy, at least for about 12 hours.” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />
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