If this tracklist isn’t exportable into GH:WT, the whole situation is going to well and truly suck.
Seriously, how awesome would it have been if the GH:A tracklist was exportable into GH:WT via a one-time use online code?
Not all that awesome. At least not for me. I liked the look and feel of GH:A a lot more than I liked the look and feel of GH:WT.
I guess you could make the argument that Metallica is big enough to deserve their own standalone game, sort of like the Beatles, but I’m unconvinced based on the prior track record (GH:A, etc) that whatever Neversoft does will be anything more than a glorified standalone expansion pack.
Based on the tracklist, which includes LOTS of non-Metallica, I can already see they’re going the GH:A route. Obviously this isn’t necessary for the Beatles game, which will be 45 tracks of, y’know, The Beatles.
My gut feeling is that the Beatles game is going to be a from-the-ground-up new experience (with scrolling note charts, obviously), and the GH:M game is going to be a crappy low-budget skin job over GH:WT.
Which would be fine by me, if like the AC/DC “standalone expansion”, you could import the tracks.
Pretty much, yeah. The difference between a rental and a buy, to be sure. With any luck, though, they have the whole platform thing firm in their minds by now. The success of the AC/DC pack (it was successful, right?) can’t be anything but supportive of that case. Hell, ideally they would offer the whole thing as DLC for GHWT and skip the foreplay, but so long as I can ditch the additional disc I’ll be happy.
Hell yeah, or maybe some Pantera.
Unless I’ve misunderstood, GH Metallica will be a band game and ship with tracks for guitar, bass, vocal and drums. So not being able to import it won’t be as bad as something like GH:A, where it was only guitar. If anything, I’m hoping they’ll take this opportunity to clean up GHWT’s band interface, and (I know this is a pipe dream) give us the option to import selected GHWT tracks to GH:M. :)
Rock8Man, I’m surprised to hear anyone say they liked the interviews in GH:A. To me, the entire band seemed disinterested, and Joe Perry in particular looked like he was in the middle of getting stoned when someone dragged him in front of the camera and had him read some cue cards. There were a few interesting historical nuggets, but I thought the presentation alternatively bounced from sheer pain to comically bad. I really hope they do a better job with GH:M, but I have concerns with the team they’ve assigned to it.
Edit: I guess it’s been widlely confirmed that it’s a band game.
As long as it works with my current fake plastic instruments I will by the disk only version on day one.
As long as they promise to make the solos “translucent note only”.
It surprised me that I liked them too. I guess everything is relative to expectations. Since I expect so little of the series after Guitar Hero 3, I guess anything was preferable to staring at the drummer “animate” hitting the drums with his robotic movement. The drummer’s face in particular in GH:A looked really detailed, and they focused on him a lot, both during the interviews and during the actual game. It was also a really refreshing change from the normal Neversoft GH art-style. As for the actual interviews, I just found the anecdotes interesting because I knew none of that stuff about Aerosmith, and so I actually found myself paying attention to every little snippet. For example, when they started off talking about making their big break in Max’s Kansas City, or whatever that place was called, that was interesting because I didn’t know they were playing at a club when someone big in the audience took notice. And that they actually wrote a song about it.
Just admit it. You were in the meeting room when they planned it!
So I got the GH:Metallica Game Informer
The good news:
-The partial tracklist from Kotaku is confirmed
-Expert plus mode for people with two bass pedals (that one’s not for me, but I think it’s a cool feature…playing with Reldan when he does quasi 2 pedal songs like Indestructible is awesome)
-the band seems pretty into it, which should make their participation more motivated.
Mixed bag depending on how it turns out
-shitload of metallica trivia stuff
-appearance is revamped to a more “realistic” look
The bad news
-no mention of GHWT integration
-you’ll play non metallica songs as “your” band, then play as Metallica for their songs…so more automatic background songs like Tool.
Overall, it’s less exciting without seamless integration into GHWT. But the tracklist and the general vibe seems positive, and it’s not like there was much doubt I would buy it.
I think the standalone-ness fits right in with GH:WT’s general direction of being more casual-friendly and game-oriented. Rock Band is the “platform” on which you are supposed to amass a huge library and do things like random setlists and follow a single band through. GH:WT is just a bunch of full-band songs you can pick up and play, and when you are tired of the songs on one disc, you swap to the other one.
Not sure which is better. On the one hand, it can be fun to build a band together over weeks and customize your rockers, so it would be a shame if you can’t use those same rockers in certain songs. On the other hand, people who just want a party game with minimum fuss are going to be more excited about a disc with a bunch of tracks they know that can just be popped in and used. Not saying they couldn’t also include the ability to copy it into GH:WT, just that the number of people for whom that is a deal-breaker is likely to be small. Especially if there are special features in the expansion pack that make using the disc worthwhile.
Perhaps. But the whole way they handled Death Magnetic gave me hope that they were going to let, you know, the customer make that decision. Because I don’t care about the backgrounds and the setting that much, I just don’t want to switch discs more than I have to in order to create the playlist of the moment.
The “Platform” is the way for me.
Swapping disks isn’t “casual friendly” at all. In group settings, once a disk is put in the system, it stays in the system. It’s why I’m so incredibly happy that RB2 could import RB1 songs.
None of these games have a complete track lists on the back, so unless you’re going to get all hard-core and print out track lists for your disks, swapping disks is a gigantic pain.
Why not give the gamer the choice? Rock Band’s method doesn’t stop you from doing it this way with their AC/DC game. I honestly don’t really see your point that such a method is more casual friendly, but even if it were more casual friendly for some subset of casuals, the Right Thing to do in this situation is obviously to allow the game to be run either way just like RB does it.
This. You’re not going to be able to get a consensus from a large group of people on when it’s time to switch disks, so whatever’s in there will remain there until everyone loses interest, which will not happen at remotely the same pace so people will have dispersed already.
I’m having a hard time imagining a “large group of people” being into Metallica and other hardcore metal bands.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see when the entire tracklist is revealed. I know for the people I regularly play with Metallica is not exactly a crowd pleaser, but this is more based on the typical difficulty level of most Metallica songs than anything else.
That’s stupid. Metallica is one of the best-selling bands (of any kind) of all time.
edit:
I agree that they sell a lot of records; it’s the difficulty of the songs in the game that I’m referring to.
Basically whenever Metallica came up in a group environment, there was a lot of kvetching about difficulty. I’m trying to imagine an entire game of Metallica songs… I guess it’ll start at tier 5 difficulty and, uh, go up from there?