During Activate 2008 we got the chance to talk to a few people, one of them was Brian Bright from NeverSoft. The full interview is found in ButtonMasher Podcast #11 and covers a few more questions not mentioned here.
What I have transcribed past the break deals with the bulk of the discussion which revolved around the note tracking in GH3 versus the Harmonix developed GH2 and some other questions that Wugga had burning inside of him.
People noticed a big shift in the way that the notes are transcribed between Guitar Hero 2 and 3. Could you describe the philosophy behind the way you transcribed the notes and what you hoped to achieve through that?
We take expert track and we track every note that is in the song. So if it’s a Guitar, for GH3 it was a Guitar track we basically track every note in there, it’s not like there are extra notes that get note tracked in there.
There are a lot more tri-chords (three button chords) and the hammer-on’s are a lot looser.
The looser hammer-on’s are just a timing window.
There is a distinct difference between the way Harmonix did it in the past and the way NeverSoft is doing it now. I’m not saying it’s any worse, it is too hard for me to be honest.
I agree, we made GH3 too hard.
I know a lot of people that just caned GH3, I think it’s harder than GH2 but it’s not too hard obviously for some people. So you’re saying it was too hard?
Yeah, it was too fucking hard. We made a conscious effort of GH Aerosmith and GH4 to kind of ramp the difficulty better. In GH3 you definitely hit a wall near the last tier on hard to expert.
That’s exactly where I hit it.
Yeah, too hard. A lot of that is chalked up to learning. Learning about the consumers and focus testing. In Aerosmith we made it much more linear, we devised a series of rules as to what constitutes a tier 6 hard song and what differentiates it from a tier 7 expert song, we came up with a rule set for this. In GH:WT we obviously have that same rule set, but we also have the ability to dial down the difficulty on any song, so if you hit a brick wall, which we don’t think you will, you can turn down the difficulty. I don’t think the guys artificially made things more difficult, we did have a few ScoreHero guys that were new on GH3 that were very good and may have note tracked some of the songs to their skill level. But in GH:WT you will see it is much more smooth, with a more even ramp, and it does get more difficult but hopefully you won’t hit that wall.
Do you guys have any plans around more Geek culture theme music? (Halo Theme, God of War etc)
More free downloadable content?
Yeah!
I am sure we’ll try and continue that. We’re backing up in a big way for just downloadable content in general, it’s a big focus for us.
How does that happen, did you get in touch with those guys for the Halo 3 theme or did they get in touch with you?
Halo was interesting, they sent us a helmet with all their signature on it, then we sent them a guitar and then we said we want to put your song in the game. War Craft was similar, a lot of the guys on our team are War Craft fans, so we got into touch with the guys at Blizzard and were able to do that. It works both ways. We want to put out free stuff, every three downloads that are paid for we get a free one from Microsoft, so we like to exploit that as much as we can. With St Patricks day we had the three Drop Kick Murphy songs. Those songs get downloading millions of times, because it’s free. But we don’t get a lot of praise for that, we get a lot of shit for download content.
I love you for it!
I’d like to keep doing it.
Tags: Games, Interviews
I just cant get passed Salyer on Hard i mean whats with that hammer ons OMG not to mention Metallica’s “one”
Damn i wonder if ill own the guys at this weekend GH tournament if all these guys admit its difficult
Well… “Expert” is the name of the difficulty, so of course, it’s for expert players. I think the idea of making charts easier is a horrible idea, personally. If someone has a big problem with Expert they can just play on a different difficulty, or better yet, they can practice until they can hit those hard parts.
Which, I suppose brings me to the next thing. There is a “practice” mode people. There are no songs on GHIII (except maybe Through The Fire and Flames, for some people) where the whole song is intense. Most songs have calm parts, and then just one or two insane parts where you’d really have time struggling to survive. You can always take these parts into practice mode and slow them down and better figure out how to approach it.
They aren’t making the Expert Tier songs any easier. They’re focusing on making the songs before the last tier straighter, and less like a set of uneven stairs.