Posts Tagged ‘PAX East’

Photo from HarmonixCommunity Flickr photostream

So as many of you remember, the week prior to PAX East, we solicited the community for questions to pass on to Harmonix while we were there. These posts are unsurprisingly very popular, with this one fielding well over 200 comments/questions. I culled through the questions and tried to eliminate the duplicates and combine as many as possible, and ultimately got them down to a somewhat reasonable amount.

Because a large quantity of the questions were either technical in nature or asking why “X” feature was not included or if “X” feature can be included in future title updates, my thinking was that we may get more detailed responses by having the most eyes at Harmonix take a look at the questions as possible. Instead of cornering Harmonix’s Public Relations Manager John Drake or any of the other community members at PAX East, we chatted and thought it would be a better idea if I sent the questions over and allowed the Rock Band team to take a crack at them afterwards back at the office. I sent the questions shortly after PAX East, and received responses last week. Below is the communication between John and myself.

RockBandAide: Why were the following not included in Rock Band 3? And could any of these be added via patch in the future?

• “Subgenre” filtering and/or sorting
• Filters by ratings (lighters)
• LEGO style auto-kick pedal
• Local or online score duels
• Ratings of songs per instrument and for normal/Pro modes instead of one rating per song
• Crowd sing-alongs
• Simultaneous duplicate instrument charts a la Guitar Hero (more than one person playing the same instrument at the same time)
• Enable “shuffle” within a created playlist
• Import characters from previous titles
• “Purchase date” sorting improvements
• Increase the number of allowable custom characters
• Delete a single song from your library that was purchased in a pack or export
• Jukebox mode
• Freestyle Play mode for all Pro-instruments similar to how it exists now for drums
• Venue select
• Modifiers and filters preferences saved by default instead of reset at restart
• Shared custom characters in multiplayer

John Drake: Overall, the answer to these requests is “Game development is a series of complicated choices. Interrelated systems all have to work together towards the ideal design for a game, and we never get to incorporate everything that we want into a title. A lot of these suggestions are excellent ones (and some of them were even proposed or worked on during development), but the game is developed on a finite timeline with a finite budget. We hope that, even great suggestions aside, you appreciate all the thought and care that went into the features that we did put into the game”. Beyond that, we’re don’t have any more title updates on the horizon for Rock Band at the moment. While that’s subject to change based on new information, most features of this scope wouldn’t be able to be added in a patch anyway.

A few things to address specifically:

- Local or online score duels – Our live data from RB2 showed that very very few people were playing these competitive modes. We put leaderboards and our “battles” functionality in the game for folks who want to duke it out, but the simultaneous competition wasn’t used much in RB1 or RB2 based on our analysis and would have been time-consuming to put in, putting other features at risk.

- Simultaneous Duplicate Instrument Charts – We addressed this a fair amount during the launch of other competitive titles – It doesn’t make a lot of sense to have multiple people playing the same track and same instrument. Not only does it not reflect the band vibe of Rock Band, it also would challenge our “make the audio track stop when you miss a note” mechanic.

- Importing characters from previous titles – There are a LOT of reasons why this is a challenge for us to do. The most important challenge is that we overhauled our art assets pretty extremely between RB2 and RB3…while we kept a lot of your favorite outfit options around so you could rebuild your characters and that may result in an “up-rezzed same character” from the player perspective, on the back end, it’s very much a new set of assets and data.

- Delete a single song from your library that was purchased in a pack or export – Oh, you mean “Visions syndrome”? We’ve heard you on this one and we wish there was an easier solution. The long and short of it is that there are some things about file management on a console that we control as the game, and some things about file management on a console that the console manufacturer controls. We’re sorry that you can’t delete these songs for the more OCD fans out there, but we recommend you just rank them lower with our lighter system to prevent them from coming up as often.

Hope that that explains some of our design choices. For the rest, I get where they’re all coming from, but they’re unlikely to change in the near future.

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The full listing of panels for PAX East was released this past weekend, and members of Harmonix are all over the place! Below are a listing of the events where you can find your favorite HMX peeps (assuming you are going, that is)! Based on my experience with last year’s panels, I would obviously recommend going to the “Reverse Q&A with the Harmonix Community Team!” And DEFINITELY don’t miss out on attending HMXSean’s premiere screening of his documentary “When I Grow Up.” Don’t forget that there are some events happening around town before PAX East technically begins, as well.

The first pre-PAX event is the Swapaholics PrePAX Video Game Swap. Starting at 5:00 PM at the Middlesex Lounge, you can get a chance to pick up or exchange some hidden treasures from people’s video game libraries.

The night continues with a Harmonix band show courtesy of @thebeststeph featuring fellow HMXers @spiritkidmusic and @robotkid at local venue Great Scott. Tickets are available for $8 over at Ticketweb. 18+ show starting at 9:00 PM. More details here!

Also, @MrPope announced that Harmonix will be getting together with ImprovBoston, Giant Bomb, Narragansett Beer, and Brattle Theatre to bring you one big-ass crazy Rock Band Night! If you like Rock Band (well, DO YA?), you are invited to hang out with hundreds of new friends you haven’t yet met and rock on stage! But beware, those knuckleheads (excuse my language) from Giant Bomb will be judging your performance. It starts at 10:00 pm, but if you show up at 7:00 pm, you can check out a viewing of Heavy Metal on the big screen! (All ages show, 21 to drink.) $14 for Rock Band Night and Heavy Metal, $6 just for Rock Band Night. RockBand.com has all the details. You can get tickets to one or both of the events here.

If you want to check out a map of the event, we’ve got that (in PDF form), too!

And DEFINITELY don’t forget that Tommy and Tiffany from RockBandAide and DanceKinection will be hosting an informal “tweetup” immediately following the Reverse Q&A panel! Stop by and say hi!!!

See the full list of all the PAX East events after the jump!

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So just like last year, we will be attending PAX East and reporting back on what we see and hear on the site. But for those who are going to be attending, we thought we would add a little surprise. Both Tommy from RockBandAide and Tiffany “ElektraFi” from DanceKinection will be at PAX East, and we thought it would be an excellent opportunity for us to meet with all of the people that visit the site.

We’re looking to place names to all the faces of those who have made the sites successful, and say thank you to all of you. If you got any ideas on how to improve the sites, let us know. Or if you just wanna say “hi” and get back to the goodness of PAX East, we’re down for that as well.

No need to RSVP (but don’t let us stop you); just look for us hanging around outside the Manticore Theatre after the panel concludes. Hope to see you there!

[Twtvite.com]

Just like we had done for PAX Prime, E3, and PAX East last year, we’re tossing this out there to you guys who can’t make it to PAX East, but still have some Rock Band related questions that you would like to have answered. Officially starting a week from today, I have a feeling PAX East will be a alcohol-fueled candy-fueled blur, but at some point I’m going to corner someone from Harmonix and fire your questions their way.

Anything is fair game, but chances are good that I’ll combine and edit a bunch to get as much info as I can out of them. Go ahead and add your questions in the comments below!

Assuming you’ve played a Rock Band title (why would you be reading this otherwise), you’ve seen some of the amazing contributions Casey Malone has made to the franchise.  Casey has worked on just about every Rock Band title to date, including the Track Packs.  Not only is he a developer, but it’s safe to say that he’s a fan, as well.  If you didn’t get a chance to see him on the PAX East panel video, definitely check it out. He’s got some great input and a number of hysterical lines!

Anyway, check out my conversation with Casey below! There’s also a special cameo at the end!

Thanks, Casey!

John's Favorite Way to Get to Rock Band Events

OK, if you check out this site with any regularity (and I hope you do), you’ve probably seen the name John Drake mentioned once or twice… in the last week alone. John is the official mouthpiece for Harmonix, and nearly all official Rock Band PR announcements go through him… with certain exceptions.  You may have seen the post I did last week where we chatted about the questions you guys sent in.  The video interview below shows less “Business John,” and more “Party John,” so one could say that this video finishes the John Drake interview-mullet over the past week (I have no idea what that means).

Anyway, check out my conversation with John below, and wait until the end for a special treat. @HarmonixSean isn’t the only one with sweet dance moves…

Thanks, John!!!