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Over Five Years of Rock Band Come to an End


USB Connector
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As you may have seen in our recent announcement regarding the release of Rock Band Blitz tracks as singles, Rock Band DLC production has gradually slowed over the past 5 years. We’ve managed to maintain a consistent release schedule for a staggering 275 consecutive weeks, releasing over 4,000 songs for the Rock Band Platform, but in recent months we’ve scaled production down as we’ve transitioned resources onto other projects. With several new titles in development and developers needed to usher these new games along, April 2nd will be the last weekly DLC release for Rock Band.

 

While there is no content currently scheduled beyond April 2nd, we still have DLC releases lined up for the next few weeks, including the remaining tracks from RB Blitz, several Pro guitar upgrades, and a handful of artists who have not yet appeared in Rock Band. We’re incredibly proud of the DLC milestones we’ve set, especially producing the largest music library of any game available, and we wouldn’t have been able to release as much outstanding content without the support of our amazing community. As thanks to the community, we’re going to continue the ongoing DLC sale of 50% off over 1,100 songs so fans can continue to build their personal libraries from our back catalog.

 

We hope that you’ll all agree that this has been a tremendous run, and you should know it’s a ride that we at Harmonix have been thrilled to be a part of. We’re going to continue to support the forums and RockBand.com and hope to still see you rocking out online, in photos of Rock Band parties shared on Twitter and Facebook, or here on the forums. Whether you waited in line for a midnight release of Rock Band over 5 years ago, or you just joined the party with Rock Band Blitz… whether you’ve downloaded every single song we’ve ever released, or you’ve just played on disc songs until your neighbors moved away… whether you’re a metal shredder, or a bubblegum pop singer… thank you for being a part of our band.

 

 

Rock On,

 

Harmonix Music Systems

source

 

I've been playing Harmonix's games since Guitar Hero 1. Since 2007 I've been checking for new song releases every Friday. I find it odd getting sentimental about a game but now that I think about it, I've hosted numerous great parties/BBQs/get togethers which have been entered around it. For me this franchise created a whole bunch of friendships and strengthened existing ones.

 

 

This franchise inspired myself and the rest of my plastic instrument wielding band mates to move on to form a real band composed of the same instruments we play on Rock Band. Last summer I even started learning a second instrument. I doubt I would have been inspired to do so if Rock Band didn't exist.

 

The brand won't die, it's too powerful. I fully expect Rock Band (or some music game crafted by Harmonix) to come back a few years into the next generation of consoles packing innovation and rockin' tunes just as its predecessors did.

 

Farewell, sweet prince, until the next generation.

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Have you tried Rocksmith? It's like guitar hero but with a real guitar... I' ve had a lot of fun with it so far...

 

I've been wanting to try that. Do you feel you're actually learning the guitar because of the game?

 

No just feel, I AM learning guitar by the game.

 

The way it works is like Guitar Hero, so you start at easier songs. Even on those easier songs, it will sense that you can't do chords, or certain riffs and will dumb it down for you to single notes, spread out if youa re messing up. You then need say 25,000 points on that song to qualify/move on. But if you keep playing that song over and over and over and get better, eventually you will end up playing the entire real song, all chords, etc. and score a perfect 120,000 or whatever points. I have almost gotten there with "Use Somebody" (King of Leon).

 

They also have downlaodable/purchasable content like on Guitar Hero for a price, including a Rush package.

 

I wish I had more time to play on it (and I wish my fingers could stand the game for logner sessions, but I am a guitar virgin).

 

I have it for the PC - comes with a 1/4" jack to USB...

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Have you tried Rocksmith? It's like guitar hero but with a real guitar... I' ve had a lot of fun with it so far...

 

I've been wanting to try that. Do you feel you're actually learning the guitar because of the game?

 

I have it. I find it's a great idea but it has a ton of flaws. I had a little bit of prior experience going in to the game and I felt the pacing was far too slow. The mini games are fun and great to train muscle memory, the tutorials are geared towards beginners. Many of the tutorials neglect to mention applications of what you just learned. You're basically expected to figure it out by playing the songs.

 

My main problem with the game lies within learning the song. There is no way to control difficulty. You do bad, it drops the difficulty, you do good it increases it. This may sound great in principle but I was playing Livin' After Midnight and I kept missing the same chord switch during the verse. So one note on 10-15 or so I would miss and it would drop my difficulty down to single notes. Had it kept me there I would have got it, but instead I go down only to go back up to try hitting that one note again. So unless you can get 100% on the song a few times, you'll never get the REAL notes. This can be frustrating. I played that song and Song 2 over 20 times and never got the full notes despite wanting to see it.

 

A good way to practice guitar is taking the notes of a song and playing them slowly right? Rocksmith doesn't let you do this either. You're either playing at the difficulty it tells you or you're not playing. You can select a specific riff to practice but even then it controls which difficulty you're playing on. This is a huge turn off for me.

 

Rocksmith will teach you guitar but not very well. To me it's a supplement and it has very little to offer experienced players (I came in with a decent amount of theoretical knowledge on the instrument from paying attention to the guitarist during out jam sessions and almost every tutorial little or nothing to offer). A friend of mine who had already been playing guitar for 3 years when it came out (the same friend I mentioned in my last post who moved on to a real instrument because of Rock Band) didn't like it because he could 100% many of the included songs on his first try and yet he still had to play the songs he wanted to learn several times before he got to the real notes. He also mentioned that the tutorials were very shallow but great for beginners.

 

I've abandoned using rocksmith to learn. I feel that I'm progressing much better using the internet to learn at my own pace. I use rocksmith's tutorials to verify that I am actually doing it right and the minigames to substitute trying to practice a scale or switch between a bunch of chords that use up more than 3 different frets. It definitely makes improving muscle memory a hell of a lot of fun.

 

EDIT: structure, grammer

Edited by USB Connector
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Have you tried Rocksmith? It's like guitar hero but with a real guitar... I' ve had a lot of fun with it so far...

 

I've been wanting to try that. Do you feel you're actually learning the guitar because of the game?

 

I have it. I find it's a great idea but it has a ton of flaws. I had a little bit of prior experience going in to the game and I felt the pacing was far too slow. The mini games are fun and great to train muscle memory, the tutorials are geared towards beginners. Many of the tutorials neglect to mention applications of what you just learned. You're basically expected to figure it out by playing the songs.

 

My main problem with the game lies within learning the song. There is no way to control difficulty. You do bad, it drops the difficulty, you do good it increases it. This may sound great in principle but I was playing Livin' After Midnight and I kept missing the same chord switch during the verse. So one note on 10-15 or so I would miss and it would drop my difficulty down to single notes. Had it kept me there I would have got it, but instead I go down only to go back up to try hitting that one note again. So unless you can get 100% on the song a few times, you'll never get the REAL notes. This can be frustrating. I played that song and Song 2 over 20 times and never got the full notes despite wanting to see it.

 

A good way to practice guitar is taking the notes of a song and playing them slowly right? Rocksmith doesn't let you do this either. You're either playing at the difficulty it tells you or you're not playing. You can select a specific riff to practice but even then it controls which difficulty you're playing on. This is a huge turn off for me.

 

Rocksmith will teach you guitar but not very well. To me it's a supplement and it has very little to offer experienced players (I came in with a decent amount of theoretical knowledge on the instrument from paying attention to the guitarist during out jam sessions and almost every tutorial little or nothing to offer). A friend of mine who had already been playing guitar for 3 years when it came out (the same friend I mentioned in my last post who moved on to a real instrument because of Rock Band) didn't like it because he could 100% many of the included songs on his first try and yet he still had to play the songs he wanted to learn several times before he got to the real notes. He also mentioned that the tutorials were very shallow but great for beginners.

 

I've abandoned using rocksmith to learn. I feel that I'm progressing much better using the internet to learn at my own pace. I use rocksmith's tutorials to verify that I am actually doing it right and the minigames to substitute trying to practice a scale or switch between a bunch of chords that use up more than 3 different frets. It definitely makes improving muscle memory a hell of a lot of fun.

 

EDIT: structure, grammer

 

I'm not sure how long it has been since you played it, but make sure you do the updates via your Steam client (if you are playing on your PC) for it. There have been some massive updates since I bought it just a month or so ago and in terms of practicing a song, you can do that and if you hit the notes it will speed up to 100%. You can also learn the techniques in the techniques area and when a song has a new technique (bends, etc), that technique will "open up" and you can practice it...

 

Don't get me wrong, I do think there are some areas that could use improvement (and will as move updates come out) but I have had a lot of fun with it and feel I have learned quite a bit in a short amount of time...

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Have you tried Rocksmith? It's like guitar hero but with a real guitar... I' ve had a lot of fun with it so far...

 

I've been wanting to try that. Do you feel you're actually learning the guitar because of the game?

 

I have it. I find it's a great idea but it has a ton of flaws. I had a little bit of prior experience going in to the game and I felt the pacing was far too slow. The mini games are fun and great to train muscle memory, the tutorials are geared towards beginners. Many of the tutorials neglect to mention applications of what you just learned. You're basically expected to figure it out by playing the songs.

 

My main problem with the game lies within learning the song. There is no way to control difficulty. You do bad, it drops the difficulty, you do good it increases it. This may sound great in principle but I was playing Livin' After Midnight and I kept missing the same chord switch during the verse. So one note on 10-15 or so I would miss and it would drop my difficulty down to single notes. Had it kept me there I would have got it, but instead I go down only to go back up to try hitting that one note again. So unless you can get 100% on the song a few times, you'll never get the REAL notes. This can be frustrating. I played that song and Song 2 over 20 times and never got the full notes despite wanting to see it.

 

A good way to practice guitar is taking the notes of a song and playing them slowly right? Rocksmith doesn't let you do this either. You're either playing at the difficulty it tells you or you're not playing. You can select a specific riff to practice but even then it controls which difficulty you're playing on. This is a huge turn off for me.

 

Rocksmith will teach you guitar but not very well. To me it's a supplement and it has very little to offer experienced players (I came in with a decent amount of theoretical knowledge on the instrument from paying attention to the guitarist during out jam sessions and almost every tutorial little or nothing to offer). A friend of mine who had already been playing guitar for 3 years when it came out (the same friend I mentioned in my last post who moved on to a real instrument because of Rock Band) didn't like it because he could 100% many of the included songs on his first try and yet he still had to play the songs he wanted to learn several times before he got to the real notes. He also mentioned that the tutorials were very shallow but great for beginners.

 

I've abandoned using rocksmith to learn. I feel that I'm progressing much better using the internet to learn at my own pace. I use rocksmith's tutorials to verify that I am actually doing it right and the minigames to substitute trying to practice a scale or switch between a bunch of chords that use up more than 3 different frets. It definitely makes improving muscle memory a hell of a lot of fun.

 

EDIT: structure, grammer

 

I'm not sure how long it has been since you played it, but make sure you do the updates via your Steam client (if you are playing on your PC) for it. There have been some massive updates since I bought it just a month or so ago and in terms of practicing a song, you can do that and if you hit the notes it will speed up to 100%. You can also learn the techniques in the techniques area and when a song has a new technique (bends, etc), that technique will "open up" and you can practice it...

 

Don't get me wrong, I do think there are some areas that could use improvement (and will as move updates come out) but I have had a lot of fun with it and feel I have learned quite a bit in a short amount of time...

 

I have it on xbox, I'm not sure if it gets the same updates. I know how the techniques work but what I'm saying is that the tutorials on the techniques themselves are just "this is how do it. K we're done here, go play songs now". It never gives examples of how to incorporate them into riffs or combine them with things you've already learned. It gives you the tools but demands that you connect the dots on your own. I'm not a very musically intuitive person and that so without giving me an idea of how to use these new things makes it rather frustrating.

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I bought a Wii because of this game. And, I love The Beatles edition. Things I learned:

  • I can not play the guitar or bass on Rock Band. One song I could play but only because it was the only one that played like an actual song on bass. I had to play it on expert. All other songs I failed on easy. I was thrown out of every band as a guitar/bass player in RockBand.
  • I love the drums and think it approximates the beat patterns (bass, snare, tom, hi-hat) of a real drum kit. I am not a drummer but I loved "drumming" in Rock Band. I have destroyed two pedals and had to put Rock Band pad protectors on the drum pad heads since they were starting to bubble. And, I would play better at the higher levels. Apparently, I play the game rather...aggressively. :haz:
  • Its a lot of fun for kids of all ages.
  • It's even more fun adults with alcohol.

Farewell, old friend :heart: Although I have not played you in a year or so, I will always be fond of you. :NP:

 

In the end, I was led back to focus on my real instrument and I think that was the best thing about Rock Band.

 

http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-music017.gif

 

:)

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I never got into RockBand, though I wanted to; just didn't get around to it. I tried it out at a friend's house a few years, but thought that the 'playing' with buttons and levers on a plastic guitar could be upgraded to something better.

 

And along came RockSmith....

 

I just picked this up, but the whole concept of using an actual guitar (or bass, in my case, mostly) is definitely along the lines of what I'm interested in! I'd like to see more interaction with other players, as in it would be cool to play this game with a guitar-wielding friend, but perhaps the game can do this and I haven't explored it enough yet. And as USB Connector mentioned, the difficulty level seems a bit weird. I'd like to have the option of choosing my difficulty - the first 'song' I was playing (in the very beginning, mind!), I was figuring out the whole note system, with the coloured notes flying at me. I did dismally the first attempt, then started catching on the second try, and the third time did well enough to say, hey, I'm getting the hang of it, but why is it getting harder? Why is the game deciding what level difficulty to throw at me? I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and would love to be able to kind of master something before moving up, instead of having it change in difficulty each time I play.

 

But, as I said, I've only just picked this up, so I still have lots to learn. And I need to figure out a way to get the downloadable Rush songs now that my boyfriend has given up his Xbox Live....

 

Oh, and I was very surprised to find that, when the game prompted me to check if my bass was in tune, it was perfectly in tune, needing no tweaks at all! I'd tuned it relatively, but wasn't sure if it was actually tuned, so, yay for me!

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The lag issues on Rocksmith are really annoying to look past. I don't want to take the time to fix all the milisecond flaws in it. I just want to learn the instrument. I thought it was a waste of 60 bucks...Haven't learned one thing from it, yet.
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So someone told me that you can use the riff repeater in rocksmith to unlock the full difficulty without grinding too much. So I popped in rocksmith again on Friday, turns out I was missing an update. Anyway, the game is a LOT more fun now. I downloaded Headlong Flight on Monday. Yep. It's a totally different game now for me. Now I feel like I'm learning something the way I enjoy it. I have to fail out a few times for it to slow a new track down to comfortable speeds so I can take the time to read the notes but after that it progresses very nicely.

 

The menus and songs are still a pain in the ass to navigate :P

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They just announced the last song (release date: April 2nd): American Pie by Don McLean. Farewell Rock Band, it was a great run. Even though I won't stop playing the game just because weekly DLC is over, I still find it hard to believe that music games are officially dead.

 

"The day, the music died"

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It's ending due to the lack of interest and the fact the ps4 and xbox720 won't be backwards compatible. If they were to move forwards all of our DLC would be gone on a new console. I own 2,875 songs on the PS3. If I had to start out with a single disc in Rock Band 4 and only 80 songs I would be done with the game in a week.
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Judging from my xbox experience of the last two years, Microsoft will do everything in their power to squeeze every last dollar from you. I expect there will be no backwards comparability in terms XBLA purchases, discs I would think are plausible but keep in mind nothing is official, it's all rumours.
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The processing styles of the new systems are going to make backwards compatibility impossible without putting an XBOX 360 and 720 into one console. When the PS3 first came out it was Backwards Compatible and huge. When they wanted to reduce prices they had to remove the BC to make it work. Both systems run different software so in order to use both types of software they had to have both consoles in one. Removing the PS2 hardward drastically lowered costs and cut the size of the PS3 in half. It's not practical to include Backward Compatibility in consoles, which is why the PS1/PS2 and early Sega consoles weren't BC and future consoles won't be BC.

 

That is a very dumbed down version of how it's working.

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Why can the Xbox 360 do backward comp, then? I guess I don't really get it. lol

 

Information isn't processed in the same way because they're different machines. The games are made for a specific set of hardware and none other on consoles. It costs more to make a new console process information in the same way as the old console. Nothing has been said on the new xbox yet. If the architecture is similar enough it will be backwards compatible but if the xbox wants to keep up it will have to change rather drastically.

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And that's it. American Pie is out. Rock Band is done. 275 consecutive weeks of DLC and nearly 5000 songs released. No more Friday morning announcements.

 

The song it really fun to play on all instruments, unless you're on bass. :P

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Damnit. Bass is my instrument of choice. I really need to get a new PS3 so I can start playing Rock Band again.

 

Edit: I just watched that video and it made me cry. The end is actually here.

Edited by billybobjoe1881
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The 3 Metallica tracks have been pulled from the store. It is now impossible to buy them. You can redownload it you own it. No warning. Their licensing contract expired and Metallica being Metallica wanted everything back. They announced that they're looking into relicensing all the other bands and they've got everything else released up until the end of 2007 and that there will be advance notice for any future pulls.

 

Good thing I already had 2/3.

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They announce everything on their twitter/facebook accounts as well as the site. They could have made the announcement, they just didn't.
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