IGN has an interview with Harmonix’s Lead Designer, Dan Teasdale, on the newly announced Rock Band 2 that will ship in September for the Xbox 360 and later in that year for other platforms.
Mr. Teasdale does an admirable job of answering interview questions without really saying anything of substance. He says that they have been reading internet forums rabidly and have made improvements to the game based on said feedback. Basically, it seems like there will be modest improvements across the board in game interface and instrument build.
The biggest tidbit of news is that all of your existing Rock Band DLC that you’ve purchased will work with Rock Band 2 and vice versa.
As far as Harmonix is concerned, there’s no difference between “Rock
Band 1 DLC” and “Rock Band 2 DLC” – we’re just releasing awesome songs
every week onto the Rock Band platform, all of which are playable by
the Rock Band titles that support DLC.
This is awesome news in the nascent rhythm game wars as a lot of people have sunk a significant amount of coin into downloading new songs. Making their investments obsolete *cough* Guitar Hero 3 *cough*, just leaves people with a bad taste in their mouths.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’d actually feel better buying a $60 game with modest improvements, than sinking $200 on all new hardware. Especially if said $60 game contained a bunch of awesome songs as well. Granted, Guitar Hero has to catch up to the whole “full band” experience, but a lot of people have bought three generations of Guitar Hero hardware already.
For Pete’s sake, give us some time to enjoy the Chinese Plastic we already have!
