Rock Band 3‘s release date is fast approaching, but even so close to launch, we had gotten woefully little time with the new instruments that make this particular music game unique. At a recent event here in San Francisco, Harmonix at least partially rectified that with an extended keyboard peripheral demonstration. Daniel Sussman, project director at Harmonix, and Sylvain Dubrofsky, senior designer, were both on hand to answer all my keyboard-related queries.
“What we’ve seen over the years is that people have gotten really good at Rock Band and Guitar Hero and all the music games that are out there. It makes our jobs as developers really hard when players can come in and sight-read on expert or beat our games in a week,” says Sussman. To ratchet up the difficulty, the team had to do something new, and they’d considered implementing a keyboard for several years. “We’d been thinking about keyboard gameplay going all the way back to 2001 when we had Frequency and Amplitude.”
