Fact:Guitar Hero World Tour‘s new drum kit peripheral has more things to hit than the kit Harmonix introduced a year ago forRock Band. But theRock Bandkit will work withWorld Tour, despite the fact that the drumming gameplay requires you to hit more notes.
Uh, so how in the hell is that going to work? I askedWorld Tourlead designer Alan Flores.
“When you plug theRock Bandkit in we condense [our note chart] down to a four lane highway,” Flores told me at aWorld Tourpreview event last week, “and we had to do extra work.”
“It’ll take the five lane highway and take the pad all the way on the right, which is the green one, and it’ll stick it over on to the orange pad,” he continued. “There’s something other logic too, I think if there’s already an orange note it will move it over to the blue note or something like that. I can’t remember the actual algorithm; it won’t actually modify the note track, it just modifies the highway so that someone with aRock Bandkit can play.”
Flores also says that their kit works withRock Band 1, and should work withRock Band 2“unless [Harmonix] changed their whole drum spec which would be crazy of them to do.”
Check back later for our full interview with Alan Flores where he talks about lessons learned from working onGuitar Hero III, downloadable content versus retail, and competition in the music videogame space.
