I'm surprised that there isn't already a thread on this, but anyway.

It's already known that Harmonix is going back to the drawing board on Chroma, their attempt at a multiplayer shooter with a heavy focus on rhythm elements. The NDA on the alpha apparently expired recently, and a coworker of mine that participated in it gave me her thoughts.

Basically, Harmonix went back to the drawing board because the game as it was originally designed was terrible. At its core, it's a Team Fortress 2-style competitive shooter, so it's WASD to move and the mouse to aim and shoot. The player is meant to play with the rhythm of the music, and they force this on the player by alternating the fire button on the mouse. So, instead of just clicking left-mouse for fire and right-mouse for alternate fire, you constantly hit one, then the other. And to drive that point home, there were constantly obtrusive button prompts on the screen telling you which mouse button to click. There was also the basic problem that shooters of this nature are not really meant to be played with a forced rhythm like the one Chroma was trying to instill.

She actually summed the experience up with the half-joke that Saints Row IV did the whole rhythm shooting thing better with the dubstep gun. Before the alpha test period ended, participants left in droves because the game simply wasn't good. Yes, an alpha is an alpha, but if the core mechanic of the game isn't fun by the time you reach the alpha stage, you probably need to take a second look, which is exactly what Harmonix is doing. Assuming that the game doesn't get canned outright.

Did any of you participate in the alpha? What were your thoughts on it?

And here I thought it was about shooting sound at the environments to shatter them.

Maybe assign every player a color of his/her own, have the level architecture light up in different colors to the rythm of the music - and the players can interact with different colors in the environment differently, depending on their own color? Blue shoots red makes it pop out. Blue shoots blue makes it shatter. Blue shoots yellow makes it green, turning it into a heal field?

Just pitching some nonesense to their Whiteboard.

I played the alpha for a few days then uninstalled. It is pretty much guitar hero but you just click left and right to the beat for some guns but not all. Submachine guns just fire regardless of beat. Many of the guns lock on to players so you can focus on the beat and less on the aiming. You jump higher on bass hits. You get a larger magazine capacity if you reload and complete the clicking for it. Jump pads help you get around the maps and you have to jump to the beat. Most of the pads are regular beat but some are rapid. That pretty much sums up the gameplay. The 2 game mods were basically conquest like battlefield or shoot the cart to make it move into the enemy teams base. There are different classes but similar to tf2. Engineer builds sentries, sniper snipes, heavy guy/soldier. It was interesting but not very fun.

That's very unfortunate to hear. It sounds like a good idea but in execution it sounds like it would be a complete bitch to make a game from these mechanics and ideas, probably for the best to either retry on the drawing board (or just giving up in general).

I imagine the broad idea could be cool in a Rez sort of way. Then again, that was a single player experience, and syncing everybody up on the same track for competitive multiplayer sounds....wonky.

@hailinel: so it was a PC game?

I assumed this was a console game like other rhythm games, I'd have to figure it would work better on a controller.

Left Trigger, Right Trigger, Right Trigger etc

I hope they find a way to make the baseline "rhythm-FPS" concept work. It sounds like it has troves of unexplored potential to be tapped.

@slag: Yeah, at the very least. I don't know if console versions were ever mentioned.

Hopefully they will make it better than just cancel it. Maybe nix the rhythm stuff and make it a UT style shooter with dope music. (and cool musical sounding guns)