So a few Guitar Hero Live articles/reviews are making there way out today and I have to admit I've been somewhat reluctant to jump onto the plastic instructment rebirth bandwagon. I love Rock Band, but at £107+ and the fact that all my dlc is on an Xbox (PS4 player now) I had decided to skip RB4 and I don't regret that. I was ready to move on until I read a little about Guitar Hero Live, for one it was being developed by FreestyleGames (who did a damn fine job with DJ Hero games) and I was interested in the whole Guitar Hero TV formula. Now the weird realistic live performance stuff seems a tad cheesy to me but at least it feels like some advancements have been made insteadbof using the same old formula. For those that don't know GHTV is basically a mashup between old (good) MTV and a jukebox wherein a channel or channels are constantly streaming new music videos (120+ at launch i believe) for you to play like any other song. It's an interesting concept, one that im intrigued by.

Plus at £79 or so it seems the wiser option of the two. Now I'm going to wait for some more reviews before deciding if its worth the purchase but I'm interested to know if anyone as got the game yet and what they think. Its not out till friday over here but I'd be interested to know.

I'm curious, do we know how the dlc content is going to be? I have yet to choose, but if GH had a large library of downloadable songs so that I can get my favorite artists I may go for it.

@mentaldisruption: they are going the streaming playlist route while rock band is doing the standard model

Rock bands dlc list is pretty bonkers

How is paying for the streaming stuff going to work?

@bradbrains: hmm okay I'll have to read up on that a bit more. The streaming thing sounds interesting.

@bbalpert: ewww

So basically it's a free to play game

That's 120 bucks

The streaming stuff seems to have some biiiiig caveats.

But-there's a catch: Any time you seek a song from the Now Playing section (i.e. a song you actually want to play), you have to spend a form of in-game currency called a Play. A 10-pack of Plays will only cost you $2.50 and you can buy unlimited plays for 24-hours for $6, but you can easily avoid spending money altogether by earning in-game currency while playing GHTV's two free "Channels," which--like the ancient days of MTV--play a constant, pre-programmed stream of music videos that you can jump in and jam along with.

So unless you pay with money, you're essentially paying with your time and attention, and being forced to play songs the game chooses on a predetermined schedule isn't really what I want out of a music-driven experience. Plus, burning through songs like that makes the music feel more disposable. The first time you play a track is often the last time you play that track unless you go out of your way to hunt through menus to find it. That's fine when the song is awful, but it's also a little sad. At least you also earn chunks of free Plays periodically just for playing the game at all, although there is no way to permanently unlock a song no matter how badly you want unfettered access to your favorite tunes.

The GameSpot review

Think about that last part for a second.

That's what it looks like, yeah. :\

Is there alisr of songs on the disc or is it all streaming?

If there is 30 or so songs on the disc it's not that bad (though I'd prefer an option to keep songs)

GHL looks awful. Not the gameplay itself, which actually has me mildly interested since it's a significant change. But the system for delivering content sounds like a vile and wretched mess.

@machofantastico: It's £66.60 at simplygames

@bbalpert: Gross. Okay I'm out again. Maybe I'll get rock band after that December update. For the "return" of the genre thesee games don't seem that exciting. Oh well.

I dunno, I kinda like what GH has done? I picked up RB4, went through their (horrible) re-downloading process, played the ten songs I remember loving (guess I was really into Nine Inch Nails as a kid, huh?) sight-read like...three of the new songs on Expert, and haven't really touched it since. Already, I'm more attracted to GH Live's model. Free streaming of songs (music videos!) to get me out of my bubble, a new controller that makes me feel like I did when I first played GH1 as a freshman in high school (struggling on medium), and a flat rate of on-demand songs for whenever I host parties.

I guess if I wanted to 100% songs on Expert, GH isn't my game (no way to own any music permanently, no good practice mode), but for a fuck-around good time, this new Guitar Hero is my new jam.

"Woohoo! Music games are ba- awwww... Well, at least there's some comfort in the return of skateboa-MOTHERFUCKER"

Man playing GH: Live made me intetested in the gameplay change, but seeing how they are handling DLC makes it an instant nope for me.

Not that it makes the game worse as long as they work, but this is hilarious

*edit: Guess I was too slow, @gorillamopena got to this before me

Not that this means anything definitive about the quality of the game itself, but this is an interesting turn of events...

Of course Konami would find its way into this situation, the lovable scamps!

I have some serious reservations about the way that streaming stuff works. I like a pretty specific subset of music, and if I'm going to bother to learn to play songs in a game it'd better be a song I really enjoy. Like, how do you get good enough to play on expert if you have to pay money each time you do? I played some of the GH2 and 3 songs tens if not hundreds of times to get really good at them, so the prospect of paying for each play seems crazy when you're dealing with the higher levels of difficulty. Imagine paying a cent or two for each run of a Super Meat Boy level or something. Some games just don't really translate to this business model.

If I could just buy a guitar controller cheap enough for this Id get two of them for when friends are over. $6 for unlimited songs for a night sounds pretty great when you compare it to the other model of "man i wanna play muse, who here has the muse dlc?"

Though I do wish you could pay to unlock a song forever as well.

Also the mics, so what. It's better they recycle perfectly good products than just make new ones that would serve the same purpose.

@jesus_phish: Oh I agree it is fine they do it. I just think it is funny that Konami mics are going to end up in these games

Polygon review (written by Griffin McElroy) is really positive:

http://www.polygon.com/2015/10/20/9576527/guitar-hero-live-review-ps4-xbox-one-wii-u

For me, it all depends on how the FTP economy is balanced. The review claims that you can get a lot variety for free, which sounds better to me than paying $2 per song in Rock Band. If you want to play 1 song 10 times, the Rock Band model is probably better, but I'd much rather play 10 songs 1 time, you know?

While I can understand the hesitancy some may have with this model, and the questions that arise (will this service die in three months? how often will new songs be added?), it sounds absolutely perfect for me. My enjoyment with GH always came from playing guitar and from playing new songs whenever possible. The idea of something that lets me jump between songs without any menus and not actually having to choose them myself sounds absolutely perfect for what I enjoy about the series.

The amount of hate GHTV is getting from uninformed people really shows how bad this model has been explained by the devs/pubs/media.

GHTV in this day and age really is unquestionably better than the RB model, with the exception of picking up super cheap second hand copies of old RB games and importing them to RB4.

£1 per song is a stupid high amount of money, GHTV gives you access to 200 songs at launch for free, just not direct access.

It's equivalent of buying one DVD or watching TV for 30 minutes than getting to watch any film for free.

Really this all comes down to how narrow minded you are with music. Good music doesn't even make a good GH song, the charting can quite often be super boring on the best of tunes. Fresh charting is what makes these game fun in parallel with the music. Chilling out by yourself playing random tunes and watching watching wacky music videos 3/4 times is undoubtedly not for everyone. But I find it hard to understand people who given the option, would rather play a single extra DLC song X amount of times, no matter how much fun some of those Queen RB DLC songs were...

I read that review and had a few issues with it, a lot of what he complains about seem to be personal to the way he plays these games. For me one of my favourite things about the Rock Band/Guitar Hero games was that they introduced me to new artists and music genres I usually wouldn't consider. It can get boring when you play only the songs you know you like all the time. Plus according to a lot of the reviews its not like they don't doll out play coins quite frequently. I use to love creating random playlists on Rock Band 3, this feels very similar to that.

That said, at £79 it's still not cheap. I probably would have considered Rock Band 4 if it weren't at £100+ and I could somehow gain access to my downloadable content from when I bought it on Xbox and transfer it to PS4. I'm realistic and I highly doubt that will happen, especially considering RB4 didn't seem to sell that well. I'm fascinated to see how Guitar Hero Live does.

Not being able to permanently buy a song seems straight up crazy..

As a pick up and play game this sounds fantastic. Not being able permanently purchase a song doesn't bother me especially as I will get to experience a wider variety of songs by playing through the TV channels.

It's probably not ideal for a 'party' scenario, but as a more focused solo guitar experience colour me interested.

GH is $50/$220 cheaper than RB here too. We didn't get any adapters so it's guitar or band bundle only. Even if we did it's only $10 more for GH which comes with a guitar. All the good reviews are making me want to try it but also that song list is terrible. I already have or played 99% of the songs I like elsewhere.

The overview from Polygon sold me on this game pretty hard. I've never been one to go nuts over owning a specific song, I always enjoyed a more jukebox-like thing where I just play from a huge grab bag - this sounds perfect for that.

I've got to say GHTV is really fuckin' cool. It is very much like a new MTV where you just kind of watch and play along. It really gives you that "just one more" feel when playing it just to see what song pops up next. You also do have the 42 or so songs on disc that are accessible at any time and repeatable. It's also $50 dollars cheaper than Rock Band 4 with a guitar. At least in Canada GH Live is 129.99 with guitar and RB4 is 179.99 with guitar.

To me its just generally a much better value, yes the TV experience is a curated one but I haven't really come across any stinkers or anything and if you do just switch to the other channel. Also they are apparently releasing another channel for free sometime within the couple months so that will be alright.

As someone who had over 200 extra songs bought on Rock Band for the 360 I really didn't think I'd be lauding a Guitar Hero game, but the combination of a new challenge in the newly designed guitar and the innovative GHTV feature has really drawn me in.

Cant wait to get my copy today

I dunno... that actually sounds okay to me. The thought of just loading up this streaming service and seeing what pops up on any given day would be kind of fun. And considering you can earn currency in game I think it is fine.

Regardless of the free to play microtransaction bullshit, this game was either going to sell me or not by the tracklist and one quick glance at that thing instantly unsold me. The only modern music I really listen to is rap music so I don't know what bands are hot right now, other than the Black Keys, so I was lost on most of the songs in the game with a handful of exceptions.

Also, why the hell is there an Eminem song in there? Like how does that make sense? I don't get it.

I just looked at the tracklist on the official site and it didn't list Eminem at all...

@demoskinos: According to this destructoid review Eminem is in the game

The included setlist itself is rather diverse, consisting of classic rock songs from Queen, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, alongside of more modern groups like Green Day and Fall Out Boy, all the way up to Skrillex ("Bangarang" works better than you'd think) and a recent Eminem song ("Berzerk"). It has something for everyone, with a good spread of indie hits, folk music, and top 100 joints. While the actual story mode is only playable solo, there is a freeplay mode with all 42 on-disc tracks that you can enjoy with a partner, which also features the FMV setup.

I underlined it right there. I also checked the wikipedia page for the game and it was also listed there but not on their main site. weird.

I'm really enjoying it now that all of my sync/calibration issues are solved.

The streaming playlist stuff seems great at the moment, but I'm sure it will drive me crazy later on when I want to play a hard song 100 times trying to FC it.

So it's not possible to buy a song permanently with in-game currency or real money? There's only a finite amount of "plays" you have?

I'm interested but I don't have room in my life for even a single plastic instrument.

I kinda like this game and I like the new gameplay twists. What I don't like is that the expert difficulty is completely goddamn impossible this time around. Especially when you get to those faster riffing metal songs.