Rock Band 2 Cleans Up User Experience Issues

Here’s an excerpt from a recent preview of Rock Band 2 over at avclub.com

First off, the career mode. Rock Band 2 cuts the solo world tour, and it makes the concept of a “band” more flexible. Any number of people, online or off, can join a band: you can play by yourself with three steady non-player characters of your own design, you can start a band with remote players, and you can invite people just to sit in with you. Your characters don’t have to stick to one instrument, giving you the flexibility to jump from guitar to drums.

The (p)review is quite long, but I wanted to focus on this small part because it’s something I’m actually really excited about.  My issue with Rock Band since I bought it has been that Harmonix made what is, on all accounts, a really awesome game, but screwed up the little “gimme” things that should have been really easy decisions.

The most glaring example of this flaw is that is nearly impossible to figure out how to manage multiple save files in the game, meaning if you and your roommate both want to rock out, it can get pretty confusing.  I’ve spent months playing this game and can hardly ever get this right.
The other element of user experience that was flawed in the the first Rock Band was that your character was restrained to a single instrument, meaning if I want to play drums and later switch to guitar I have to make a character named Campo1 for drums and one named Campo2 to for guitar and the two characters share no traits.  A lot of people think it’s really fun to manage the look of their characters in Rock Band but having to do it for three difference characters just gets cumbersome.

Fortunately from this review, it sounds like Harmonix has repaired these issues and are focusing the release of Rock Band 2 on increasing the quality of the overall user experience of the game.  I expected Harmonix to have solved these issues before releasing the original game, but it’s “better late than never” and I credit them for acknowledging the issues and making a commitment to fix them for the upcoming release of Rock Band 2.

Also GameTrailers.com has just put out a video trailer of Rock Band 2 game play. This Foo Fighters track looks absolutely insane and I cannot wait to get behind the drums for this song. Enjoy!