armonix and MTV Games are just about to release a new patch for Rock Band that will help improve the gameplay experience. A number of new things are being added to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions including a new in-game music store, revised fan caps, more diverse songs in world tour mode, downloaded song caching and more. Although the companies wouldn’t be more specific about timing, a representative told us that the patch should go live sometime this week via Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.
“Updating any game is something that takes a lot of effort to do – not only do engineers, artists, production and designers all have to be involved at some point, but each change has to go through a rigorous Quality Assurance pass to make sure that it doesn’t introduce any new issues (like corrupting old save data, for example),” posted Senior Designer Dan Teasdale on the Rock Band Web site. “After we’re happy with the software update, we then pass it on to Microsoft and Sony, who each have their own rigorous testing and certification processes. The entire process can take months for a simple day’s worth of fixing!”
The new and improved features, straight from Harmonix, are as follows:
Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.
Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the “One Million Fans” achievement.
More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play “Say it Ain’t So” or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour. Improved phoneme recognition: We’ve improved the detection and scoring for phoneme recognition. If you had trouble on songs like “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” or “Blitzkrieg Bop”, you should have an easier time beating these songs now.
Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.
Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!
Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a “once only” wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.
Awesome. A lot times when a company patches a game online, the players don’t really see much of an improvement. But it really seems like Harmonix listened when the players spoke out. The in-game store with previews and a shiny interface is a very attractive way to purchase music and the caching of downloaded music is a great way to prevent pre-rocking frustration. This is exactly the kind of thing we’re been waiting for from the developer and it’s just going to keep the Friday night Rock Band parties running past 3 a.m. going for a long, long time.
[Update: The software update is now available for download. Enjoy!]