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To that end, Guitar Hero Live supports multiple venue types, from intimate hundred-person clubs to sprawling stadiums. Imagine the sort of stage fright you might be grappling with, however accomplished or seasoned you are, if you’re playing a festival in front of a hundred thousand people. FreeStyleGames says part of its design discovery process involved identifying the psychological rituals band members often go through before heading onstage. When I asked if this involved shooting epic volumes of video, the studio, which isn’t yet offering precise figures, was nonetheless emphatic that it involved “a lot.” The studio wants to scare youĪ little, anyway. So by taking out that process of your brain having to read the colors, everyone’s reactions got quicker. You always know which is left or right or the middle, that was a given piece of information. “But it didn’t need to actually read color, because your fingers never actually move out of position. “What we realized when we broke it down was, by having these as colors and trying to tell you whether to hit top row or bottom row, your brain was having to read color first, then top row or bottom row,” explains Jackson. Jackson thought it was a terrible idea at first, but after giving the idea a try, he found he was able to play even more accurately. But then one of the studio’s user interface designers came up with the idea to reduce the button colors from five to two, one for each button row. “In early development, we actually had the buttons using the original Guitar Hero colors,” says Jackson.

It sounds drab, and at first it does look bland, but FreeStyleGames says the decision to strip out the series’ trademark orange, blue, yellow, red and green buttons for black and white ones came about because it realized, belatedly, that those colors were throwing up informational roadblocks. The buttons (and onscreen cues) are now black and white In practice, it’s a hair more like playing chords on a real guitar, your hands challenged to operate in two dimensions (simultaneously horizontal and vertical) instead of one. The idea’s that casual players who maybe want to jam with at lower difficulty levels can do so by fingering just one row of buttons (three) at a time, whereas more sophisticated tappers will have to access both rows of three simultaneously. “What we’re trying to tell you, in design language, is ‘Do you hit the top row, or the bottom row?'” says Jackson. Guitar Hero Live increases the button total to six, but eschews primary colors for just two-black and white-then stacks them at the top of the guitar neck as two rows of three, giving one a unique crisscross texture to help you sense (without looking) which row each finger’s in. The more difficult the song, the more the fourth and fifth buttons were used. The original Guitar Hero games had players tapping up to five uniquely colored buttons along the top of a faux-guitar fretboard. That’s our vision for the game.” The pretend-guitar control scheme is totally different “It’s about getting you to believe that you’re on that stage, and to be completely swept along by the whole thing.

“You never see yourself in Guitar Hero Live, you never really hear yourself talk, because the whole idea is for you to imagine that you’re there,” says FreeStyleGames studio head Jamie Jackson.

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