Rock Band - Gameplay

Gameplay

The Rock Band games are score-based music video games that combine elements of two of Harmonix' previous efforts: Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution, allowing up to four players to play on lead and bass guitar, drums, and vocals. Rock Band 3 expands this number to seven, including a keyboardist and two harmony vocalists. Players use these instruments to play scrolling musical "notes" on-screen in time with music.

Rock Band titles' gameplay and on-screen interface use a combination of elements from Guitar Hero and Karaoke Revolution. Rock Band has up to three tracks of vertically scrolling colored music notes, one section each for lead guitar, drums, and bass. The colored notes on-screen correspond to buttons on the guitar and drum peripherals. For lead and bass guitar, players play their notes by holding down colored fret buttons on the guitar peripheral and pushing the controller's strum bar; for drums, players must strike the matching colored drumhead, or step on the pedal to simulate playing bass drum notes. Along the top of the screen is the vocals display, which scrolls horizontally, similar to Karaoke Revolution. The lyrics display beneath green bars, which represent the pitch of the individual vocal elements. When singing vocals, the player must sing in relative pitch to the original vocals. A pitch indicator displays the singer's accuracy relative to the original pitch. The Beatles: Rock Band introduces three-part harmonies using three separate microphones, a feature later carried over into Green Day: Rock Band and Rock Band 3. If any part is not being played, its interface does not appear on-screen. The remainder of the screen is used to display the band's virtual characters as they perform in concert.

During cooperative play as a band, all players earn points towards a common score, though score multipliers and "Overdrive" (an accumulated bonus that is the equivalent of Guitar Hero's "Star Power") are tracked separately for each player. The bass guitar player's multiplier can reach as high as 6x (compared to a 4x multiplier for the other players) and achieve "Bass Groove". Overdrive is collected during select portions of a song by successfully playing all white notes within that section (guitar and bass players can also use the guitar controller's whammy bar to extract Overdrive from white sustained notes). Once the Energy Meter is filled halfway, players can deploy their Overdrive, resulting in the "Band Meter" (which tracks how well each player is doing) changing more dramatically. This allows players to strategically use Overdrive to raise the Band Meter and pass portions of a song they otherwise might have failed. Overdrive can be used to activate score multipliers, which vary based on a player's note streak. In solo play, deploying Overdrive doubles the player's score multiplier. However, in band play, activating Overdrive instead increases the score multiplier of the entire band by two. Additionally, players can deploy Overdrive independently of each other (Guitar Hero games until World Tour require players in Co-Operative mode to deploy Star Power simultaneously), as well as collect additional Overdrive while it is deployed and draining.

Each band member can choose the difficulty at which they play (spanning Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert; a "Super Easy" difficulty is also present in Lego Rock Band for younger players). Furthermore, with Rock Band 3, players can also select the Pro mode of their instrument if they have the appropriate controller for it; Pro mode challenges guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards to play their controllers closer to the real-life instrument. If a player does not play well enough and falls to the bottom of the Band Meter, they will fail out of the song and their instrument will be muted from the audio mix. However, any active player can activate their Overdrive to bring failed players back into the song, "saving" the band member. However, a band member can only be saved twice; after the third failure, they cannot be brought back for that song. Failed players continuously drag the band's Band Meter down until they are saved. If the player is not saved before the Band Meter reaches the bottom, the band fails the song. Special portions of songs are labeled as "Unison Phrases," which reward the band with a score and Overdrive bonus if each player can play their parts perfectly during the phrase. Select songs end with a special "Big Rock Ending," which gives the players a chance to improvise and earn extra points. If each player successfully plays the final notes of the song following the freestyle portion of the "Big Rock Ending," the band earns all of the "Big Rock Ending" points. Otherwise, the bonus is lost.

As the song progresses, the screen shows a meter with the current accumulated score for the game, as well as the number of "stars" earned so far based on their score and the progress towards the next star indicated by a partially filled ring. Players can earn up to five stars, with the chance of getting 5 "gold stars" by getting a very high score with all players on the Expert difficulty. The performance's star rating will influence the monetary reward and number of fans for the song within the various game modes, or in the case of Rock Band 3, the amount of fans earned and speed progress towards the virtual band's Career Mode goals.