Rock Band Difficulty Selection

This entry is a comment on Robert Wettach's September 27th blog entry on selecting difficulty in Rock Band. In Rock Band, you don't know how the difficulty varies between the different instruments until you actually try the song. This can be a frustrating cause of many failed attempts and restarts. Rock Band 2 improved upon that by adding a chart that shows the difficulty across various instruments during song selection, but Rob was still frustrated because this information is not available while you are actually selecting your instrument. This was finally cured in The Beatles: Rock Band.



Guitar Hero 5 has recently made and advancement beyond what Rock Band has been able to provide. Guitar Hero 5 allows players to dynamically change the difficulty of their instrument in real time without interrupting the song. You don't have to fail a song and start over in order to change your difficulty. You don't even have to pause the song. This is especially relevant when playing at a party with a large group. If only one of the four players decides they want to change their difficulty, they don't have to interrupt the other four. They can alter the difficulty for their instrument alone.



On top of that, Guitar Hero 5 allows players to drop in and out of the game in the middle of a song. If a new player comes mid-song or someone decides they want to stop playing, they don't have to ruin it for the other players by forcing them to restart the song. Instead you can drop in without stopping the music at all. You can even change instruments and have multiple people on the same instrument. The ability to change your difficulty, switch instruments, pause, and drop in and out of the game in real time without interrupting the song or other players gives players the opportunity to alter their settings without forcing an inconvenient restart on other players.

While it is not as clear as Rock Band on the individual difficulties of each instrument, the ability to change difficulty in real time gives Guitar Hero 5 the advantage over Rock Band.