Guitar Hero is back with a “Live” experience

Music gaming is making a comeback in 2015: after Rock Band’s announcement a couple of months ago, Guitar Hero has also confirmed the return of the franchise with a new title later this year. 

The game, called Guitar Hero Live, will recreate the live experience of a real concert, from the preparation and warm-up to the actual performance in front of a “real” crowd. 

This should make the game more interesting since the crowd will be cheering if you’re doing well and grow increasingly restless if you start missing your cues. 

The franchise is upping the ante from a gameplay perspective by making the experience as realistic as possible, so that if you move around on stage the acoustics will change and - for example - the bass will become louder if you go stand near the bass amp. 

Activision also re-designed the controller, changing the layout of the keys to enable a more progressive learning curve. The new controller looks great, but as of yet there is no information on the site as to whether the old ones will continue to work (it would be madness if they won't). 

The new game won’t just be available on Playstation, Xbox and Wii U consoles, since Activision is also working on a mobile version of the game in order to attract a whole new audience that may have never have played the traditional Guitar Hero franchise games before. 

Finally, Activision is launching GHTV to accompany the new game, this is a 24-hour TV channel that will be showing a variety of music videos on rotation, enabling users to join in and challenge on another. This old-school-MTV meets gaming-video approach is quite an innovative idea and it will be interesting to see whether users will take to it. 

The game will launch later this year but is already available for preorder, priced at $99 in the US and £89.99 in the UK. 

(Andrea Leonelli)