Satch Boogie has been FC'd on Expert Guitar for GH:WT. Which means that now every guitar part for every song on the official setlist has been completed perfectly by the community at some point.



And it only took roughly a month and a half. Now, compare it to the original Guitar Hero (2 and a half years), Guitar Hero 2 (1 year, 2 months), and Guitar Hero 3. (about 11 months, although there's still one DLC track yet to be FC'd)

So I got to thinking, why did it not take very long for this game to go down? Many of the songs were perfected just days after being released. This is most likely due to several factors, the biggest one just being that the setlist is easier this time around. The previous games focused exclusively on guitar parts, so they could select songs that had ridiculously hard lead guitars without many other instruments. Now that it has shifted over a full-band focused game, they needed to have songs that had a better balance of all instruments. The previous games had later tiers that were made up of virtually nothing but songs like Satch Boogie, in that they were just long guitar solos, so that's why they took longer to beat.

Another factor is the addition of purple "slides" in the game. Remember One from GH3? Yeah, I thought you did. If that song was put in World Tour, the infamous Fast Solo A triplets would be connected by that purple line, meaning that if you missed a note, you could continue playing without restrumming. While this was meant to promote use of the slide bar on the neck on the guitar peripheral, many players just ignore that and tap on the regular fret buttons. Making tapping a more forgiving process helps more players try it out, and gives more people a better shot at FC-ing difficult solos with the technique.

And finally, it's probably just due to the fact that the community that plays the game competitively is a lot more talented than when the other games came out. It's been more than three years since the original Guitar Hero was released, which gives people a lot of time to practice. The time taken to beat each game has gone down with each successive release, so while the game engines and timing windows (which is one of the main reasons the original GH took so long to finish) change and evolve, the plastic guitar skills carry over to each game.

It's almost kind of dissappointing. While some of the songs in GH3 made me want to put my foot through the TV, the toned-down difficulty of many of the guitar parts takes away the same satisfaction of finally passing (or five-starring, if you're really good) tracks like Raining Blood. Not that I want ridiculously-over-charted songs in Guitar Hero - that's just bad game design - but Activision/Neversoft needs to change something up and put some more challenging (but fun) songs back in.

But in the meanwhile, there's always custom songs and DLC tracks to keep me occupied, as well as waiting for the day when the drum parts are FC'd. I'm not exactly holding my breath for that last one though...