The overwhelming amount of bile that people are spewing over GH4 lately is simultaneously maddening, confounding, and hilarious. Reading through the comments on various blogs and trailers lately, I've found so many blatantly uninformed arguments that I didn't even know how to start writing about them. But now I've devised a means by which I can rant and you guys choose to read only the statements that apply to your own stupid opinions! Sounds like fun, right?
Protip: These are ordered from most to least stupid
Guitar Hero 4 is copying Rock Band!
Actually, Rock Band stole their idea from the Drummania/Guitarfreaks series of video games. But then again it's not like it would have taken a genius to come up with the idea of a networked band game. It's just a natural part of the evolution of rhythm games. Guitar Hero is copying Rock Band to keep up with the market and is attempting to win back their userbase, just like any sane capitalist would do.
Guitar Hero should be just about the guitars!
This is the next big thing in rhythm games, and Activision has to follow Rock Band's lead in order to remain competitive. Many people prefer the guitar note charts in the Guitar Hero games to those in Rock Band, and that's why they stick with GH instead of playing RB. But guess what, if GH doesn't properly compete, the franchise is going to go under. Also, is it really a question of integrity or honor if a game isn't exactly the same as its predecessors but carries the same name? "Oh man, in Super Mario Bros. 2 you can play as Peach and Toad too? Why are they even calling it Super Mario Bros.?"
I don't want to blow my money on a lot of new peripherals
If you knew anything about rhythm games outside of, oh say, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DDR, and Elite Beat Agents, maybe you would be able to see that this new drumset is pretty much guaranteed to be vastly superior to Rock Band's. You were willing to spend money on Rock Band's peripherals just to play the game, even though they were mediocre, and honestly didn't complain enough about the price, considering what you got for it. Now I think you're all just worried you're going to be bullied into paying a lot more for the game you wish Rock Band was in the first place. And besides, the hardware/software bundles haven't been worked out yet, so we don't know for sure that you're going to have to buy everything en masse.
Guitar Hero 3 sucked, so this is going to suck
We don't even know the tracklist yet, which is really the backbone of these kind of games. In terms of the hardware, things look extremely promising right now. Then again, Guitar Hero 3 wasn't even that bad, and was extremely popular. The Metacritic rating of 83 is below the series' usual average, yes, but that's still solid. Also, one of the main complaints people had about Guitar Hero 3 was that it didn't deliver enough new content to the franchise. With Guitar Hero 4, we're getting features out the ass! We're getting a veritable diarrhea of features (in a good way)! You've got customizable rockers and instruments, the Music Studio, "the largest on-disc set list in a music-rhythm game to-date," (I'm admittedly skeptical about that one) and 8-player online play. You've got to be blind not to see that the devs are working hard not only to one-up Rock Band, but to improve the Guitar Hero franchise. The need to compete may end up being the saving grace of the franchise.
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Absolutely fucking wrong. It depends on how the developers adapt the songs. If they took a song like Modern Swinger and made it a tier 9, while Joker & The Thief became a tier 1, then they fuck it up. The backbone isn't tracklists, or else people would just pick up a damned guitar and go play Frets on Fire with their own songs. The backbones for these games are their difficulties. If it were about the songs they choose, then we'd never hear any songs that were new to us, which is why they don't generally listen to the community. I wouldn't be as much of a QotsA fan were it not for Sick, Sick, Sick and 3s & 7s in Rock Band.
"If you knew anything about rhythm games outside of, oh say, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DDR, and Elite Beat Agents, maybe you would be able to see that this new drumset is pretty much guaranteed to be vastly superior to Rock Band's."
Hypocrite. In the last paragraph, you chastise us for essentially being sheep and judging by past efforts (which, by the way, no one has done) and then you say that this one will be better, even though you haven't used them. We've seen one photo of the drums. One photo. Wait until reviews come out at least.
"Guitar Hero 4 is copying Rock Band!"
So instead of disproving this point, you just say that they're copying Drummania... 9 years after Drummania is released. I doubt that if their inspiration is from Drummania, then they would've done it forever ago, as opposed to after they see Rock Band's success... which, by the way, is not a copy of Drummania at all. Similar hardware =/= copy, or everything after 1942 is a copy, including Geometry Wars.
2. One Photo (oh and some interviews) is enough to tell that the kit is well-built. The pads are rubber, which means they'll respond with the appropriate bounce, and nothing about Activision's track record should lead us to believe the hardware will be below average. Rock Band's drumkit is laughable (like I said, people who play Drummania can attest to this). The lack of padding and the painfully stiff bass pedal seemed like things that would be easily avoidable, but were implemented anyway. I'm saying Guitar Hero 4's kit will be better because it would be harder to make something worse (seriously).
3. Like I said, for competetive reasons, they are copying Rock Band. But in terms of "Rock Band's great idea," that was a way to piggyback off of Guitar Hero's success in the first place. It was all about the right time and way to market the band game to American audiences, though I'm sure developers had been wanting to do it for some time now. As I said, it's a simple idea that would be obvious to come up with. To bash a game for that kind of copying is childish, as you've pretty much pointed out.