How you'll use your Rock Band drums with Guitar Hero World Tour

12:38 PM on 09.16.2008   |   Nick Chester

20 comments

Fact: Guitar Hero World Tour's new drum kit peripheral has more things to hit than the kit Harmonix introduced a year ago for Rock Band. But the Rock Band kit will work with World Tour, despite the fact that the drumming gameplay requires you to hit more notes.

Uh, so how in the hell is that going to work? I asked World Tour lead designer Alan Flores.

"When you plug the Rock Band kit in we condense [our note chart] down to a four lane highway," Flores told me at a World Tour preview event last week, "and we had to do extra work."

"It’ll take the five lane highway and take the pad all the way on the right, which is the green one, and it’ll stick it over on to the orange pad," he continued. "There’s something other logic too, I think if there’s already an orange note it will move it over to the blue note or something like that. I can’t remember the actual algorithm; it won’t actually modify the note track, it just modifies the highway so that someone with a Rock Band kit can play."

Flores also says that their kit works with Rock Band 1, and should work with Rock Band 2 "unless [Harmonix] changed their whole drum spec which would be crazy of them to do."

Check back later for our full interview with Alan Flores where he talks about lessons learned from working on Guitar Hero III, downloadable content versus retail, and competition in the music videogame space.