nickdawgy

I had to go through the song list in the game and manually check for songs that showed as purchased. But then I saw a song I swore I had purchased, and it said buy for $1.99. I clicked on it, and it said that I own it.

So yeah....

flashburn

Yep, you literally have to click on every single fucking song to make see if you actually own it or not. It even sometimes doesn't list I have a song downloaded until I click on it and it just say I already have it, then it updates the list.

Hokeyboy

The wife and I finally got around to playing it last night. Ordered the XB1 full band bundle. New guitar feels great, very smooth and a quality build. The mic is wired and quite frankly that's fine. Haven't assembled the drums yet.

The game at once feels like a step forward and backward all at once, and really ends up as more of the same. The player customizations are terrible, and the included setlist is very weak. The gameplay is fine but the improvised solos are fun as hell.

The DLC re-downloading situation is... abominable. We had a few hundred songs which meant going through the store, one by one, trying to remember what we had.

Either way, in the end it's the Rock Band experience all over again. But it's been kind of missed, so we're playing along nicely.

Spiderbite

Wait a second. The wireless Lips mics don't work on this new version or with the adapter???

Wired mics won't work for me as I have a projector and my X1 (and all my components) are in next room.

GoVegan

I haven't tried it yet, but the compatibility chart says they don't work. I'll give it a shot tonight, but I'm assuming the chart is sadly correct.

You can get fairly long USB cable extenders that would probably work for using a wired mic.

Spiderbite

Fuck wired. What year are we in? Why are they regressing?

pinata242

They didn't make the Lips microphones either. Someone eventually will make a modern wireless microphone. RB4, if it's still a platform then, will patch in support.

You can use a headset attached to your wireless controller.

Decker

Even if it were 1978, this would be inexcusable.

GoVegan

Is the game way less forgiving or is my strum bar just messed up? I've been having trouble keeping a streak going, even on songs I could 100% in RB3.

shaane

I'm having the same issue (XB1) but it could be due to poor calibration and/or firmware issues.

Can I just say that it is utterly insane for MadCatz to only offer firmware upgrades through a Windows machine (and an additional barrier of needing bluetooth for a PS4 instrument.) At the very least, the firmware upgrade process should be OS agnostic. (Yes, I'm an Apple person...but so are a lot of folks.) Frankly, I think you should be able to upgrade in game in some fashion. I know that Sony/MS could be blocking that, but damn. Shipping out instruments that don't work as well as they should is bad news. Getting them upgraded should be as simple of a process as possible.

The easiest way for me to upgrade my drums and guitar is to pack them up, bring them over to a friend's house (when he's available) and then get the firmware update. I'd much rather just plug them into my XB1, select "Upgrade firmware" in a RB4 menu item, and then be done with it. Good UX is king, that's what I say.

Overall, I think this RB4 release is a mixed bag of good and bad. The core gameplay is great. I enjoy the new solo system. It's just nice to have a new RB game to play again.

But Harmonix really was facing an enormous task of trying to put out a new game and, at the same time, making sure as much as the old stuff (music and instruments) worked with it from day 1. And they also have to deal with system quirks from Sony and MS (both of the console OSs aren't exactly free of flaws, either.)

It's quite a predicament to be in. I knew there would be hiccups and bumps in the road. But I expected a little bit more. And I'm willing to cut HMX slack. I've been a fan forever. I just hope they can get as much of this stuff fixed as soon as possible so we can go back to complaining about the quality of the weekly DLC song choices.

Dan

^ Completely agree.

With standard Xbox One controllers, you do the firmware update through the console. It's annoying since you have to physically plug them in (except the newest controllers, which apparently can update wirelessly), but it's better than having to do it on your PC.

The RB4 controllers, if it were up to me, should be handled exactly the same way.

pinata242

I would guess that Harmonix and Mad Catz want it that way too. Based on everything else with platform providers, I'll happily blame MS and Sony for this lockdown.

Kelkee

Are there any 3rd party controllers that update firmware thru the Xbox One console directly? I would imagine MS would frown on this.

Remember GH:WT drums? You had to call and order an adapter, download a program from a website, connect it to your PC just to adjust the kit settings.

I really believe HMX should have done the RB:Blitz sequal first and then worked on releasing RB4. All this mess proves it. All the DLC issues would have been ironed out, and better familiarity in coding issues related to new consoles.

Dan

Oh, absolutely, it's the console makers who are at fault here. (or, if not at fault directly, then at least responsible for finding the solution)
It's becoming a terrible experience for their customers, so who knows, maybe the'll smarten up and work with Harmonix/MadCatz to make it work as easily as it should.

DVDChris

Still waiting for my pre-order to come in. So can you compare scores with friends in this game at the end of the song? I used to always compare against the guys on here. I never could beat Shagrath in vocals though.

pinata242

And Mad Catz just released v2.26/v1.09 of the drum set firmware for "improvement to drum pedal detection threshold".

shaane

Well, at least they got the patch out quickly so I don't have take my equipment over to my buddy's place twice for two different updates.

I hope they make some progress on the song packs and game soundtrack exports soon. There's still a lot of missing music.

Adam Tyner

Straight from the CEO of Harmonix:

GoVegan

Rb3 export is good news.

The character customization is pretty funny. Rb3 offered you a "weight" slider which only affected how muscular you were, which was already weird. Rb4 offers: masculine and feminine. Skinny guy or skinny girl.

Also, you can customize the hell out of your character and then hit the gender slider and it just dumps everything you did, even if you switch it back.

nickdawgy

But you can put a beard on a chick!

pinata242

So I spent about two hours tonight going through the full DLC list and downloading everything I had on my printout. The randomness of "In Library" vs "Purchased" versus "$1.99" and every combination thereof was mesmerizing. I really don't know how it could be so hit-and-miss but, at least almost everything I know I owned, it thought I owned. There was only a handful that it still tried to make me buy (and apparently I did once, but oh well).

Now that everything is downloaded and installed, I'm "rebuilding the song cache". It's unbearably slow. 464 DLC songs and it's doing about 1 every 3-4 seconds. I know it warns us that the rebuild could be slow, but is that the performance the rest of you are seeing? I put everything on an external drive (5400rpm) but I think that's what the internal drive is anyway. Before I move 22gb+ back onto the internal to test it, I thought I'd ask you guys.

pinata242

I have to say, I'm a big fan of the Quickplay library "Sort By Artist - Hold for Shortcut" popup actually lists each artist individually rather than RB3's insistence to go by first letter. Sure, it makes for a longer list, but it's much prettier to jump to the right band.

Sub-sort appears to be by album & track order as well, just not actually grouping the albums under their own headers for quick playlist access. Hopefully that comes whenever Quickplay Playlists do.

Brooklyn

I'm on the PS4 and had 802 songs transfer over from my 1,314 owned and they went in just as fast as they did in previous games (just constantly adding, under a second each easily). The only difference being that where previous games jumped various increments due to the count being based on downloads instead of individual songs (packs made it jump more than 1), RB4 raises one at a time due to its breaking up packs into individual downloads. Also, I like how once the game has added each new download to the total, it no longer needs to do it each time you play the game.

flashburn

Also the bald haircut and beard is called "Empty".

mbrunet

Could you post a bit more about this? Do you mean that the blitz songs show up for purchase at the sony store if you start up blitz on PS3, or that they're available for download free like (some) legacy DLC?

Thanks