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Rock Band VR News: Classic Gameplay Returning & 2 More Songs Announced for Song List

430 views · Published 4 September 2016 · 0:48 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Rock N' Roll True Stories · 2016 · Gaming

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The more “punk” years of my life are a fickle memory; less so a protest aimed at the establishment and more at my parents. But one minor point of pride I’ll always be able to keep is my time spent playing music with friends, and actually performing it live. It’s impossible to disassociate my youth with the pop-punk anthems I crooned, the basement gigs we trashed, or the girl I definitely thought I could impress with a new hardcore song. Yes, we were that kind of (godforsaken) act. But we loved every second of it.

And as much as the Rock Band series has always been about getting your friends together and slogging your way through your favorite anthems, Rock Band VR is decidedly grasping onto a different sort of fantasy: The nights spent shouting into a hairbrush in the tentative privacy of your bedroom, unplugging the guitar peripheral and going positively ape.

At PAX West Harmonix and Oculus Events, players were able to get a feel for just how the Rock Band experience might work in an immersive virtual setting.

Most significantly, Harmonix developers acknowledged that Rock Band’s mechanics would need to be revamped to make the experience work in VR. The traditional descending note grid, which was featured at our previous GDC demo of the game, only detracts from the experience of looking out in a crowd while you bust out a solo. It breaks the immersion.

To make up for this, Harmonix has completely rebuilt Rock Band’s gameplay loop for VR. Rather than scoring points for note accuracy, players must pay attention to prompts presented both visually and through vibration feedback on the neck of the virtual guitar. These prompts let players know which chords to strike, but it’s completely up to the player how often and aggressively they strike those chords or notes.

Not only is the player freed up to gaze out into the crowd, they’re also able to put their own personal twist on the classics. In both Bowie’s “Suffragette City” and The Killers’ “When You Were Young,” I was able to put my own rapid, punk-leaning influence onto melodies that most certainly weren’t.

Like many things in the world of virtual reality, it’s difficult to explain while separated from the experience itself. Even while watching another player, it may not come across that the Oculus Touch remote attached to the Rock Band VR controller is doing more than just identifying where you’re currently slinging your axe. It’s actually vibrating in time with the prompts, allowing you to focus on the thrill of staring out into the crowd, rather than memorizing specific chord progressions.

Ample warning is given before each chord change, so it never felt like I was blundering my way through a chorus I was unfamiliar with. Hanging above the crowd is a progress bar that tracks your location through the song, meaning that even if you do somehow miss a prompt, you should have a solid idea of what to play at all times.

When it finally comes time to bust out that sick solo, Rock Band VR makes the least notable progression here. It’s largely the same freestyle mode seen in prior entries, allowing you to noodle or scale your way through a segment of the song in either impressive or (like me) horrendous fashion.

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