Rock Band has been supported by hardware dev Mad Catz since 2008, but the manufacturer has always stayed behind the curtain… We go backstage with ichard Neville, Mad Catz’ senior product development manager, to talk about what it’s like to be the roadie for gaming’s biggest rhythm action franchise
When Mad Catz contacted Harmonix to talk about how the publishing and distribution of Rock Band 4 was going to be handled, the hardware developer came upon some distressing news: all the moulds it had used to create the instruments in previous games had been scrapped, literally.
“It’d been five years since Rock Band 3 when we started working on the new hardware, so that meant a few things – it meant we had to get and find all the tools: the plastics, the injection moulds, the tooling,” explains Richard Neville – who’s been at Mad Catz for 16 years working on gaming peripherals and hardware. “You can do everything you can to protect these ‘tools’, but they’re made of steel – by the time we were ready for Rock Band 4, they’d been sat there so long they rusted. We actually melted them down and sold them for scrap! Within months of scrapping it, of course, Harmonix was in touch and everything started going ahead [laughs].”
It was surprising to see Neville laugh after making this statement because as he and Mad Catz’s global PR director, Alex Verrey, were keen to tell us… those things cost a lot of money. “This is the side of product development stuff that no-one really thinks about,” Neville explains. “Each of these jelly moulds – these ‘tools’ – cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. They’re very precise, very sturdy, very heavy… and we didn’t have any of them left.”
But it was a blessing in disguise; it meant that Mad Catz could build from the ground up, start again and take the instruments apart in a modular fashion – observe the core components of Rock Band’s now-famous kit, from drums to guitars to mics. “Even though all the new instruments look identical to the old ones, they’re actually totally new – built from the ground up,” Neville explains. Mad Catz invested in new moulds to create the instruments’ casing, and re-evaluated what the interior chipset needed to do, too. The result – as we found out as Mad Catz took us through each new instrument, beat by beat – is incredible.
The drums in Rock Band 3, for example, were purely digital. Depending on how hard you hit the crash, or how lightly you chose to ride the snare, you were only ever going to get one of six sound variations – it’s not fully noticeable, but it certainly makes the game a much more rigid affair than live music. That’s not what Rock Band 4 is about – it really wants to run away with that idea of a rockstar fantasy, and to do that, it’s made the drums perform exactly like a real-life electronic drumkit. That is to say… it reacts to you.
“Right now, this doesn’t really need to exist,” laughs Neville, showing off the dynamic responses on a program hooked up to the drumkit – the harder the hit, the bigger the flash of colour the software pumps out. There’s no digital scaling here. “The game is still purely beat matching, you hit the pad when the gem falls on the screen and you get the points,” he continues. “Harmonix wants to make Rock Band 4 a platform – it’s not going to release a Rock Band 5 – so we imagine it’s going to want to do expansions in the coming years, and these expansions might have something to do with this more analogue input. So, of course, we have to figure that out now [laughs]. We need to think ahead, even if it’s only something that might need supplying.”
It’s an interesting side of peripheral development that’s only really become a problem recently: back on the old generations of consoles, a single game would never need to have longevity instilled into its peripherals: there could just be another one shipped when the inevitable sequel comes out. But with Rock Band existing on a digital platform that’s only ever going to grow as time goes by, Mad Catz needed to plan ahead for every eventuality…
“All of the products in the Rock Band 4 range are firmware upgradeable, too” explains Neville. “We don’t shout about that, but that basically means that if anything comes up later on in the game’s life that we aren’t ready for, we can remotely deploy a patch and flash the instrument’s firmware, and add what we need to add. Because we’re not allowed to update the instruments directly through the console – the first parties won’t allow that – we’ve come up with a way for you to update the instruments via Bluetooth on PS4, or through USB on Xbox One.”
But if Mad Catz wants you to shell out for its instruments – and expects them to last for the lifetime of the Rock Band 4 platform – then there’s going to need to be some improvements on the last generation of rhythm action peripherals… the guitars for Rock Band 3 had some issues (most notably in the way the tilt function worked) and a lot of the drum kits would end up dimpling where persistent drummers hit upon the exact same spot for every beat.
“We’ve been looking at every component part of the kit when we’ve been building [the instruments] up again – even down to looking at the varying densities of foam we use between the drum pad and the sensor inside,” explains Neville. “It’s a long process – you think you’ve got the perfect model, you get the plastic injected, then you realise that something, somewhere, isn’t quite right… so you try again. It takes months and months and months to get it right!”
But Mad Catz seems to have gotten it right this time – we went pretty hard on the drum kits, and noticed there was no cross-talk this time. No matter how hard you laid into the kit, you’d notice that the game would never interpret your input as something from another pad (a heavy hit on green would never scan as a yellow, for example). This is something that became a pretty big problem for drummers in Rock Band 3, and Neville assures us that configuring the algorithm that solved this issue wasn’t easy… “I actually have tennis elbow – I kid you not – because of the testing we had to do with examining all the varieties of velocity and combinations of drum hits you could make!”
And it’s not just the drums that have been improved, either: we got to play around with the guitars, and despite being cosmetically exactly the same, there are some key differences that really stood out to us. They feel less ‘toy-like’ – which has always been something Rock Band peripherals have attracted criticism for – and whilst they still handle like miniature guitars, there’s a more satisfying ergonomic quality to them.
“The guitar has gone through several changes since the Rock Band 3 iteration… firstly, the guitar itself is much more solid when you’re holding it in your hands – you can’t twist it from the neck as much as you could with the old products: we’ve added structural reinforcements on the inside of the neck, and some extra ribbing to help out with that,” Neville explains.
“You could also compress the old guitars – forcing down on the body, you could feel the plastic buckle. You can’t do that in the new ones, and that’s intentional – we want the products to feel less like toys, and more like a real musical instrument. We want to make you believe you’re a rock god again.”
But for anyone playing a videogame, the ‘feel’ of the instrument isn’t really the focus – instead, there’s more attention on how the game responds to you, to your actions, to your inputs. To this end, the frets of the Rock Band guitars have been re-thought, made slightly more ‘springy’: an intentional move to let you know you are definitely hitting the right fret. There are also more discernible ridges in the guitar’s neck, so you can rely on your finger’s reading of the fret notches and not have to drag your eyes away from that precious note lane in the middle of the screen.
“We call that ‘force actuation technology’,” explains Neville. “You need to know when you’ve hit a fret on the board. When your eye is on the screen, you need to know the satisfying click when you’ve hit the fret – we’ve made sure that’s even more obvious to you in Rock Band 4.” The guitars also make use of a digital accelerometer to make that tilt function a little more… reliable (for reference, digital accelerometers are what the DualShock 3s have been using since launch day on the PS3).
“I can guarantee you if anyone goes digging out their old guitars and wants to use the tilt feature, I promise it doesn’t work,” admits Neville. “It was a mechanical solution that used a ball-bearing or other physical switch, and after even a few months players would start to struggle with it. The mechanical switch can either get stuck or just degrade and it won’t respond anymore. What we’ve done for Rock Band 4 is we’ve gone with a digital accelerometer. We’d have done this before, but it wasn’t cheap enough from a consumer standpoint, but since the technology’s moved on in leaps and bounds, it’s cheaper to use now.”
So if you’ve ever been put off from playing a Rock Band game because the instruments just felt too ‘gamey’ for you, then fear not: Rock Band is all about living up to that rockstar fantasy the Guitar Hero games established over a decade ago. Thanks to the new tech in the current generation of consoles, and the way Mad Catz has been developing its production pipeline, Rock Band 4 is ready to really take advantage of the current gap in mainstream rhythm action games. You’ll be paying a lot for the initial bundle, granted, but Harmonix and Mad Catz both want you to believe that it’s a worthy investment – one that’ll outlive the lifespan of the PS4 and the Xbox One. To do that, they’ve made the hardware even easier to maintain, and even cheaper to run.
“We’ve managed to dramatically increase the battery life of these instruments from previous gens – we’re 35-40 hours on Xbox and way more than that on PlayStation. Oh, and we’ve reduced the number of batteries they take to run, too… it used to be three batteries, which is such a pain: who buys a packet of three batteries, right? [laughs] Oh yeah, and we’ve lowered the latency, too.”
We were surprised by how satisfying it was to handle the new instruments. On a superficial level, they’re the same, but this is Rock Band’s evolution beyond the gimmick: this is the game away from the brackets of EA, away from the ownership of MTV, and is composed from the notebooks of Harmonix and Mad Catz working in harmony. “Absolutely everything in this kit is new – even if it doesn’t look it,” Neville concludes as he picks up the guitar, ready to show us what he’s got.
Want to find out what we thought of the final game? Here’s our full Rock Band 4 review