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Rock Band 2 screenshot

Last week we headed to the curry-haven that is London's Brick Lane, for a quick chat with Harmonix's Dan Teasdale - lead designer on Rock Band 2. Read on for his musings on music creation, the forthcoming The Beatles game, and why there's still life in the rock-em-up genre.

VideoGamer.com: What was your attitude going in to this game?

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Dan Teasdale: With Rock Band, it was all about innovating. We wanted to make a band experience, an authentic band experience, and bring it into people's living rooms, and we totally achieved that. So for Rock Band 2 we've been focusing on perfecting that experience. We've taken suggestions from our community, we've fixed a lot of the things we felt we had issues with, we've improved our instruments a lot, and we've provided a whole load of new ways for you to experience your music - not just the stuff on disc, but also the downloadable content that we're releasing each week.

VideoGamer.com: Could you be more specific? I guess you need to be quite careful in terms of what you tweak.

DT: We've tweaked a lot of things in the core gameplay. We've added things like drum solos, as well technical things like hammer-on chords and a bunch of ways to get increased expressivity into the gameplay. Our biggest changes have been in progression and online gaming: we've made the game party safe, so anyone can come on and bash around without ruining the session. So, that's a big thing. And we brought all of our campaign modes online as well as local, so you can do the world tour with one to four players, in your living room or with anyone in the world. We don't do region locks, it's a worldwide thing. We've also added a Battle of the Bands mode, which isn't just four players vs four players - this is you versus your entire friends list. And then after you've become number one on your friends list, it's you versus the whole world. There will be daily challenges set by Harmonix. They might last a day or they might last a week, but every day there will a family challenge, or an expert challenge, or perhaps something based around DLC. So it's really about providing new experiences for all this content.

VideoGamer.com: What kind of challenges?

DT: Well, we'll provide battles for all the content that's released, so on day one you'll be able to play it through. And we'll be running a lot of themed battles. In the US we've been doing Three Degrees of Separation battles, with three linked songs. Then we've had challenges like "longest streak on guitar on expert" for specific songs. There are very wide avenues that we can go down, and we're taking suggestions - so if you have a cool idea for a battle you can post it on Rockband.com and we'll put it into the schedule.

VideoGamer.com: How hard is to push things forward with a game like this? You must want to innovate, but if you change too much then you lose the core attraction of the game. Is it possible to keep doing new things with this kind of game - are there still new places for the genre to go?

DT: I think both points are valid. It is challenging, whenever you have a franchise, to keep things growing. But in terms of music games, we're just at the beginning. It was three years ago that Guitar Hero came out, and it blew the genre wide open. There are huge avenues for many people to go down, but one thing that Harmonix is focusing on... we have a vision statement that is we want non-musicians to experience and make music. And so a lot of our goals going forward are going to be around letting people do just that.

VideoGamer.com: What do you think of the studio mode in the most recent Guitar Hero game?

DT: It was interesting, we've dabbled around with stuff like that before, with Frequency and Amplitude, and we learned a lot of lessons from it. The main one is that you can't do it half-arsed. If you want to do a way to let players create and distribute music, you have to go all-in - not just do it as a bullet on the back of a box. We actually want to find a way for people to create music and express themselves, but when we do we want to make sure that people can sing, or the songs can be longer than three minutes, or that you can have more than 1200 notes, or that you're not tied to some dodgy sample somewhere. We want to make sure it's an authentic experience and it fits on the platform.

VideoGamer.com: So you weren't that impressed with it then?

DT: I haven't had much of a chance to play with it. I think the main thing we've seen from it is just the restrictions. So I'm looking forward to playing it after I've finished this press tour.

VideoGamer.com: That's a diplomatic answer! So is this something we're likely to see in a future Rock Band?

DT: I think it's more a case that we want find a way to integrate creativity and expression onto the platform. I can't really say too much because we haven't announced anything, but we want to make sure that it's authentic, fully-featured, and that we're doing it properly - we're not just rushing them out for a game.

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