By 2008, the gaming space was swept into the rhythm game fervor. Once a niche genre that was mostly relegated to arcades and very niche console titles, it was now a mainstream success that was penetrating everything outside the gaming industry. It would not be uncommon to see Rock Band or Guitar Hero in a bar, taking the place of Karaoke machines as folks play plastic instruments while intoxicated. It felt like the success was not stopping anytime soon, and Activision continued to try to capitalize on it with their next major entry to the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero: World Tour.
The third of four Guitar Hero releases in 2008, World Tour was touted as the evolution of the Guitar Hero franchise by expanding both the setlist and the instrument play. This is the first Guitar Hero game to include all instruments: bass, guitar, vocals, and drums, which was a long time coming. Previous work on the unreleased Drum Hero, which was in development as a stand-alone title, was folded into World Tour for the sake of ease for Neversoft. Neversoft had actually put a lot of work into the drumming tech already, which made game development relatively easy once licensing for songs was complete.
In fact, the entire process for how songs were made in World Tour is actually well known. Once a song was licensed, a mix of the song would be put onto a "tempo map" that denotes specific beats for the rest of the development team. Neversoft would then break their teams into five different departments: one for guitar, one for bass, one for drums, one for vocals, and one for the animation team, who would then create the song as it would look on Expert for the note tracks. Through there, the team would adjust songs for the other difficulties and make a final assessment of the charts before placement based on potential difficulty.
Due to the brick wall of difficulty in Guitar Hero 3, note placements and charting are a bit easier in World Tour. Several songs still provide a nice challenge across all instruments, though, so the balance in difficulty is not too crazy. This is, of course, by design, as there are now multiple instruments and vocals to contend with. This didn't shy away from trying to innovate in some respects with World Tour, such as the heavier focus on drumming vs Rock Band.
The aforementioned work on the unreleased Drum Hero was a major asset, as work on a new drum kit was already in full production. Bringing in several professional drummers, such as Travis Barker of Blink-182 and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they tweaked the drums to feel more realistic and dynamic. The biggest addition was elevated cymbal pads, which added to the drumming range and increased the feel and fidelity of in-game feedback. Wisely, Activision avoided the problems Rock Revolution had in making their drum kits overly complex. The drum peripheral still only had five inputs with a kickstand, with two of them now just being cymbal pads. This allowed the drum kit to directly compete with the layout from Rock Band.
Rock Band and Guitar Hero peripherals were designed to be compatible with each other's games on the PS3 and Xbox 360, mostly because both Sony and Microsoft requested they be compatible. For Activision to compete, they needed to provide a hook to purchase their drum kit, guitar, and other peripherals going forward. For the drum kit, it was the sense of realism and its sturdiness; the drum charts in World Tour have special notes that are armored, which you need to strike the drums harder to break through and score extra points, for example.
Guitar controllers had an innovation as well for gameplay: the slider bar. Rock Band created a controller with fret bars at the base of the guitar neck, which made hammer-ons and pull-offs easier. Neversoft responded with the slider bar, a touch-sensitive pad at the Guitar's neck that you can just slide your finger over to play certain note sections in a song. These slider sections, which are marked as semi-transparent notes with a colored line going through them, are often seen in difficult sections and major guitar solos and can be done with fret button taps without strumming, if a slider bar is not available.
These innovations definitely provided an identity to World Tour while innovating a bit on charting and design. Rock Band 2 perfected the formula of band-specific rhythm games, but World Tour attempted to push it even further with in-game mechanical changes and peripherals that would take advantage of this. This, however, does lead to some issues; while all of the features mentioned are available without the peripherals for World Tour, they are a bit harder to pull off without the peripherals they are made for. The slider bar is a good innovation, but for extremely hard solos it's almost necessary, leading to some of the game's later songs feeling like the brick walls of Guitar Hero 3 returning.
World Tour also kind of suffers from a presentation standpoint in anything not related to the game's guest appearances. Much like Guitar Hero 3 and Aerosmith, World Tour would feature a lot of guest musicians across all instruments this time around. We get Zakk Wylde, Jimi Hendrix, Ted Nugent, Travis Barker, Billy Corgan, Hayley Williams, and Ozzy Osbourne, along with arguably the biggest get, Tool. Yes, Tool, the entire band, is featured in World Tour, and even has their own stage and three songs in the game's massive 86-song setlist. Tool is notorious for not licensing any of their work, but Activision allowed them full creative control for their design, setlist, and even venue for the game, giving them the green light to do what they want.
Tool is a great get, and so are a lot of other gets for World Tour. Neversoft had a full-on list of over 500 songs they wanted for the franchise, and tried to focus on key licenses that would be hard to get, such as Jimi Hendrix, for World Tour. The result is us getting the likeness of Hendrix and two Hendrix songs, "The Wind Cries Mary" and the live version of "Purple Haze", which are fantastic in-game. In fact, a lot of the guest acts get the best content; Wylde and Nugent have custom guitar duels with "Stillborn" and "Stranglehold" as the encores, "Misery Business" is sung by Williams from Paramore, and Ozzy gets both "Mr. Crowley" and "Crazy Train," two legendary songs not seen in other games yet.
The problem, though, is I mentioned presentation. While the guest stars are a nice addition, they tend to dominate everything in-game. It is clear that getting all of these acts and their likenesses was a priority, but it leads to the rest of World Tour feeling a bit sterile. The classic characters of Guitar Hero are mostly returning, along with a few new ones, but they are all customizable now and a bit bland. Players can customize their own character, with some unlockables for guitars and outfits, and even make a band logo, but a lot of this just doesn't come up in-game as any form of significant design change. Compared to Rock Band, which had a more robust creation suite with more options and was centered around your band in-game, it just feels tacked on for the sake of competition. Even venues, save for the aforementioned Tool level, feel like they have less character in comparison to Guitar Hero 3.
The game boasts 18 venues and revamps the setlist to be mostly like gigs, which can contain three to six songs each. Sometimes this is broken up by a boss battle or an encore, as per the Guitar Hero formula. The lack of customizable setlists is another mark against World Tour, Rock Band 2 provided unique challenges and creative freedom once you go through the songs in their venues, along with the implementation of DLC songs into the main game being a massive draw for replayability. Outside of unlockables, there really is only one other gameplay feature that World Tour has, and that is create-a-song mode.
Guitar Hero as a franchise has a history of hacking and chart creation, and Neversoft saw World Tour as an opportunity to tap into the emerging scene by offering a toolset to create songs. Though attempts were made by Rock Revolution to do this as well, World Tour actually allows you to not only play your created songs, but also post them live online at the time.
All custom songs are made with Expert as the default, with the game generating lower difficulty versions, allowing for lead, rhythm, and bass guitars along with drums getting representation. Overall, the inclusion of song mixing and creation is a great innovation, but the tools provided were difficult to use for most players. For some, though, this would be a spark to chart songs for non-Guitar Hero games that emulated the formula, such as Fret's on Fire or, more recently, Clone Hero, so it is a nice, if somewhat niche, addition to the series.
The setlist in World Tour is, as always, the bright spot. The guest acts get a lot of special treatment, but we get a ton of songs, all master recordings, from major players like Joe Satriani, The Answer, Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, Sex Pistols, and Sting. There is some overlap with Rock Band's setlist; a few songs like "Go Your Own Way" by Fleetwood Mac, "Ramblin Man" by the Allman Bros., or "Float On" by Modest Mouse are just being repeated with a different chart. The setlist is also big, with a lot of unique choices, like Korn, Paramore, Negramaro, Beatsticks, and NOFX getting some representation.
World Tour does feel world-like with multiple bands from Europe getting a spot on the setlist. This is good for building up a library of songs, but one major problem World Tour has is that most of its songs, save for DLC, are only available in World Tour. By the time we get to Guitar Hero 5, only 37 songs would still have a license to transfer over to the next game, which is incredibly disappointing. Also, unlike Rock Band, Guitar Hero would never have a really robust DLC package. Songs were forward-compatible (except for any Jimi Hendrix DLC), so future Guitar Hero games would at least start with a healthy library, but the biggest sin is the lack of integration into the main game.
Guitar Hero: World Tour is a good game, sometimes even great. Neversoft has found a way to work on the franchise that is able to bring the best of Guitar Hero 3 together, while fulfilling the mandates by Activision for it to be a full-band experience. Guitar Hero going forward will have every game include all instruments, whether it makes sense or not, a mandate that Activision utilizes to fight back against Rock Band and its success. For me, World Tour pales in comparison to Rock Band 2, but it doesn't mean it's a bad game. A case can be made that World Tour is the best of the band-centric games in the Guitar Hero franchise; it brings enough to the table to carve a unique identity from Rock Band, but when your setup and gameplay are almost a mirror of each other, it does boil down to a question of preference.
Author's Note: Screenshots of online gameplay were used by the following YouTube channel: Team Aftermath