By 2007, Activision was already prepping for the fourth release of Guitar Hero in three years. The PS2 exclusive Guitar Hero Encore: Rock's the 80's was, if anything, barely a setback for the franchise's momentum, which was shifting into new gears. The loss of Harmonix through MTV was a setback, but for Activision and Red Octane, it would turn to another studio to helm the Guitar Hero series going forward.
That studio was Neversoft. Neversoft cut its teeth primarily on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series and was widely considered a solid development team to helm the project, despite little experience with rhythm games before. Most of the impetus came from Neversoft being fans of Guitar Hero, playing the game to de-stress during the development of Tony Hawk Project 8. Red Octane was supportive of the studio, providing consulting as Neversoft found the game "deceptively difficult" to work on.
Original plans for the next Guitar Hero were to take it to a band-style format, which was part of the plans that Harmonix were working on before their MTV purchase. Most notable are several trademarks securing the 'Hero' name for Activision. Two projects showed promise early: "Drum Hero," which would release a plastic drum kit for players, and "Band Hero," which would focus on drums, vocals, and guitar and bass for a four-player party game. Both of these ideas were early prospects, but the short turnaround for a new Guitar Hero game and Activision's unwillingness to fund a third project so quickly without proof of concept led to Neversoft abandoning the Band and Drum Hero ideas for now, instead focusing wholly on Guitar Hero and bringing more guitar-based songs into the franchise.
This shift in direction was a good call, as Neversoft would take the Guitar Hero 2 engine and expand upon the work Harmonix did, breathing some new energy into the franchise. This was also the first game where Activision would be more directly involved in the production, securing resources thanks in part to the good rapport that was being built with musicians through the games. Guitar Hero 3, given the subtitle Legends of Rock, would morph into what is arguably one of the best games in the franchise, and for many, the zenith of the Guitar Hero franchise.
Part of this success was the focus Neversoft had as a developer versus Harmonix. Harmonix was a rhythm-based game studio with deeper knowledge of music, as most of their dev team were also in bands. In contrast, Neversoft was more of a classic video game developer, bringing those sensibilities to the franchise. You can see it with some of the design of Legends of Rock, with everything feeling more arcadeified in rhythm game form, and it also sets up new precedents for the series that become normalized for the rest of the franchise, both in positive and negative ways.
One of the biggest positives is presentation. Harmonix went for a stylish but simplistic look, one that focused less on the actions in-screen and more on the music and rhythm of playing on the charts. Neversoft added to the presentation by creating small interactive movies that added visual flair to the game. Seeing a stage set suddenly get busted by the cops, who appropriately headbang to the music, starting a prison riot. This type of added animation was a boost in making Legends of Rock feel distinct from the previous games, providing small vignettes of cartoonish characters to the game's career mode.
Speaking of, career mode is actually updated with a narrative structure. It's nothing special and told through cartoon vignettes with minimal animation and no dialogue, but it at least provides extra context to the chosen venues as your backdrop. Your three nameless bandmates sign a contract with a new manager named Lou, who takes you to super highs, until the predictable happens and Lou turns out to be the devil in disguise. The final set of songs and last venue is literally rocking out in hell, making a capstone that surpasses the Stonehenge set in Guitar Hero 2 with ease.
Not the most subtle storytelling, but it also serves a dual purpose in introducing one of the main additions to Legends of Rock: guitar battles. Guitar Battles have you against the player or PC in guitar duels, where you need to not only maintain a healthy note streak, but also need to collect power-ups to attack your opponent. The power-ups range from preventing notes from being hit until you move the whammy bar, to doubling your note count, to even forcing a player to do a lefty-flip with their note placement. You can bank up to three powers and use them all at once, creating a truly chaotic mess for your opponent who needs to avoid failure or lose the battle.
On paper, this mode is great, and its implementation in the story mode as a mini-boss battle challenge is a welcome addition. The final battle is a climactic, guitar-heavy cover of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by guitarist Steve Ouimette, where you battle against Lou in his full devil form. It is fun, thematic, fits the game's atmosphere, and is probably as perfect a cover as you are going to get for Legends of Rock.
Battle mode does come with a few problems. For one, it can be wildly unbalanced once you learn the placements of power-ups on your chart. Strategy is there in theory, but several of the powers are immensely more powerful than others. Forcing no note playing over just making it harder to play notes is objectively better as a power-up, with perhaps the exception of the lefty-flip power. As someone who plays these games left-handed with the flip already active, I do have a notable advantage in those situations as well, as it would be a right-handed flip which is not super tedious. Finally, spamming powers is possible, so the optimal strategy is to hit your opponent either when they are about to go for a new power-up or with three power-ups at once, making it almost impossible to succeed.
The idea of guitar battles is great, but the execution is just a bit off. This is actually a nagging issue with Legends of Rock: great ideas that just feel a bit off, either due to Neversoft's inexperience with the genre, or their push to make it more arcade-like vs a pure rhythm game. Having guest guitarists, for example, is a good idea on paper and great for marketing. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Guns N ' Roses' Slash are guitar battles you need to overcome. You also get Bret Michaels of Poison coming in lip-syncing his signature song "Talk Dirty to Me" as a bonus.
The inclusion of these real-life rockstars is a double-edged sword. Having them in the game provides some legitimacy to the game's experience and offers a cool bonus, like a guest character in a fighting game. Playing as Slash and riffing through a song like "The Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden is a cool image. The drawback is increasing bloat and scrutiny for who they can get next; the inclusion of real-life rockstars means we need more real-life rockstars for the next game, and more than just three of them too. This is another trend that Activision focuses on, especially when marketing Guitar Hero going forward, and it will be a decision that mired the franchise in major controversies in the future.
One more problem would be massive difficulty spikes. It was estimated that 40% of the player base only played on Expert, so Neversoft wanted to give them a massive challenge towards the game's end that, to this day, is often considered over-tuned and overly difficult. The last songlist set contains the aforementioned guitar battle with Lou and "The Number of the Beast", along with a cover of "Cliffs of Dover" by Eric Johnson, Metallica's "One", and most notoriously, "Raining Blood" by Slayer. Many have pointed out how this final setlist is often considered too hard or 'over-charted' for the sake of a difficulty spike. This, of course, doesn't even compare to the infamous "Through the Fire and Flames" by Dragonforce. Though only a bonus song here, it is only unlocked if you beat the game, and is often considered the hardest song in the entire franchise to overcome.
Guitar Hero is no stranger to hard songs, with songs like "Bark at the Moon" from Ozzy Osbourne, Buckethead's "Jordan", and Extreme's "Play with Me" carrying those mantles for the previous games. "Jordan" is probably the only song that can compare to the difficulty spike mentioned, though, a chart that is made hard for hard's sake, an almost insurmountable challenge that is designed to test the skills of players in ways that seem almost inhumanly possible. A lot of love is given to these difficult songs, but a lot of backlash is also bestowed upon them, with some seeing the increased difficulty as being detrimental to the series.
Difficulty issues aside, it helps that Legends of Rock has one of the best soundtracks in the franchise. 73 total songs, with over half of them master recordings, and another 68 DLC songs, including all of Death Magnetic from Metallica, grace the PS3 and 360 versions. The list is solid, with the likes of Carlos Santana, Cream, The Rolling Stones, Smashing Pumpkins, and more getting representation. Two notable contributions were "Cult of Personality: by Living Colour, who re-recorded the song and its guitar solo for the game, and "Same Old Song and Dance" from Aerosmith, which would strike a relationship between the band and eventually lead to the next spin-off title, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Covers were mostly performed by Steve Ouimette, with Wavegroup doing a select few of the covers, and as always, they are excellent additions to the game.
The final major innovation was co-op and competitive online play. Co-op players actually had incentive to play this time, as 6 songs were included specifically for co-op play and can only be unlocked while playing with a friend, including hits from Blue Öyster Cult, The Beastie Boys, and The Strokes. For online, the ability to shred it out online in the classic co-op modes and the guitar battles was a welcome, and not surprising, addition that was only possible due to the leap to the next console generation. Legends of Rock still came out on the PS2, but all next-generation consoles at that time (360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii), PC, and Mac would get a full release of the game, to massive success. The Wii version in particular, despite not having access to downloadable content, would be one of the top-selling 3rd party games for the entire console.
That is the real legacy of Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock; being a smash success. Activision's gamble of purchasing Red Octane and then turning the keys to Neversoft paid off, with Legends of Rock being one of the first video games to cross a billion dollars in sales across five systems. The unprecedented success of Legends of Rock cannot be denied. Despite some issues, it is arguably the best game in the Guitar Hero franchise, and easily one of the most fun games in the series, to this day well worth playing for anyone with a passing interest in rhythm games. It is also the last game in the series to go unchallenged, as a new player enters the game and fundamentally changes it forever.