Pro Guitar DLC For Rock Band 3 To Cost A Little Extra

Keyboards, pro modes, yadda-yadda. With the game's new pro-modes, you'll essentially be using the game as a tool to learn a real instrument. In the case of pro-guitar, this will require the purchase of an entirely new peripheral. And it takes Harmonix a ton of extra time to develop. As such, yo, your DLC is going to cost a little bit more.

MTV Games' Paul DeGooyer explained the situation to IGN:

“All DLC released for Rock Band 3 will be fully Rock Band 3-compatible, which means it’ll come with Pro Mode for keyboard and drums, harmony mode, etc,” he said. “The only thing that’s more difficult for us in terms of authoring time is the guitar stuff, so we’ve decided to sell Pro Mode for guitar separately. If you’re not interested in Pro Mode for guitar, you can still get the DLC that should conform to our current DLC pricing, and you get Pro Mode for all your other instruments.

“Right now, a typical stand-alone song for us is a buck ninety-nine. If you wanted to buy Pro Mode for guitar on top of that dollar ninety-nine, it would cost a buck. So it’s not going to be five bucks or anything. We think it’s a really fair price. The alternative would be of course to include it (in the regular download) and up the price for everybody, which I don’t think is really fair.

“I should note that not all tracks will have Pro Guitar mode. (Many bands’) guitar parts wouldn’t rise to the level that they would need to have pro mode authoring associated with them."

Hardly a big deal then, and we appreciate Harmonix giving us the choice. That's nice of them. The natural progression, therefore, is will previous DLC get the same "Pro" treatment. DeGooyer was coy, but did reveal that the studio are working with one major band on updated content.

“We’re gonna have one major band that we’re working with that has already got some DLC out there, and we’re going to add to that DLC, and retrofit their DLC with Pro Mode,” he said. “Then there’s a selection of other tracks in the catalog that we’ve gone back and identified, and we have suggestions as well from our community, and we’ve gone and identified those tracks.

“So our first announcement will actually be a pretty good cross-section. And I think that track list will help people understand the stuff that we would actually go back and retroactively put Pro Mode into. To be honest, we haven’t completely worked out exactly how we would be able to get it to market, in a way that recognizes people who have already purchased it, and thus be able to supply the updated file at a discount, which would be our preference.”

To be honest, we could never really get past the easier difficulties in Rock Band/Guitar Hero; Pro's certainly not on our agenda. Even though, playing real guitar is actually somewhat easier than these music games. Well, obviously that depends on the song. But it's much easier to wrap your head around a sequence of chords rather than a bunch of coloured rectangles.