Music Gaming Goodness: Rock Band 2 Rocks The House

Multiplayer Support and Online Matching

While it was possible to play online in Rock Band, there are new multiplay possibilities at our finger tips with the second installation. It is now possible to join a band (or have someone else join your band) to play songs on the normal tour. There are pluses and minuses to this new setup, but it is a step in the right direction for online play.

One of the major pluses is that you can play online and still continue to unlock stuff. This is only a factor until everything is actually unlocked, but many other games where things are unlockable don't fit online play into this model very well. Rock Band 2 does a good job here. This, and the simple fact that you can play with your friends, is about where the goodness ends though.

Part of the fun of playing with your friends is laughing at (or yelling at) them when the fail out or save someone. Sitting alone and playing the game, while still very fun, is still sitting alone and playing the game even if other people are playing along elsewhere. It's not a bad thing, it's just not as great as having everyone in the same place. Playing online with your friends is definitely a good option to have. But what if you don't have any friends (or maybe they just aren't online ... yeah that's it)?

The interface that allows you to get started filling in slots for your band online isn't really intuitive. When you are joining your band, you press the yellow button and wait. And wait. And wait a lot. But that's how matchmaking can be at times. Once you finally have another member or two for your band, you can continue on and do whatever you want on your tour.

But you don't know who you're playing with. They could be awesome or terrible. They could like fast stuff or slow. They might not have the 6 or 7 hours free it would take to run down the entire endless set list right now. This little frequently encountered issue results in people frequently quitting in the middle of a set. And this can be really frustrating. You lose fans, you lose time, you have to drop back out and start over if you want to play with someone else online. Yes, talking about what you want to do with the people you've joined does help, but not everyone uses their headset while playing. And it seems like no one ever wants to sing online. If you sit around waiting for a vocalist (at least until more people get the game and want to sing) the delay in getting going is vastly increased.

If you are the one joining someone else's band rather than inviting people to help you with your tour or challenges or whatever, you do still lose fans if you fail and gain fans if you win. But if you decide to quit in the middle, you lose much less than if you stuck it out to the end, thus encouraging you and your band mates to screw each other. A larger penalty for dropping out might help keep people going even when they are down, but it would also unfairly piss off people who have legitimate connectivity issues (or a pet that trips over the power cord -- yes it happens).

And then there's the major complaint. The game makes you fail out no matter what after someone disconnects, this can be incredibly frustrating if someone pulls out at the last song in a set. It seems like it makes you keep failing every time you start the song over after someone has quit as well, though we can't tell if it's just that everyone else follows suit and quits preemptively.

We hope that as more people pick up the game online play and matchmaking will go more smoothly and quickly, but it is a little difficult to predict. If you have friends you can play with online, great. If you want matchmaking and don't mind a little bit of a wait, then that's fine too. But the major drawback to playing online is having people drop out in the middle of sets and thus making everyone else fail out. We wish that Harmonix had gone a different route and allowed a band where someone dropped out to keep playing as if it had started with fewer players.