For you Rock Band fans, Harmonix has a mighty update that’ll find its way to the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the impending future. While the update itself has been finalized, it’ll have to go through the usual QA process, but by the time you read this, the patch will have been released.
One of the major features is the new in-game music store, where players can preview and purchase songs straight from within the game. In addition, all downloadable songs have been optimized for faster loading times.
Other updates include revised fan caps (detailed below), more diverse songs in Band World Tour, improved phoneme recognition for certain songs like "Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" and optimizations to microphone lag for the PS3.
In related news, this press release mentions that over 6 million songs have been downloaded for Rock Band. Hooray!
Here’s the list of new changes:
1. (New!) Music Store: Rock Band now has a new feature that lets you preview and purchase songs from within the game! Accessible from the main menu, the Music Store lets you view, purchase and sort all available music based on various categories, view album art, listen to song previews, and check out extended information about the song like difficulty for each instrument.
2. Revised Fan Caps: To allow Easy, Medium, and Hard players to progress further in the Band World Tour, we’ve increased the number of fans that you can earn before hitting the cap. Easy players can now travel across the Atlantic, Medium players have a wider range of venues they can play at, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 are now able to unlock the "One Million Fans" achievement.
3. More diverse songs in Band World Tour: If you’ve ever cursed about having to play "Say it Ain’t So" or a Metallica track multiple times in the same hour, then you’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour.
4. Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: Our awesome team of audio programmers has found some optimizations that reduce microphone latency on the PlayStation 3 in certain situations.
5. Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: An issue with parental controls stopped band logos from being visible over Xbox LIVE. With this update, you can now view all of the awesome band logos that people around the world have created!
6. Faster loading of downloadable content: Not only is the loading speed faster, but this information is now cached so that this loading time is a "once only" wait rather than something that happens every time you turn on the game.
[Via Rock Band Forums]
