Rock Band Creators Delay Their Next Game

Harmonix's upcoming project Amplitude has hit several bumps in the road over the course of its development, and it appears it's just hit another doozy. 

The nuanced music game from the creators of Rock Band won't be releasing now until 2016 -- January 2016, to be exact, due to the abundance of time it's going to take ot add in extra features, environments, game modes, and new songs that have been slated for inclusion. It sounds like bad news, but honestly if the delay means there's more content to go around, it's difficult to be mad, especially when the game was Kickstarted to begin with. We could have just done without, but luckily we didn't have to. The fact that the game is happening at all is really quite surprising. 

Originally, the game was supposed to ship with 16 songs total, but Harmonix has upped that count to 30 songs, with a 31st going to Kickstarter backers at several tiers. That track was voted on by the Song Senate, a special group of backers who voted together on the additional tune to be included. The solo mode's 16 songs are all written by Harmonix in-house musicians, which is a big change from the original PlayStation 2 release, which were primarily songs from other bands. 

Both basic play modes and single-path song environments have been expanded as well, with two more playable environments and different paths per song. So as the dev team explains, there will be a solo campaign, solo free play, 2-4 player free-for-all, and team play mode, which is 1x3, 2v2. Asynchronous multiplayer has been announced as well, and a still-to-be-revealed mode that will involve the game's 6-lane track somehow. 

That's where all the delays are coming from, since the previous ship target was supposed to be summer of this year. Now we'll see it coming early next January, with Kickstarter backers who paid in advance for the "early access" tier seeing the PS4 version in December. So anyone who paid extra to experience the game first will still be able to do so, albeit in a much different way than before. 

Unfortunately, one of the most-requested additions to the game will not be included, and that's synchronous online multiplayer. The team has explained that it simply isn't feasible due to budgeting constraints, which is disappointing for sure since it was always a hope of mine since playing the original PlayStation 2 version, but alas -- perhaps the reincarnation of Amplitude will blow that and even Frequency out of the water, so we don't even miss it too much. We've got a few months to wait and see now.