An Open Letter To Activision.

[Kgoodrich]

Dear Activision Representative,

Let me first start off by saying that I really enjoy your Guitar Hero series of games. From the very first one I knew that I was going to be a large fan of the entire franchise. You have recently announced your plans for a Guitar Hero 4 that will be set to include a drum set and a vocal mic and you can be very well assured that I will be purchasing the product when it's released. One thing however I would like to discuss is the bass guitar and it's relevance in your products. Now I'm sure as you are a very large company have quite a number of bass guitar players in your payroll I may not be alone in this sentiment. I feel like the bass has been severely underutilized in the franchise and is in need of some serious revamping. Now I'm not suggesting that you change the name of your to Bass Hero by any means but some changes are definitely in order. While modern rock music has the bass swept under the rug so to speak a change by a highly respected company for yourself could do the same to the bass as you did for the guitar when you first released Guitar Hero. What I propose is subtle changes, when playing the first Guitar Hero that featured bass (GH2) I noticed that it was only playable as a second player or a first player in the training mode, and the third installment had the same feature. I feel this is the most serious of all features that needs to be added, with a new game featuring multiple instruments there should be an opportunity for every instrument to play single player through the career mode, this would offer a significant increase to the amount of re-playability to this already feature filled game. Secondly the amount of available in-game basses should be seriously retouched, the amount of shall we say, unusual guitars in the third game were vast, too vast if you ask me and it felt like the basses were sorely outnumbered. I'm not asking for thousands of additional basses but a number at least relatively close to the number of guitars would be reasonable. The third change to consider and most difficult would be to include a separate bass guitar controller, one with a longer neck to recreate the larger neck scale of a bass and perhaps to be more realistic, 4 buttons instead of 5. Perhaps GH4 is far too into development to consider changing but maybe in further installments of the franchise these adjustments could be put forth to the development team. I will be showing this to many members of the bass guitar community in hopes that others will agree with me and perhaps write their own letters of recommendation for changes to the game, I hope that you will take my suggestions and perhaps even show them to your superiors in the slight chance this letter could make a difference. I can be reached for response at kgoodrich1@gmail.com. Thank you for your time.

Always a loyal customer,
Kyle Goodrich



A few things

1.I hope that others will read this and send some other suggestions in.

2.I realize this may not do anything but It's worth a shot.

3.I don't claim to speak for the bass community.

4.In the end it's just a game.

[coolrunner989]

Bravo!

I'd love to be able to play bass in the career mode. I dont know about having a whole seperate controller though...

[mothmonsterman]

zee wall of text, she burnz zee eyez!!!

[TheDarkReaver]

one thing that gets me about GHIII; the game is licensed by Gibson and yet their most icon bass, the Thunderbird IV, is left out of it. i don't understand it, i really don't.

[MakiSupaStar]

LOL. How about just playing your real bass?

[NJL]

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

LOL. How about just playing your real bass.

+1

[XtreO]

"While modern rock music has the bass swept under the rug "

"perhaps to be more realistic, 4 buttons instead of 5."



Now I wonder why it is swept under the rug, when even bassplayers possess the attitude.

[MakiSupaStar]

Originally Posted by NJL

+1

That Steel Reserve is GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD! Stoked on that stuff.

[Mark Latimour]

Maybe Activision should develop Paragraph Hero 1 to help save that letter!

[ahkiatt]

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

LOL. How about just playing your real bass?

Because we can't earn loadsa money, and battle Satan, and sellout playing bass.

[Kgoodrich]

Originally Posted by XtreO

"While modern rock music has the bass swept under the rug "

"perhaps to be more realistic, 4 buttons instead of 5."


Now I wonder why it is swept under the rug, when even bassplayers possess the attitude.

I'm afraid I don't understand your remark?

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

LOL. How about just playing your real bass?

like I said in #4, it's just a game, how about playing YOUR bass instead of telling other people what to do

[NJL]

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

That Steel Reserve is GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD! Stoked on that stuff.

now you gone and done it! lol

[rezin]

i've been playing rockband lately and i just don't see the point in a different bass controller. i mean, yeah we're bassists and we love bass and everything but most people aren't. most people don't want to play bass, let alone a game about playing bass and another controller would just add to the cost.

not to mention, how different would it really be? the buttons are frets, not strings, so switching to 4 wouldn't make any sense to me. otherwise they'd just have to make it bigger and heavier

[TheDarkReaver]

oh yeah, i agree somewhat with their being no need for a bass controller. maybe as an optional stand alone purchase if you really wanted to (say a thunderbird controller for GH or a P-bass for RB), but i couldn't see enough people being bothered about it to make it commercially viable.

However, a Bass career mode could be a nice playable feature for the GH series. I am not so familiar with rockband though, do they have the option for single player bass in there? i would have thought they would as presumably you can just play drums or sing as well.

[KeithBMI]

Now... I haven't played my bass in a while...

...But I'm pretty sure that it can produce more than 4 notes... So the five-button controller would still work...

[rezin]

Originally Posted by TheDarkReaver

I am not so familiar with rockband though, do they have the option for single player bass in there? i would have thought they would as presumably you can just play drums or sing as well.

i'm not totally sure, i just bought it for the drums. it seems like pretty much every time you go to do a song with guitar it gives you option of bass or guitar. so you might be able to

[Jerose]

Originally Posted by Kgoodrich

The third change to consider and most difficult would be to include a separate bass guitar controller, one with a longer neck to recreate the larger neck scale of a bass and perhaps to be more realistic, 4 buttons instead of 5.

Half the difficulty (for me, at least) is that damn 5th button. Really, 4 buttons just makes it seem like you are constantly in "Medium Difficulty" mode. I'd rather just play the regular Guitar Hero controller.

[Kgoodrich]

to all rock band players

http://www.rockbandmods.net/news/mad...sing-next-week

looks like we get a p-bass, with a nice split strum bar for 2 finger playing!

[john turner]

lol. i wonder if in 50 years people will be arguing about this controller, saying how awesome a "vintage fender" it is.

[baba]

I replied to a Craigslist wanted ad looking for a mexi strat for a project, working or not. I had one that needed rewiring with a new 5 way switch. Dude replies that he's looking for one to mod into a Guitar Hero axe and then tells me the neck must be twisted since it's been without strings and he doesn't want it. ????