What Was Wrong With Guitar Hero Live?
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Everybody knows Guitar Hero as "that one guitar video game". But did you know that there was game where you could actually be on stage and play guitar in front of a crowd of fans? I did, and I completely repressed it from my memory until today.
I forgot to mention that there was a phone app that you could use to sync with the game for vocals. Just imagine singing along to Bangarang by Skrillex on your smartphone.
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Good video, thanks for the GHTVR mention. ❤
Our community is always trying our best with what we can to try improve the game with what we can, some of the things you mentioned GHTVR does fix and we hoping to do much more when V3 comes out that will actually support unmodded consoles, only downside with unmodded consoles is we can't modify the game's executable but there's ways around things so we do try our best to improve it :D
Pp
The fact they marketed the crowd as reactive, and yet there were only 2 states- positive and negative- arguably is the worst sin of all.
Idk I think the worst sin, and the real killer of this game, was the mid-at-best song list
@@harrylane4 Mid, and lacking real diversity. Just like the FMV crowds.
Needed a killer tracklist to even scratch the surface of the previous entries.
Pretty much
Yeah, if you're gonna reinvent the control scheme then you gotta put music in the game that makes me actually want to bother learning it. From what I remember the tracklist was almost nothing but inoffensive pop-rock garbage.
It did though, that was Guitar Hero TV. But they couldn't keep up with licensing
@selig_420 except as mentioned guitar Hero TV was Microtransaction heavy and most people don't buy the game for that reason. Without a good story mode the game doesn't have legs to stand on especially when the games whole thing is being live having the live mode suck is bad.
One of the biggest problems with GH Live IMO is that it simply doesn't /feel/ like a GH game. The original games had a sort of roughness to their aesthetics that made them endearing; yeah, the characters were a little funny looking sometimes, and what story they had was super cheesy, but that's what made it so entertaining. GH Live in comparison just felt like it was trying too hard to be cool and modern, which makes it stick out a lot more compared to what came before it.
Yeah the Live mode was pretty awful. A bunch of songs I hated and the corniest cringe inducing live footage ever. I didn't feel like I was in a rock band or a "guitar hero" I felt like I was in some lame pop group the whole time.
But I absolutely loved playing over the music videos in GHTV. I thought it was the coolest addition to the series outside of the new guitar which I also quite enjoyed after getting used to it.
Compared to the originals, Live just feels soulless.
Making you pay in order to just play the game that you already paid for, PLUS a proprietary game controller, is diabolical
No, is just Activision
Still not as egregious as Guitar Hero iOS which made you pay $4 for 6 songs and (depending on your device) a slideshow of your avatar dancing. I STILL hope Activision burns down someday because of this.
I just remember how cheap those frets felt
First time playing guitar hero live, first introduction. I screwed up so badly when playing the anthem that when everyone was booing, I cried so hard I ditched the game for a week (I was 10)
I was completely uninterested in this game once I saw they just used irl footage.
A big reason why Rock Band in particular was so successful is because they focused heavily on the personality of the game. Things like how great the characters looked and how you could unlock really cool looking cosmetics. After GH3 Guitar Hero was always catching up to Rock Band. They seemed to assume that the reason why sales kept plummeting was because casual fans were disillusioned by Guitar Hero Warrior's of Rock. When in reality it was because they massively oversaturated the franchise by putting out so many games all at once.
I mean, if Activision added PSVR support for it. Then you would have an epic anxiety simulator. Especially when you are screwing up a song. 👍
@@Wesmoen That would have required even *more* time and money to do a 360-degree video.
@@casualgamer1209 A close up fixed screen effect, could work as well.
not as pretty as, but it does the job!
@@Wesmoen Yeah, didn't think about that.
They're made by the same companies but different people lol what do you mean
I love how the iOS version just had the small video on the top with the highway taking up 90% of the screen.
one of my favorite ways to play this game is going to that spreadsheet that has all the songs and just playing the ghtv songs on clone hero instead
Have they fixed the six-fret guitar’s compatibility with Clone Hero yet? I play on Mac, with the controller that was bundled with my Wii U copy of the game. Last time I tried it, I could plug the dongle directly into my MacBook and the frets would register correctly, but I could only strum by using the joystick on the guitar. The strum bar was not recognized. Technically you can play it, but… who wants to strum with the joystick?? 😆
I’d love to be able to play six-fret songs again, though!
@@Mr._Mints Nope, only way and official way is to use boot camp, straight from the devs.
@@Akshuls What is Boot Camp? Is it a separate software that I can download?
@@Mr._MintsBoot Camp is a program that comes with mac os and lets you install windows on Intel macs, it doesn't work on M chip macs because they aren't compatible with windows.
Biggest issues for me as a veteran player ultimately boiled down to these things: No practice, no hyperspeed/highway speed options, and microtransactions just to...play the game. It didn't help that the controller itself feels cheap, but those things, just couldn't get past it.
lol always fun to see a familiar name.
I just can't believe that they put every song worth playing on GH TV, thus making the game even worse going back. Like imagine if you booted up GH2 and Hangar 18 was just gone from the setlist. That is literally the case with GH:L
I am one of the few people who had the Platinum trophy on this game for PS4. For Strummillionaire, I literally spent several hours during several songs not even hitting notes, just flicking the strum bar as much as I could during the play period. It took a little while, but I eventually got it (There were only 748 platinum achievers out of approximately 96.5k players according to PSN Profiles)
I envy you so much for that platinum, I would like to have it as well as the GH Smash Hits, my respects to you Trophy Hunter❤
...Why would they make a trophy out of basically wearing out the strum bar?
@@casualgamer1209 great question honestly. That trophy and the 1000 note streak in GHTV were the painful ones for me, considering I got this many years ago and early on, a lot of songs didn’t even have 1000 notes on them, even on Expert for a while. Only the hardest ones like Cry of Achilles and Ghost Walking did and if you’re an above average player, you still won’t get that without lots of practice. But even the practice came at a literal price because you couldn’t practice for free lmao
@@0xD42K The fact you couldn't even purchase songs- something GHTVR has shown as a planned feature- is just absurd to me.
Huh, I got an achievement on Xbox 360 that IDK how many people have, but basically it was to beat one of the developers online in a song
8:05 surprised that hasn’t been sued from existence.
There’s no way I’m hearing music from the final levels of Digimon World 2 (2000) used as background music in a 2024 video!! MASSIVE RESPECT TRUESTRIDER
I am so glad you pointed out the reactions of the band, I swear to God some of those guitar techs WANT me
As someone who played this game day one, it was a semi decent songs, it really pushed me to get into playing real guitar and a few years later I'm jamming out, to be fair I started with guitar hero 1-3
ugh that would give me so much more anxiety seeing real people judging me. also it sucks that this game doesn't have a crazy fan charging on stage to try to shoot me.
As i have saw your previous videos and this one about the guitar hero history, i was wondering if you would play also the Rock Band series, mostly cause there is a Rock Band game for the PSP called Unplugged that lets you play with the 4 instruments at the same time but still, great series, great videos and a really nice way to explain them overall.
the imagine the nerves reference is amazing lol
All we wanted was the same old guitar hero but with 6 buttons. But then they did this.
My only problem with GH live is that they have too many folk, and pop music
I’m biased to rock music
Yep, i also got used to massive rock hits on older GH games, when i booted up GH Live i was really disappointed
@@alphaascii gh3 literally ended with a dragonforce song
needs more corridos lol
I loved GHTV. Coming back from work and just playing a marathon of songs straight against a typically small group of competitors. It was nice, and a different kind of cozy.
Great video! Still the most underated GH imo, thank god we have GHTVR! Also i guess this answers who 'Klumfraggles' was on the leaderboards xd
this game came out while I was working at costco, and we got them with 2 controllers for 35$ or so on sale. I decided to pick it up as somebody who beat through the fire and the flames on expert wanting a new challenge. I hooked up the game when I got home and my god the menu and the tv mode was so cringe to me I was already not happy. Then I found one of the 2 controllers was broken a fret was very much sticky and not working. I returned it to costco and got a 2nd, and then a 3rd copy. ALL 3 HAD A DEFECTIVE CONTROLLER. That was it I returned it again and never touched the game again.
That guitar was a finger killer. Solid frets between the buttons meant that if you ever pressed down between them on accident, which happened often is fast sections, you’d be met with pain.
now imagine the nerves
All we really wanted was djent hero
I only had two gripes with Guitar Hero Live
1. It was too short.
2. They used master tracks rather than make covers of the songs. It was honestly odd to see real musicians just lip-synching to the master tracks. Its Guitar Hero LIVE for heaven's sake
The bust a groove outro made my ears perk up like a dog whistle
Good video. Havent touched guitar hero (3 in my case) in over a decade. Subbed!
The game was a too far drastic change from the previous GH games. song list was all over the place and nothing too memorable except the songs I hated. Compared to the previous games it felt cold a bit lifeless.
It went from "i cant wait" to "i guess ill get the new guitar hero game". Then eventually it was "i havent even got the last one yet"
Honestly although due to the half baked game mechanics and awful microtransactions it doesn't hold a candle to the five-fret games, I love the game because it's Live mode is an unique experience when playing for the first time. I never thought I'd get goosebumps when playing When You Were Young.
0:35 what game had Kiryu, Master Chief, Solid Snake and Dante?
Modded.
It's a mod called Guitar Hero: World Tour: Definitive Edition
@@IanThatMetalBassist it even has content creators in it too
@@casualgamer1209 that sucks, why ruin a good idea like that
@@cashnelson2306 GH/CH content creators dont worry (Acai's in it)
2:24 This is the equivalent of a treadmill simulating you running through a forest…doesn’t really fkn matter if it’s there or not
Just the thought of this game makes me want to crash out
I really liked the new Guitar for the game, I thought it made the game feel unique especially since Rock Band uses a very similar guitar for entries prior to Guitar Hero Live at that point, but it just didn't feel the same as previous games. You're either playing a music video or playing in front of a live crowd that is either loving it or heckling you with no in-between.
Yoo is that natural playboy at the end? Good stuff.
Was so excited when I got this game, probably only played it for about a week bcs it sucked. Great video!!
Did it suck? or more likely you were not very good and unwilling to adapt and or learn. :)
@ haha no, the game was not nearly as good compared to the previous ones so it kind of sucked. if i could use the new guitar on older games i would have
the dumb 3x3 button layout....if done 5x5 or just added a 6th button would have been better
I loved the new button layout. It was a lot more interesting having a bit more interesting finger poritions.
The track list was what killed it for me. I literally cannot recall a single song from the game when I can remember huge swaths of songs from every game until this one.
here it is a new suscriber, i earned it with this one lml
When it came out, I had no idea it existed. Then I went over to a friends house and saw the new guitar with the stacked buttons. I was extremely disappointed, immediately.
Is that little goblin junior? Gonna cry?
There was a lot of problem with the game, not to mention the controller. The controller was so busted the buttons were stuck whenever you press down on one of them not to mention I kinda like the original guitar hero because when you had a song that you bought from the store you could play whenever you want.
I guess the first GH games were about the challenge, getting better and hitting everything at crazy speeds in expert difficulty was the meat of the game. And it was intentional, Wavegroup, the people that did the covers for the 3 first games and Harmonix knew what they where doing, they had a vision. The games had an incredible aesthetic that I remember to this day. The menu sounds, the hand drawings, and it was so fast to play, you entered the game, quick play and that was it. Everything worked even on a PS2. I miss it to this day, and it was the true catalyst for my love of music and playing guitar, and nowadays music producing. I'm crying writing this lol I don't think I'll ever play something that made me so passionate about something that is so fundamental to life.
This would've been a decent idea as a VR game
Oh wait
Despite its shortcomings, I will admit I had fun with it for a little while. Ultimately it was the monetization that made me drop it.
When you mentioned multiplayer, you forgot the mic thing/karaoke feature on some songs. And multiplayer also went up to 4 players (even though that wouldn't fix it)
8-bit beat at 1.0 track speed is crazy
This game helped me discover and influence my taste in music. HOWEVER the controller was the worst part as the frets would stay stuck and the strumbar would make a loud squeaky sound
“Imagine the nerves”, you say? 😏
0:38 they did this in gh1 with Frankenstein so alt charting is always in the series
I actually had a lot of fun with GH Live when I was in high school. I loved the fact that I could play songs by some of my favorite metalcore bands and that’s what did it for me. I hadn’t played a GH since I played PS2 but that was at least 8 years before that. I didn’t mind the controller since the last one I had used was made for the PS2 and it felt pretty cool if you learned one of the metalcore songs on a higher difficulty. My only gripe about this game was the fact that you had to pay to play.
Guitar Hero could have released 5 more versions of Rocks the 80's and I'd be playing all of them today.
The birds dying from you playing so bad is fucking hilarious wtf 🤣
BUST A GROOVE OUTRO MUSIC!?!? SUBSCRIBED
I was one of the people who bought it for the Wiiu. I remember there being a lawsuit against Activision for not keeping the TV service active.
They tried to reinvent the wheel…
The fact that this lasted longer than concord makes me laugh
All that microtransaction bullshit really epitomizes the state the AAA game industry was in in the mid 2010s.
If you wantes to play a Guitar Hero game, play Guitar Hero World Tour: Definitive Edition, it's a mod for GHWT that not only lets you play the regular game's songlist, but also it's DLC, and every single song from almost every Guitar Hero game with full modded character and venue support.
I would love to do this!
14:40 ERM ACKTUALLY, that would be Guitar Hero On Tour 4
Great vid man!
That KFC highway is amazing
The nicest thing I can say about Live is that it managed to have an Arctic Monkeys track in the midst of all of this modern pop crap.
0:38 is that taichi suzuki?!
I didn’t even know this game existed
I got this game November 2018, got to play live for one month, then servers shut down. Just as I was starting to like the game too
0:34 Guitar Hero World Tour Definitive Edition Mentioned!
This game isn't for people that already liked Guitar Hero, or it would actually feel like Guitar Hero. This game was for nobody.
The "live action" spin to it was just off putting to me and made the game just unappealing.
I'd rather have something 3D/fictional when playing games. But by the time this came out I was also kinda tired of the format.
I kinda miss doing some drums in rock band at times, but can't say I miss doing guitar in either of the franchises
I am quite high and drunk while watching this and somehow the black and white notes made more sense but even then my brain was still going backwards with them. I feel like that rly goes to show the poor design in it
The biggest mistake any guitar hero game has made was not being able to be modded. What they need to do is to make things modders can't like new models, new guitars, campaigns, and then design a system to make charting easy for modders so modders can do the best songs in the games for them while they actually make the game entertaining and feature rich. They also don't ever have to make another guitar hero game again after this hypothetical game, all they'd need to do is to keep adding onto it by giving modders more tools and abilities in the form of DLC packs or something.
They replaced the cool characters with disney channel extras and made a weird guitar
Lowkey, Really enjoyed this game, just living in the world where it could possibly come back (just because I am stuck at 970/1000g on xbox). There is clearly a market for rhythm games.
Yeah it did have its issues like you said, but it could have been something. Like an update to the HO/PO colour or just a note visual change like rock band changes how they look.
I unironically really liked the new guitar.
It's just a shame that the track list was shockingly bad.
I appreciate the HFR soundtrack in the background
Guitar Hero wasn't just a fun plastic guitar rhythm game - it was a celebration of rock music as a whole. The charmingly tacky, aesthetics the over-the-top, even campy atmosphere, and comical flair was what kept people invested beyond the initial gimmick and setlist. GH Live had none of that despite still using the name.
Played a demo of this for like a minute and got motion sick, never picked it up because of the live mode
What completely killed this game for me was watching gameplay footage and immediately seeing a three-lane guitar track.
Even though I *know* it has more frets total than previous games, and even though I think having multiple buttons per lane to simulate using different strings is honestly clever design... it just makes it look like Guitar Hero for Kindergarteners. It's way too visually simplistic to feel exciting at all. They should have either just added a sixth lane or, if they wanted to really go for complexity, given us four or even five lanes with two frets each. Ten-button Guitar Hero would be insanely fun.
Hay I was a percussion person with no drum kits. Learning a bass peddle from a game and how to use percussion to get into drumming is something great. Love the guitar stuff too but ya that's my take.
Miss It. Had 13,000 hours in the game. Would love to play the online again
It absolutely sucked ass
I remember getting this game soonish after it came out for like 40 bucks or something. I did a single run through the story mode and was completely underwhelmed by the lack of any good songs to play. Like *Eminem*? Beat the entire store mode in like one day, then did the thing I'm guessing most people did: check out the Live mode. In about the span of half an hour, I played the same (Avenged Sevenfold? ZZ Top?) song multiple times. I took a look at the play coin thing, then immediately dropped it. I had almost every post-GH3 Guitar Hero and Rockband game, and maybe 1000+ hours across all of them. Could barely pass like 3 hours on Live.
Haven't watched the video yet, but in my experience, the biggest problem wasn't the new guitar design and gameplay.. it was the soundtrack. The soundtrack was dogshit. Too much pop music and who the fuck looks at Guitar Hero and goes "man.. I wish I could play Mumford & Sons..".
Dude I'd forgotten how absolutely dogshit GHTV was. I remember uninstalling the game when I saw that I needed tokens to play songs. It was a huge disappointment. I was VERY anti-microtransactions even back then when I was 17.
I loved this game rip
This video is so well made! I'm glad that it popped up in my reccomend because I learned so much more about GH Live that I never knew before, despite putting a lot of hours into the game myself.
2015 was an interesting time to be a GH/RB fan because each series got its first new game in half a decade, only for them to both come come out and be extremely mediocre. At the time, I commended Guitar Hero Live for at least being more unique, whereas Rock Band 4 was essentialy just a *MUCH* worse Rock Band 3. Over time, I realized that Harmonix made the right call by sticking to the tried and true formula with RB4, especially because they kept updating the game and making it better while GHL literally shut down instead. To this day Guitar Hero Live is the only console game out of either series that I never come back to. The last time I touched it was in 2018 just before the GHTV servers were taken offline, but I've played just about every other Guitar Hero and Rock Band game at least once a year since then (including the Rock Band track packs).
The best thing about this game was it got me to pick up the classic games again. Live wasn’t good, but I genuinely loved the TV mode. It was like playing along to MTV and the live leaderboard and rivals mode was pretty cool imo. The originals will always reign superior, but I genuinely put a lot of hours into this game
I liked it quite a bit
I didnt hate the gameplay, but taking away the extended library made the game useless. The live action stuff was cringey, but didnt annoy me as much as it did most people.
I actually prefer the 6-fret guitar and have played in since. The GHL TV GUI is shit though so since Clone Hero came out I've been using that. If you have an old 6-fret laying around, I'd highly recommend trying it :)
i loved guitar hero live , i wish it was still out
Guitar hero live biggest issue is the pay to play for the actually good songs
I’m kinda glad I never got to play this
I loved the six fret system, but the live service system and bad guitars were what killed it. The hammerons being overwritten was also really bad, but the custom servers had a fix.
For me the hate for the game really started when they found out there was a live streaming service part of it to play songs that were another guitar hero if they did another smash hits maybe it would have been better
I wanted Live because it had my favoeite song that no other rythem game had featured. I went to my local game store and they had a fresh sealed version of Live and the controller, brand new for only 6 bucks for both.
When i want to buy it he wouldnt let mw buy it at first, and he recommendded other games to me first. I really insisted though and he finally let me get it. Even if it was a terrible game i still at least got a new guitar out of it.
He was sure right about how mediocre it was though, and i was so disappointed that i had to be in a queue with others just to play my one song i want every once in awhile.
I still have it to this day, and use it to play that song on repeat on clone hero to make up for lost/wasted time from live lol
what song was it?
@AuroraAce. Audioslave like a stone
great video, just thought that the track list didn't intrigue me and hated that they removed the two buttons instead of adding onto them which was why I didn't purchase the game.
Thankfully nowadays if i wanna scratch that "guitar hero" itch.. i can just throw myself at Clone Hero or Fortnite Festival.
Guitar hero live feels like what a hipster thinks people want rather than what actual fans want