Hello Rocksmith fans!

Welcome to another edition of Rocksmith 2014 Remastered hype. Following on from last weeks reveal of some of the changes coming to Nonstop Play, the @UbiSoftStudioSF team decided to treat us this week to some details of the changes coming to Dynamic Difficulty.

Here we have the familiar tools menu that is (on PC at-least) accessed by hitting the Space Bar.

We have the same tuner in the lower left (preferred by a lot of players since it displays more accurately than the pre-song tuner), same Ernie Ball poster on the wall, same guitar case and stool and the same Rocksmith pedals pick logo. What is different are just the bottom and top menu items.

For more on the Stats see our write up on them here.

A straight on or off option for Dynamic Difficulty (DD)?

An interesting addition to the game – given the amount of time and effort that is put into the difficulty levelling process in the first place. One of the biggest reasons I think Rocksmith has been so successful (I myself am a player that has learned 99.9% via Rocksmith), is that it gets new players playing songs they can recognize from day one – without being horrendously overwhelmed by the things they don’t yet have the skills to play in real-time.

It’s sure to be a bigger hit with the much more experienced players that prefer to use Rocksmith like a pretty version of Tab however, but not as much as one of the options lower down the list will be.

Where this should be really useful is for intermediate players, perhaps ones that have used Riff Repeater to get certain phrases to one level and just want to be able to practise the song at that point.

Think of it as a global PAUSE button for the dynamic difficulty system.

The awesome dirty riff in Philip Sayce’s – Out Of My Mind, is one that I like to play at around the 75-80% level. It’s a good “guitar store” riff to get under your fingers and the slightly lower levelled version of it doesn’t rely on pre-bends and unison bends. Using this option I could set the level for the song and sections as I want it – then the game won’t make me attempt to play the more complex version of it after I’ve nailed the easier version 3 or 4 times.

Do you love using the the DD system, but think that it currently levels you up too quickly? Too slowly? Well you will soon be able to adjust that behaviour more to your liking.

Just like levelling up, the speed at which the DD system will now level you down is adjustable to some extent.

The Sightreading Level setting is an interesting one. Currently the game uses some guesstimations of your playing ability and uses that to determine what you see on the first play of a new song. Instead of the DD system handling that calculation, you can now set it to be over-ridden by you.

The game has always had 30 “levels” of difficulty available to it for any one phrase of a song. Very few songs use all 30 – or even get close to that – but the intent has always been that “level 5” difficulty is fairly similar across the board on ALL songs. If you can play around the “Level 5” mark on Blitzkrieg Bop – the game will give you Satch Boogie at “Level 5” if you were to play that next. “Levels 15-20” are usually used for technical solo sections, so rather than give a slider that goes all the way to 30 – they figure anyone actually wanting a sightread that high – probably wants 100% of the notes anyway, so 15 and then MAX are the 2 highest setting options.

The Sightread Level and Level Down Speed settings when combined, would potentially allow players to be shown a Max difficulty chart initially, that levels them down to a level that they are hitting a majority of the correct notes pretty quickly.

“Let the user personalize the way they choose to use the game” seems to be the motto the remastered team are working under.

It is worth noting that this setting applies ONLY to arrangements you that haven’t already played. If you’ve played the arrangement previously, then your existing “Level” is what the game will continue to use.

This wasn’t really mentioned during the stream – but a notification about the modified sightreading level was seen when they went into the next song. No idea if these notifications can be disabled, but it only showed for a few seconds anyway.

OVERRIDE TO MAX!

Are you a “Give me 100% of the notes, all the time – no matter how much I suck,” kind of player? Tick this box and be done with it. No DD – ever again for you.

The really good news is that Rocksmith will remember what level each arrangement of every song was at before you ticked this, so if you decide that 100% of the notes all the time isn’t the best idea for you afterall, you can disable it and go back to the DD levels as they were before.

It’s also worth noting that you can’t set this on a per path basis. So really good Bass players that dabble in a little 6 string now and then, may want to hit SPACE and disable this setting whenever they plug in the 6 string (or vice-versa).

All of the above settings are set per-profile, they are not a global setting for the entire game – therefore if you are getting your multiplayer session on and one of you wants their DD locked/disabled/100% or forget it mode – and the other doesn’t – then that is totally doable.

There has also been some tweaking of the DD algorithms to smooth out some of the idiosyncrasies that occasionally popped up. One of the benefits of this is that the transitions into and out of Master Mode should be smoother and more logical now. Perhaps this may mean I can finally get that first and last phrase on Renegades Of Funk to go into full Master Mode so I can get above 109.6% on it!!!

Bonus mention – something about “Rocksmith Guy” is getting changed in remastered. We were not given any details, just a passing – vague mention of some work being done, no doubt this is one of a few extra bonuses we will discover on patch day.

Perhaps a @DanAmrich voice pack? Some clips from this weeks live stream alone could be; “I’m gonna punch you so hard” or”I was better at this in practice.”

How about a Dethklok voice pack?  Just imagine the giggles from – “What is aco-ostic? Oh, you mean a grandpa’s guitars?” instead of the “Could be better“….

I want this more than can be imagined, I disabled the Rocksmith Guy voices ages ago, but I’d turn them back on for some proper scorn from a Dethklok character. No idea how that ESRB rating would hold up mind you, especially if the clips went on for more than a few very short seconds, but it is the kind of fun that one might hope for from the same studio that is creating a South Park game, named the “Fractured But Whole.”

@UbiSoftStudioSF are holding out the “big update” for next week – the changes to the Riff Repeater (in the game, they haven’t acquired this web site!), but so far we have seen some really impressive tweaks and new features – made even more impressive by the fact they are coming as a free update.

• What one of these changes are you most looking forward to?
• Are you a 100% of the notes 100% of the time kind of player – that will be over the moon at the Override to Max setting?
• Do you think the altering of the DD levelling speeds is the more useful change?
• What about manually setting the sightreading level?
• Is there a voice pack you would really love to replace the Rocksmith Guy?
• Do you think some time should be spent on the Guitarcade – to remove the painful wait times?
• Or do you just want to see whats being fixed with the Riff Repeater already?