What does Criterion Games’ speed-soaked Burnout franchise and Ubisoft’s riff-rocking Rocksmith series have in common? Well, both involve speeding down a highway (or note highway); are built around a series of increasingly difficult tracks; and involve getting some potential scratches on your Fender (er, or Gibson). More importantly (and seriously), both franchises have been shaped in part by the hands of developer Paul Cross. Cross cut his teeth at Criterion Games, and currently sits in the role of creative director on the Rocksmith franchise at Ubisoft’s San Francisco studio. Throughout his impressive career in games development, Cross has thrived on the creative freedom and nimbleness that comes with working within smaller development teams.

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“Lately the media has been all doom and gloom over Criterion being reduced to just sixteen people,” says Cross about his former employer. “Lucky them! It’s a complete misnomer to think that’s happened as result of some sort of punishment. Quite the opposite. That’s what Criterion are about – they’re about being small, innovative and bringing something special. When you bloat and get bigger and bigger, innovation becomes harder to do.”“I like to think that Ubisoft San Francisco is like a small Criterion… Well, more like a large Criterion. We’ve got 27 people now,” he adds with a laugh.While the original Rocksmith was well-received critically and enjoyed worldwide sales of over 1.4 million, there’s no doubt that there were some concessions made in getting the game out the door – certainly as far as presentation was concerned, and likely as a result of the developer’s ambitions outstripping the size of the team. While Cross and his team focussed on getting the actual note-recognition and core gameplay mechanics in place, the game menus and loading times suffered from a noticeable lack of fine-tuning. As a result, the original Rocksmith felt confusing and sluggish to navigate, and the frequent loads made it tiresome for some players to keep their fingers on the fretboard.Of course, the success of the first game has afforded the team at Ubisoft San Francisco additional time and resource to invest into its follow up, and the results are apparent as soon as you plug your guitar or bass into Rocksmith 2014 . Aside from the initial boot up, there are no noticeable load times in the game and the menus are structured far more intuitively, making non-stop rocking a reality. It’s basically the best thing to happen to rock music since Jack Black hilariously invented inward singing on Tenacious D’s debut album.“It’s much easier when you’re successful. I mean, life is in general, right?” laughs Cross. “Rocksmith 2014 takes away the pain – not the physical pain, I’m afraid – but the grind, which is the main obstacle in the process of learning to play guitar.”In a recent hands-on with a near-final build of the game, I certainly found it easy to navigate through tracklists and jump in and out of the different modes of the game – from the career mode to session mode to the Guitarcade mini-games and so on. Also glaringly apparent was the dramatic reduction in audio latency while playing a song - granted I was playing through Ubisoft's AV setup, but latency is something that Cross assures me has been hard-tuned for Rocksmith 2014. The result is that the delay between you plucking a string and the sound reverberating out of the speakers is imperceptible, much like a real guitar amplifier.Far more tweakable difficulty sliders means it's easier for players of all skills to jump in and find the right amount of challenge from the get go (experienced players, including myself, found it a chore to slog through the novice-centric beginning of the previous game). No matter which level of aptitude you're at - whether you're first learning basic barre chords or you've just mastered two-handed tapping - the game adds dynamic signposts to the menus as you go along (or “breadcrumbs” as Cross refers to them as) to steer you towards certain technique lessons or other areas of practices it thinks you need to focus on. It definitely feels like a more guided way to learn the guitar, although Cross is quick to stress that it’s not the be all and end all for guitar tutelage.“Rocksmith isn’t supposed to kill the guitar teacher. What it’s supposed to be is the ultimate practice tool,” explains Cross. “If you just want to learn guitar via Rocksmith, you can – I’ve still never had an actual lesson myself. You think Rocksmith seems like cheap guitar lessons? I get paid to play it!”“But if you’ve got a teacher who’s open-minded and can actually see the benefits, then you can have the best of both worlds: a real person to observe your technique and make subtle suggestions, and then an incredibly interesting and entertaining way to practice in the week between lessons. Practicing the mixolydian scale is a heck of a lot more compelling if each note you play swerves a car in and out of traffic [in the Guitarcade mini-games].”The success of the original game also proved invaluable when it came to licensing the actual track list for Rocksmith 2014. The first time around, music publishers and artists were wary of video games after the decline of Guitar Hero and Rock Band (Cross confirms that a lot of meetings were met with reactions like “Oh, another music game? Who gives a shit?”). While there were still a lot of heavy hitters on the original game’s soundtrack (and subsequent DLC), Rocksmith 2014’s tracklist feels more like it’s been cultivated without as many compromises, with big name hits from the likes of Radiohead, Iron Maiden and Muse included on-disc. Additionally, new player tracking technology built into the backend of the game will allow Cross and his team to better get to know the Rocksmith audience, and tailor the experience to their needs.“For Rocksmith 2014 we can track how players interact with the game [provided they’re connected to the internet],” explains Cross. “Statistical tracking is a big deal for us, so we can better understand where people are failing, which songs are their favourite, how far they’re getting with each song and so on. These core elements are going to help inform our DLC decisions, and any future patches that may be required for the game.”“So we’ll be able to know, this is the song that everybody plays – let’s do more DLC from that artist, for example. We should be able to know by territory as well, since musical taste and culture is so different around the globe."Not every feature that Cross and his team brainstormed for Rocksmith 2014 has made the cut. For example, Kinect support is included for the Xbox 360 version of the game, but it’s strictly for the voice-activated menus. The developers toyed with using the Kinect camera to recognise and reward classic guitar posturing - such as Pete Townshend’s signature windmill move - but were limited not by time or budget constraints but by the technology itself. The simple fact is that Kinect, in its current gen form, is unable to distinguish between the player’s arms and the neck of their guitar, and thus the idea was quickly scrapped.Yet ultimately the team at Ubisoft San Francisco appears to have been very smart in choosing their battles. It’s apparent from my time with the game and chat with Paul Cross, that there’s a great deal of thought behind what is and isn’t the focus of Rocksmith 2014’s development. The team's commitment and singular focus towards the creation of its game appears to be analogous with the product itself; unlike the vast majority of video games released each year, Rocksmith is one of the few that will actually reward the player with a tangible real life skill if they’re willing to invest the time.“Sometimes I need to remind the team that what we’re doing is special,” says Cross. “It’s not just shooting virtual people in the face. Not that there’s anything wrong with that... [but] Rocksmith is longer lasting and more profound in a way. And we’re damn proud of that.”

Keep an eye out for the Rocksmith 2014 review in the coming weeks on IGN.com.