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Forge – the game engine powering Amplitude and Rock Band 4

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“ Character creation was actually on the table as something we weren’t going to do.

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Visual fidelity in Rock Band 4 has taken a huge leap, but the expressive personality of the series’ angular characters remains entirely intact. The new engine gives Harmonix the ability to add finer details – particularly with lighting – to its characters, instruments, and environments.“One of the fun things, to get into the new details, is of fingerprints showing up on a used guitar, and scratch marks on pick guards and stuff like that,” said Hartelius. “Just having large amounts of wear and tear that’s natural for guitars. And again, because of the lighting engine, it just looks way better than it did in previous games.”It’s the things you wouldn’t think to look for, like the way the chrome of an amp input reflects light differently than a pickguard, or the way cloth material looks different than leather.Hartelius pointed to a sizable array of cheering fans at a Rock Band 4 show. It’s impressive in engine, where it isn’t even properly rendered to look like the game eventually will. Their animations are more varied than ever, and there’s a lot of them in a huge room. “It’s a work in progress,” Hartelius said, “but there’s about 700 crowd members on-screen right now, which isn’t even our largest venue.”Character Lead Shawn Witt elaborated on the artistic advantages of Forge. Characters “are a lot more angular than they were before, they’re more of a ‘mature’ stylization,” Witt said. “They’re still pretty stylized and abstracted, but in a much... cooler, for lack of a better word...way than they were in previous games. With all the advancements we’ve made technologically since the last Rock Band game, they look a million times better.”Creative Lead Greg LoPiccolo added that Forge “is optimized to work on a new generation of consoles, which is giving us a set of creative tools we never had before. The actual rendering of the crowd, the actual characters onstage, the lighting, just the whole experience of rock band is much more expressive.”Lead Engineer Jess Scott explained that the fate of your band’s aesthetic was almost very different, until Forge came along. “One of the things that we decided to go after was character creation, which was actually on the table as something we weren’t going to do,” she said, “but it turns out a bunch of fans wanted it, and we wanted to create it as well.”For the development team, the updated engine allows for a faster workflow, especially for artists, who weren’t completely pleased with what the previous engine, Milo, permitted. Now, artists have better control over creation, without necessarily having to consult a programmer about how to solve a problem, as they would have before.This means, ideally, a game that’s built better and faster. The results so far have been impressive – and there’s a lot more to explore in the coming weeks.For anything else you're interested in, stay tuned for more on the RPG-like campaign, and here’s Everything You Need to Know About Rock Band 4

Mitch Dyer is an Editor at IGN. He hosts IGN Arena , a podcast about MOBAs. Talk to Mitch about Dota 2, movies, books, and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch