Green Day: Rock Band follows in the footsteps of The Beatles: Rock Band as the next band-specific rhythm game from Harmonix, but there's one aspect of its predecessor that won't be carrying over to the Green Day game: DLC. Project lead Chris Foster confirmed as much in an interview with Joe Rybicki of Plastic Axe.
When asked how DLC would be handled in the game, Foster revealed that -- aside from the 21st Century Breakdown tracks currently available for Rock Band 2 -- there would be no additional music downloads for Green Day: Rock Band. Here's the full explanation he gave Plastic Axe:
"This is actually different. In this game we're taking a different approach to performances: We're building these crafted, linear sequences. One of the reasons we could do open-ended DLC for The Beatles is that it's all tiny clips, and we could just reconfigure them for different songs as needed -- and dreamscape backgrounds similarly had that. With this, we're really creating sculpted experiences for every single song; there's an animation that plays all the way through, pretty much. That's something that's not really practical to do open-ended. So we decided we were going to make DLC just about finishing 21st Century Breakdown, using the DLC that was already out. That created a great three-album game, and also let us give each of those [six DLC tracks] unique assets, more than we could easily pack into a DLC pack. Those songs have their own video-wall assets, their own [motion capture]."
Basically, what you see is what you get when it comes to the setlist for Green Day: Rock Band. And here's the real bummer for Green Day fans: This means we won't get to play any of the tracks that the band recorded before 1994's Dookie -- omissions that Foster chalks up to restricted access to the older master recordings. "We wanted to get something from 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours and something from Kerplunk!," Foster said, continuing, "But we just couldn't get those. And we didn't want to do live versions. We decided the studio stuff was what was important."
Like The Beatles: Rock Band before it, there also won't be any way of playing the rest of your Rock Band library in Green Day: Rock Band. However, there will be an option for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 users to buy a license to export the Green Day setlist into Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Rock Band 3.
Be sure to check out the rest of the interview over at Plastic Axe. Green Day: Rock Band is scheduled to hit retailers on June 8, 2010.
