Multiplayer
For a game that is heavily intended to provide a fun multiplayer experience, Rock Band 3 unfortunately misses the mark in comparison to past entries in the series. All previous competitive multiplayer modes have been removed from the game, leaving leaderboards and setlist battles as the only ways to see how you stack up against others. Although you can have all 4 instruments in a band along with vocal harmonies, this requires you to play in all instruments mode (AIM). When in AIM, vocals are reduced down to easy difficulty, and are no longer scored. It should be noted that in order to have guitar, bass and keys all present in your band you must use all instruments mode as well. One interesting addition is that the game now provides you with a solo instrument score as well as a total band score, eliminating the frustration of finally getting a tough FC in band play and having no record of a solo score for it. While the solo scoring works fine in band play, the star cutoffs seem a bit odd. While playing we saw a 200k score on "Llama" flagged as a gold star score when the cutoff is actually around 60k higher.
Online Play
Online play suffers from some odd design choices as well as some irritating bugs that didn't seem to come up in past games.
- All players can now add and remove songs from a setlist at the same time until the leader advances to the difficulty selection. This may work fine if you're playing with friends, but have fun when you have someone in your band who really wants to play a song along with someone who hates the same song.
- If a player disconnects, the game decides to let you know by placing a large Player has disconnected message directly over your note track. This effectively obscures any notes coming down the track until right before the hit window, and stays up for several seconds.
- There seems to be a really odd audio lag issue that pops up from time to time, causing another players instrument track to both drop in pitch and begin playing late in the song. This can be very disruptive to try to keep playing in time with an instrument noticeably out of sync. A video of this issue can be found below.