As Neversoft director Brian Bright discusses the impending release of Guitar Hero World Tour, one idea keeps coming up time and time again: "Anything is possible."

Okay, well maybe not anything. The upcoming music game sequel certainly isn't compatible with most of the downloadable content that was released for Guitar Hero III. And missing master tracks make the inclusion of some songs, such as Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," practically impossible to get in the game.

But as Bright points out, the future is wide open. Now that Guitar Hero has "the full band experience"--drums and vocals in addition to guitar and bass---the developer is hopeful that future entries in the series will work with the songs of World Tour and beyond.

"It's the direction we'd like to go," he says, with a smile.

Bright's optimistic view of the future manifests in a number of subjects, ranging from downloadable content, to the game's fabled "new instrument," its music creation mode, and yes, even the slight possibility of Prince appearing in a future Guitar Hero game.

Shack: How does the single-player campaign work? Is it still a list of specific songs you have to beat to unlock the next category, or is there some choice involved?

Brian Bright: You start off with three gigs, and gigs are anywhere from three to seven songs at a particular venue. Once you beat once gig, you unlock another gig.

So, you always have a choice of which gig you want to play and how you want to work your way through your career.

We also did away with the different difficulties [for campaign]. Essentially, you can start on expert and if you find it too difficult, you can step down on any particular song. You earn less cash, you won't earn all the achievements and things, but you can make your way through and play through all the songs that way.

Shack: Can other players join in during that tour, or do you have to hop in the multiplayer mode?

Brian Bright: You'd have to start as a band, to make a band first, to be able to go in and do band play. It's a separate career, it's got its own progression.

Each of their instruments have their own career. There's a bass career, drums, guitar, vocals, and then a band career. And they all have their own progression model, based around the difficulty of the song for that particular instrument.

For band mode, you can play with anywhere from two to four players locally. But also, if any of those players leave, you can have online players join in.

Shack: During my time with the game, I noticed that you can create your own setlist of songs you want to play, but that those setlists can contain up to six songs. Is that limit in the final game?

Brian Bright: We kept it to six. We could have probably gone higher, but we thought six was a good amount before you just wanted to take a break, maybe change difficulties and swap up the instruments or something.

We did leave it at six, but the cool thing with that is you can integrate your downloadable content, and you can also integrate any of the user-created songs that you've downloaded from GH Tunes.

Shack: Speaking of downloadable content and GH Tunes, even before those elements factor in, the game's setlist is rather large and requires a fair amount of scrolling. Is there any way to sort all of those songs and hop directly to certain categories?

Brian Bright: You can sort the set list by different criteria, and you can also hop down to the downloadable section, at least. Currently, there's nothing else beyond that.

Shack: Is there any sort of "No Fail" mode where you can just jam without fear of losing a song?

Brian Bright: We added a fifth difficulty, called Beginner Mode, this year. It's not really a no fail mode, but it's mainly for people who are new to the game. It's a lot harder to fail, for guitar you can press any button, you just have to strum essentially, we don't care what color [fret buttons] you press, you just have to strum in time. The drums, you hit any pad. It's a lot harder to fail in there than in easy mode, so it's really for playing with your little kid, or your grandmother, or parents or whatever.

Shack: And you can just pause the game and change the difficulty level at any point, though that'll restart the song?

Brian Bright: Yeah.

Shack: Will Guitar Hero III downloadable content be compatible with Guitar Hero World Tour?

Brian Bright: Only the Metallica downloadable album.

I'll explain. We request a song, let's say we request The Doors, and we want that delivered to us as nine streams--four streams for the drums, the backing vocals, the vocals, the guitar parts. We need a mix so when you miss a note, that stream's volume drops.

With Guitar Hero III, we only had, I don't remember, three or four streams. We didn't have drums or vocals--we didn't care, those were all in the background. For us to make those work, we would have to re-get all those songs, redo them all, then re-upload them, and [you'd] have to go and re-download them. It's just a monumental--and we've completely redone our animation system.

Going forward, now that we have the full band experience, we're gonna not try and fall into that pitfall again. But for us to go back and try to get GH3 stuff to work, it would just be monumental. It would be like making the game again.

Shack: Speaking of the future of Guitar Hero, owners of the first Rock Band can bring almost all of the original's tracks into Rock Band 2. Is that sort of functionality feasible in future Guitar Hero games?

Brian Bright: I would say it's feasible, that's about all I can say. It's the direction we'd like to go, but I can't make any specific confirmations at this time.

Shack: As for downloadable content, most of the Guitar Hero DLC released up to this point has been in bundle packs, and even the Metallica album Death Magnetic is one big bundle. Moving forward, are there any plans to sell songs individually?

Brian Bright: We're not talking about other DLC strategies yet.

The Metallica thing, they want their album to be in context, as a whole, and be experienced that way. Metallica feels very strongly [about that].

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