ROCKSMITH 2014 LEAVING STORES
www.ubisoft.com
Nearly 10 years ago we launched Rocksmith 2014 and set out on a journey of learning and playing guitar together, practicing old favorites, and discovering new ones along the way.

You may want to know that Ubisoft’s Rocksmith® 2014 Edition will be de-listed from Steam and other online stores after October 23rd, 2023 which is one week from this post date. This is a game that makes learning to play the guitar like Guitar Hero/Rockband, which can score you or let you slowly practice a part with scrolling fret indicators.

Now, it’s not on sale or anything (hasn’t been for a couple years), there might be W11 issues (I’m using Win 10 and Linux computers), and you’ll need a real guitar and either a mic or special USB cable to properly play the game. However, after this date you won’t be able to purchase this game anymore unless you buy from a key-seller or a retail CD copy.

Of course, Ubisoft is going to replace this 40 CAD game with a subscription service model called Rocksmith+ which is 20 CAD per month and not available on Steam. On the other hand, RS2014 works without the need of a Uplay account and can be played offline (Just press Esc twice at the signin screen).

Now there are 1555 DLCs available but they will eventually be delisted as well at some point in the future but you won’t be able to get them without the base game. The only DLC you will “need” is the Cherub Rock DLC because of…

Custom DLC is a community created mod that lets you play user-created and converted maps. By default it uses the DLC ID of Cherub Rock which is why you need it, but this is configurable if you really don’t want to spend 4 CAD. There are tens of thousands of Custom DLC songs available online so you will be hard pressed to run out of new ones to try.

  • Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    26·
    1 year ago

    I’m still not over how they ruined Rocksmith. The first two were amazing games, they improved my skills so much and I had so much fun playing them. And I kept waiting word for a Rocksmith 3, because the team behind it is amazing so I was really hopeful. But then one day without ever hearing of it being announced I stumbled upon Rocksmith+ and that’s when I realized this is where the license had gone to die, in a shitty closed Ubisoft online subscription, a shadow of its former shell. I hope one day we get a better spiritual successor that isn’t in the hands of such a trash company.

    • moon_matter@kbin.social
      8·
      1 year ago

      The music industry wants their license fees and people want to play using those special controllers. So it’s prohibitively expensive to make this type of game on top of the added burden of the hardware. It’s a miracle the game even exists as is.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caOP
      5·
      1 year ago

      I think you could probably find the game on the high seas even after a delist, probably some of them could have a lot of DLC included but I haven’t checked. Custom DLC might take a little more setup but idk, there are tutorials at least.

      Custom DLCs exist that “cover” some of the same songs as the official DLCs do exist, though you won’t find them on CustomsForge. The Internet Archive has a folder with over 60k custom song maps, and hasn’t needlessly bound itself with restrictions.

      • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
        3·
        1 year ago

        Custom DLC might take a little more setup but idk, there are tutorials at least.

        You only need the official Cherub Rock DLC, then installing cDLC is just a matter of putting the files in the same folder as the official ones.

        • Rentlar@lemmy.caOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          You will have to hope your local friendly pirate will include that with the installation.

    • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yes, years ago. There is even a mod to play without buying the official RealTone™️ cable (which is a $5 USB soundcard sold for $20).

  • boolean@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    I bought this recently and the installation and setup experience was so broken and painful on W11 that I uninstalled it out of frustration.

    Graphics were ganked (only showed the top left 25% of the screen on 4K, stretched to fill the screen),
    Required a UPlay account signup that sent me to dead servers,
    Wouldn’t use ASIO with my big boy audio gear,
    Wouldn’t calibrate using “mic” mode plugged into a DI port on my interface and on and on.

    It’s just a disaster and I wasn’t willing to put any effort into figuring out how to de-UPlay the thing and mod it.

    Do Not Recommend!

    • CarrierLost@lemmy.one
      5·
      1 year ago

      I use it with my focusrite scarlet (2i2 2nd gen) via asio on W11 and it works fine. Running it in windowed mode lets you set the resolution and put it anywhere on your screen you want.

      There are lots of walkthroughs online on how you can set up asio. Modding it consists of replacing a single DLL and then adding your settings to a text file.

      If you’ve got big boy audio gear, my assumption is that you’re not using RS for learning to play. It’s awesome for picking up new songs or just playing along with songs you love.

      Check out customsforge.com for user created content.

      • boolean@kbin.social
        4·
        1 year ago

        yeah, good tips. I got frustrated and table flipped on it. I found out about the ASIO mods after the fact. Still annoying that they were selling this product in this state and getting away with it.

        • CarrierLost@lemmy.one
          5·
          1 year ago

          It’s Ubisoft… of COURSE they were selling it in the worst possible state. XD

          The community content makes it absolutely worth it, and I highly recommend it. Fair warning, it IS community created content. I’ve had to re-chart and submit updates to some of the song charts on there, but I also feel like that’s helped me become a better musician as well. Knowing the song well enough that I can tell when it’s wrong and then I get to use (ToneLib-Jam, for me personally) another piece of the toolkit to fix it and resubmit.

    • Rentlar@lemmy.caOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      If anyone else runs into the Fullscreen Issue like I did initially, you have to go in the .ini file, set your screen width, height values to something less than your monitor specs and Fullscreen to 0.

      And the UPlay signin screen is bypassed by pressing escape twice, Ubisoft doesn’t make this obvious AT ALL.