All of Unplugged’s songs are now unlocked and available from the start of the game, removing the progression system that the game launched with. A new system replaces it that sees players completing challenges to unlock new venues instead of songs.
Unplugged is one of the biggest and most technologically ambitious Quest games to release this year. In my review, I came to the conclusion that the hand tracking technology was, for the most part, up to the challenge, but only once you had spent some decent time understanding the conditions in which it operated best.
Rockers unite! 🤟 We've heard your feedback and just released a brand-new patch for #UnpluggedVR, which unlocks all songs and revamps the progression 🎵
Read the full patch notes in the comments! #VR #VirtualReality #VRgaming #VRgamer #VRgames #OculusQuest #Oculus pic.twitter.com/gfTriaEFpv
— Unplugged: Air Guitar (@UnpluggedVr) October 29, 2021
At launch, Unplugged’s fantastic tracklist was used as the main incentive for progression — you started with just one ‘record’ (the game’s name for a collection of 5 songs) and completed challenges for each record that allow you to unlock more records/songs gradually.
However, many players – including myself – encountered some difficulty with the challenges as the complexity of the songs ramped up, making the game feel quite challenging, frustrating and for some, not possible within the constraints of the hand tracking technology, especially when trying to unlock the final record.
Some players also expressed disappointment that not all songs were available from the outset.
The latest Unplugged update addresses all of this in a big way. All of the songs are now fully unlocked from the beginning of the game. Instead of progression unlocking more songs, it now is linked to venues — record challenges still exist, but have been tweaked and now work towards unlocking the different venues, from small to large.
The initial system of tying venues to songs/records was a fun way to emulate the career of a rock star, but now you’ll instead be able to play any song at any venue you’ve unlocked, using a new venue selector.
There’s also been some difficulty adjustments – the percent of notes required for a gold score is now lower, and it’s harder to fail when playing on easy difficulty.
Minor bug fixes have also been made, along with volume adjustments to make some songs slightly louder. There’s also been changes to the number of fans required to unlock new guitars.
Overall, these changes seem like a step in the right direction — not only do they address concerns around the difficulty and hand tracking, but they also make all of the songs accessible to players from the get-go. That should make it easier to demo the game to new players and let people jump in with little-to-no experience.
What do you think of these Unplugged changes? Let us know in the comments.
