Rocksmith™

I have watched enough live-service titles come and go to know the difference between a community being dramatic and a community being right. With Rocksmith+, the community is mostly right. What Ubisoft shipped here is a subscription-only music learning platform covering guitar, bass, and piano, built on the bones of a franchise that had genuinely loyal players. Those players are now the loudest voices in the negative review column, and they have real points worth sorting through. The platform itself splits into two modes: Learn, which offers structured video lesson paths across beginner, intermediate, and advanced skill levels, and Play, which lets you jump straight into the song library with an adaptive note highway that scales difficulty in real time. Connect any electric or acoustic guitar, bass, or MIDI keyboard via the Rocksmith Real Tone Cable, a compatible audio interface, or the companion mobile app. The audio detection and real-time feedback loop are functional, though players routinely report needing to fiddle with buffer settings between 40ms and 60ms before note recognition stops misfiring. That is the kind of setup friction that a learning platform, of all things, cannot afford to leave unsolved. The song library is the sharpest wound. Rocksmith 2014 had a decade of DLC and a thriving custom content scene that gave it essentially unlimited repertoire. Rocksmith+ replaces that with a curated, licensed catalog where notable names like Green Day, Muse, and Foo Fighters are absent or represented by live recordings rather than the studio tracks players actually want to learn. A meaningful portion of the library leans on covers rather than master recordings, and songs get removed as licensing deals expire, which is precisely the kind of subscription-era anxiety that makes ownership-minded players furious. The platform also dropped Session Mode, the freeform jam feature from 2014, and removed local multiplayer entirely. Playing with a friend used to be one of the best reasons to own Rocksmith. That is gone. On the operational side, the subscription billing has attracted serious complaints. Multiple users documented Ubisoft continuing to charge cards after cancellation requests, with support escalations turning into weeks-long loops between Ubisoft and Steam, each pointing at the other. Refunds for unused subscription periods have been denied, and the yearly tier has seen significant price increases since launch. For a live-service product, trust in the billing and cancellation layer is not optional. It is table stakes, and Rocksmith+ keeps failing it. Where does that leave someone who genuinely wants to learn guitar or piano without paying for in-person lessons? There is a real learning tool underneath the noise. The adaptive difficulty, the structured lesson paths, the support for multiple instruments including piano via MIDI, and the low-latency feedback system all have genuine merit for absolute beginners. If you can stomach the subscription model, if your taste runs toward whatever happens to be in the current catalog, and if you have never used Rocksmith 2014 with custom content, you might get something from this. But veterans of the old game will feel every missing feature like a phantom limb. I have seen this pattern before: a live service strips a beloved product to its frame, charges a recurring fee for the privilege, and then wonders why the reviews look like a funeral. Planet Side 2 at least kept its feature set. Rocksmith+ started below zero.

Yuki · Scout Team

MMOs & live service

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