Harmonix unveils Chroma, revealing their next project is unexpectedly a free-to-play PC first-person shooter from the developers of Rock Band, the console rhythm series, though Chroma apparently continues the studio's tradition of music-based games. Ars Technica reports Harmonix is recruiting Counter-Strike Global Offensive developer Hidden Path Entertainment to help with the shooter mechanics of the Unreal-engine game. "We know music, we know game mechanics, we know our player base and what feels good as far as songs," John Drake of Harmonix told Ars. "But we know we shouldn’t build a shooter from the ground up. That would be a very cocky move." They offer a trailer and the following explanation of how music plays into all this:

Harmonix's hard-earned musical knowledge still comes into play in the game, of course. “Music is essential to all the elements of the game," Drake told Ars during the demo. That means everything from capturing certain points on the map to shooting your weapon will generate music, playing samples and songs that match with your team's musical genre and style (the laser light-show coming from certain weapons will match the waveform of those samples as well). It also means that the maps themselves will morph and change in time with the music, with walls and plateaus rising up during particularly intense parts of the song, for instance.

"If you understand the shape of the song, you can play the game better, just like knowing where spawn points are on a shooter map, or knowing where people can camp out and snipe,” Drake said. "Knowing the song you’re playing along to lets you understand what’s gonna happen as the map evolves."

The biggest musical twist on the shooter genre, though, comes through in the way players can gain bonuses for matching their inputs to the rhythm. You can jump at any time, for instance, but jumping in time to the music, right on the downbeat, gives an extra boost of height to reach certain platforms. Reloading is similarly faster when you click the reload button in time with the music, and the limited dashing ability is tied to the once-per-measure downbeats.