Harmonix: 'Hit on the downbeat to enter the fast travel' in Chroma

Harmonix is making a musical free-to-play online shooter, and that is a hard thing to imagine without some help, and the descriptions we got yesterday with the announcement were OK. But perhaps the more explanation we're getting, the stranger it all sounds, or at least that's what I got from Harmonix's John Drake when he spoke with Rock Paper Shotgun this week about the game.

"When you’re playing with eight versus eight in a small part of the arena and you have multiple people shooting weapons that are all snapped to the grid so the sounds they’re playing back all feel musical, you can actually hear one team sort of washing over the other team. It’s like, ‘Oh, the Industrial team just swept into this area and crushed the House Music team,’" Drake said. But wait, there's more of this insanity. Let's talk fast travel.

"There’s actually a crazy fast-travel system in the game. These jump pads that are beat-matching," Drake said. "They don’t work unless you jump on the downbeat. If you jump on the downbeat, you get launched into these tubes and then you can chain them together. There’s whole note, half note, and quarter note ones, so you’ll actually play a rhythmic pattern and ping pong around parts of the map around the outside.”

What does that mean? I don't know. I'm sure it will all make sense when the game hits PC later this year.