Rock Band 4 Is Coming to Xbox One and PS4 This Fall

It’s official: Harmonix is getting the band back together. The maker of music games like Fantasia and Dance Central is reprising its once-massive Rock Band franchise after a five-year hiatus. It will release Rock Band 4 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this fall. You heard right: Plastic guitars. Living-room karaoke. It’s all coming back. Devotees […]
RockBand4PromoIllustration
Harmonix

It's official: Harmonix is getting the band back together.

The maker of music games like Fantasia and Dance Central is reprising its once-massive Rock Band franchise after a five-year hiatus. It will release Rock Band 4 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this fall. You heard right: Plastic guitars. Living-room karaoke. It's all coming back. Devotees will be thrilled. But will it play in Peoria?

Harmonix doesn't want fans to start over, the game's lead developer Daniel Sussman told WIRED in a meeting in advance of today's announcement. So Rock Band 4 will work with whatever songs you've already purchased through your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 versions of the game. Harmonix is moving them all to the new-generation version of the game. With more than 2,000 songs in the catalog, that's a lot of music to play on day one.

Daniel Sussman.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

"We want to respect the investment that people have made in the platforms," Sussman says. Harmonix is singing the same tune with the hardware: the company is working on a solution that would allow you to use the last generation's musical instrument controllers, so you don't have to upgrade your axe.

"We are working our asses off with Microsoft and Sony to support legacy hardware," Sussman says. "We're confident that we will come up with a solution."

Gaming peripheral maker Mad Catz is creating new guitar, drum, and microphone controllers, Sussman says. "Along the way, we're taking every opportunity to improve build quality and the componentry," he says. Still, any improvements will be "incremental" instead of entirely changing how the controllers work, since the game still has to be playable with the old controllers.

Harmonix also says Rock Band 4 is the only version it will release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It will update the game with new features and add new songs, but it won't release Rock Band 5 (or Rock Band: One Direction, etc.) on this generation of consoles.

Some features of Rock Band 3 won't be returning for the reunion. "Pro" guitar mode, in which extremely advanced players could plug in a real guitar and play the real chords and solos for some songs, seems to be out. Ditto the keyboard controller that added an Elton John flair to Rock Band 3.

"The sprawl that was Rock Band 3 actually splintered the audience in a lot of ways," Sussman says. "One of the words we're using to describe our approach [for Rock Band 4 is 'focus'... We're very much dialed on guitar, drum, bass, vocals."

Sufficient Innovation

Rock Band and Activision's Guitar Hero were two of the biggest games at the close of the aughts. But 2010 was the last time either got an update. Activision made a big show of canceling every Guitar Hero game in production even after earning $2 billion on the franchise. Music games burned bright, then flamed out just as fast.

"In terms of what happened, we can only theorize," says Alex Rigopulos, Harmonix co-founder and chief creative officer. "Often, it gets painted with a very simple brush: 'Activision oversaturated the category and that's what happened.'"

Rigopulos says the real story probably is more complicated. "We were selling the most expensive videogame in the world into a recession," he said. But there was something else that always nagged at him. "Frankly, I also think that we didn't deliver sufficient innovation, or the right kind of innovation, over that period of time."

Harmonix, a company with many musicians who play in bands, loved to say Rock Band gives everyone the experience of playing music with friends. But, Sussman says, what usually transpired was "four people playing four single-player games next to each other." The guitarist stared at the string of guitar notes sliding up the screen. The vocalist read the words. Nobody really interacted with each other.

Harmonix

Harmonix wasn't ready to demonstrate Rock Band 4 at our meeting. There was no Xbox, no game build, no plastic instruments. It says it will reveal more in the weeks leading up to E3 Expo in June. What it will reveal, Sussman and Rigopulos say, is how they'll tweak the gameplay to encourage more interaction between players and more creative play.

"We're working on a lot of these things that really change the dynamic in a fun and healthy way," Sussman says, "leveraging some of the interplay and band dynamics that make playing music with other people really compelling."

"The other [area of improvement] is similar," he says, "the idea that playing music is such an opportunity for self-expression, and that there are things we can do to give players a little more ownership of the play experience."

"Those are areas that Rock Band historically promised, but didn't really deliver on," he says.

Rigopulos identified three major gameplay scenarios that Harmonix is focusing on addressing with Rock Band 4: Friends playing together at a party, a solo player or groups competing for high scores on online leaderboards, and a single player progressing through a narrative "career" mode.

"The game is more fun when you're good at it," Sussman says. "I want to incent [players] to get better at the game."

Rock Band 4 will be the first game in the series Harmonix has created since being sold off by corporate parent Viacom in 2010.

"There's a vibe that takes me back to the early days of the studio," says Sussman, a Harmonix veteran since 2001. "We can follow our instincts in a way that, for better or worse, was made more difficult by this sort of a more structured relationship with the shot-callers. The thing I love about where we are right now is that we can do what we want ... the space between idea and execution is really small."

One piece of Rock Band history that, due to rights issues, can't currently be integrated into Rock Band 4 is 2009's masterpiece The Beatles Rock Band. "We are still in touch with Apple Corp.," says Rigopulos. "There's no specific plan. All I'll say about that is, that project remains one of the dearest projects in our entire history, and so I'd love to find a way to return to that at the right point in time."