It’s been rumoured for a long time now, but today the news is finally official: Rock Band is coming back.
Developer Harmonix is working with hardware manufacturer Mad Catz to bring Rock Band 4 to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One by the end of 2015, the two companies announced today.
That’s exciting news for plastic instrument aficionados, as is this: Harmonix says their goal is to make the game backwards compatible with every Rock Band guitar and drum set you might have thrown in your basement or garage since the series launched in 2007. They’re aiming to let you carry over all of your old DLC songs, too. For more info — and photos of the new instruments — head over to Kotaku UK.
Comments
22 responses to “Rock Band 4 Announced For PS4, Xbox One”
Fuck.
Off.
Take all of my money.
Time to get the band back together brah!
We’re on a mission from God.
Hooooly craaaaaap!
I’ve been having thoughts of buying a 360 and importing a rb2 drum kit for months now. I will SO be down for this if it brings back my bought songs!
All the licences have expired, so I doubt it.
“They’re aiming to let you carry over all of your old DLC songs, too.”
Negative Nelly.
Some of the licenses have expired. Most have not.
That whole backwards compatible with old guitars thing alone is enough to make me want to get this. Just to throw support behind people not trying to wring every last cent they can out of us
What a coincidence, I actually googled rock band 4 only 7 hours ago.
And now we wait for Activision to officially announce a new Guitar Hero and rush it out the door before Harmonix. Shouldn’t take them too long.
There’s been rumours of a new GH game going around for a few weeks now actually: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/02/24/new-guitar-hero-game-coming
They reckon something will be officially announced at E3.
Over the last few months, there has been a lot of buzz about Rock Band. People were saying they’d like more of it and then Harmonix responded with a survey about what people want from a new RB.
I’m incredibly excited about this. All I wanted out of a new RB was backwards compatibility with DLC. Everything else, including new content, is just gravy. Delicious gravy.
Clack clack coming back.
Arrrgg… all my DLC and instruments are on my PS3, but will be getting this on xbox one… 0% possibility but I still dream of a day my PS stuff can be transferred over to Xbox.
Offer me a subscription based service, of say $4.99 a month to access your whole DLC library, and I’ll be throwing boners around like no tomorrow.
That’s the exact same situation I am in and very close to the comment I was about to make. Already had this issue with Rocksmith 2014 but thankfully that wasn’t a full new version, just an HD update. This one is a killer however 🙁
That’s an interesting goal to make all the previous peripherals compatible – AFAIK the ‘bone and PS4 specifically don’t support peripherals from previous gen and there’s been issues with steering wheels for driving games and other such dramas due to this state of play.
Will be watching with interest.
They don’t support them out of the box but it’s not impossible to make it work. The Skullgirls guys made a driver to get PS3 fight sticks working on PS4 and made that available to other developers, for example. PS3 and PS4 controllers are both just bluetooth IIRC so theoretically that should be doable. Xbox might be harder.
I distinctly remember articles where people that had invested mucho $$$ in the best steering wheel setups on MS systems (360) getting shitty when some peripheral authentication thing meant they needed to buy a crappier wheel for the ‘bone racing game. Policies might have changed since then?
Sold all of RB/GH gear many years ago now. Wasn’t planning on coming back to it any time soon.
This might be tempting – as long as they don’t completely botch the Australian release this time. That past experience alone was enough to almost turn me off RB completely. Original RB released in Australia more than a year late and RB2 never made it here officially at all (yet NZ got it). If there’s one thing Activision got right with GH, it was their release and distribution. How EA and Viacom managed to botch RB’s release so bad, I have no idea.
I’ll admit, most of my working controllers are for Guitar Hero , and the bulk of my DLC is for Rock Band. I just liked the GH (well the Band Hero drums specifically) hardware better.
I’d be all over preordering a new drum kit – but WHY NO RAISED CYMBALS AS STANDARD? I really cant play cymbals as flat pads.
Offer a full band kit (1 guitar, 1 drum kit, 1 mic, one keyboard) – FIX THOSE MAD CATZ DRUMS – and make the price reasonable – and you’ve got me back.
That said, I still get out rb3 once a month or so and bash away for a few hours, so I’m definitely the target market – but my drum pedal has gone a bit wonky of late, and I’d be happy to “upgrade” if they could noticeably increase hardware durability and (I may have mentioned) FIX THOSE HORRIBLE RB1 LOOKING DRUMS.
Yeah…as a real life drummer myself, I really hated RB’s drums. I found GH’s drums (specifically the band hero drums) much better, mostly due to the dedicated cymbal pads.
GH’s method of activating star power by hitting both cymbals at once was also far superior to RB’s method of activating overdrive by waiting until a specific point in the song then doing an adlib thing to activate it.
Agree on the star power/overdrive activation. Although sometimes it’s nice to bust out a fill or even practice if you’ve got the main rhythm down from memory – a lot of the time the adlib/ activation parts came up at really strange parts of the song, and usually too frequently – especially if you’re waiting until 5 stars to switch the overdrive, and it starts throwing in adlib sections every 16 bars or so.
I’m not sure where they can go with Pro Guitar post Rocksmith..
Yes yes yes!
I sunk over $1000 into my RB collection over time on X360 (pro guitar, midi adapter, keyboards, drums, DLC) so it’s a bit sad that I’ll unlikely be able to use any of that on my PS4, but I’m still excited for this!