It’s been teased and hinted at for such a long time, and everyone’s been waiting and waiting, but now, it looks like our prayers have been answered. it is finally time- Rock Band will be returning this year. Yes, that’s right, Harmonix has gone ahead and announced that Rock Band 4 will be releasing on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this year.
“With Rock Band 4, we’re doubling down on the energy and excitement of playing music live with your friends,” says Harmonix Chief Executive Officer Steve Janiak. “Focusing on the core experience that our fans have told us they love allows us to evolve established gameplay in meaningful ways that we can’t wait to share with everyone later this year.”
But that’s not all- Harmonix will be doing you all good. You see, all your purchases from the older Rock band games will carry over on to the new games- assuming you upgrade within the same console family, that is. So, if you have $500 worth of DLC from the Xbox 360 Rock Band games, it all carries over to Rock Band 4 on Xbox One, and the same goes for PS3 and PS4 too.
“Since the beginning, we’ve called Rock Band a music platform. Players responded by downloading hundreds of their favorite tracks, and building a massive library of playable music,” says Rock Band 4 Product Manager Daniel Sussman. “It’s important for us to respect those purchases and enable our fans to bring that content over to the Rock Band platform on new generation consoles.”
Harmonix has also promised that this won’t be the start of a new series of annual Rock Band games (the kind of rapid fire releases that caused the genre to crash in the first place). Rather, they assure us, this new Rock Band will serve as a sort of platform, for which they will be releasing new tracks constantly via DLC.
Harmonix will also be bringing new hardware in the form of accessories to the market.
That’s a hell of a way to make an announcement, and one that has absolutely no bad news attached to it anyway, but Harmonix promises that it will be sharing more news and information with us this coming May. Stay tuned/\.