Last week, we reported on rumors that Harmonix might be reviving it's Rock Band series for current-gen consoles and today, we have confirmation!
Multiple outlets have confirmed that the game manufacturer is planning a release for later this year. Longtime fans of the video games, fret not! Harmonix says that all previously-downloaded DLC packs will be supported by the new version, as will most of your all game controllers/instruments.
The game is still in very early development, but game developer Daniel Sussman explained to the Verge what was new about it:
A few things. One is sort of our perspective on a longer play here, where we're not positioning Rock Band 4 as sort of the first in a long step of subsequent sequels. We think of Rock Band 4 as a successor to Rock Band 3, but our plan for the long term is to augment Rock Band 4, to build upon the game in a way that makes sense and is designed through a conversation with our community, with respect to content updates. What are the songs that people want to see, and how many should there be, and other areas of content expansion in the game, and also features… Looking at how people are playing the game and doing sort of incremental title updates that grow the franchise in one of any number of directions. I think that's actually a novel thing in the context of music games… At the end of the day, we're positioning Rock Band 4 as the nucleus to an experience that has a much longer tail and a more viable future in a lot of ways, I think.
That's sort of a framing statement around our long-term plan. Some of the stuff that we'll have on display at E3 [this year] I can't really talk about in detail, but I do want to cover quickly the specific areas where I feel there's a lot opportunity for innovation, and this is the stuff that the team is really dialed in on. One of which is improving some of the in-road social dynamics of playing music with other people. Rock Band is perceived as this great party game, but when you watch people play, in a lot of cases it's four people playing a single-player game next to someone else who's playing a single-player game. The opportunities for the drummer to be aware of what the bass player is doing, and for the singer to have some sort of relationship with the other people in that band… The game doesn't naturally sponsor or reward that type of behavior, and I think it should because it's huge part of playing music with people.
Also, here's a first look at the new instruments:
And here's a video that the creators made:
The company plans to make this version of the game last for years to come, with DLCs continually being added. Sounds kind of exciting, doesn't it?
