On January 25th, 2024, Harmonix released its final DLC for Rock Band. Three songs were released, but the last one typically listed is Rusted Root's "Send Me On My Way." It is a song that is surprisingly upbeat in tempo, almost optimistic in its melody, despite being about loss and sad goodbyes.
It is fitting in a way that "Send Me On My Way" would be the final ever song released for Rock Band, some sixteen years after the first upload for the original Rock Band. It is a sad goodbye, an old friend finally closing a door of access, yet it is also a moment of optimism, reminiscing on the good times you had over the years, and the memories that we will make beyond the comforts of our past self.
Harmonix is lucky in many ways. Going from indie darling to major development team, back to indie studio, is a path few game companies can claim. After the loss of MTV Games and Viacom, Harmonix stayed afloat with the Kinect-based Dance Central games, with only a steady stream of songs as DLC and Rock Band Blitz being any hint of a Rock Band title. In 2013, they even stopped releasing DLC for Rock Band, a brief hiatus that ended when Harmonix announced Rock Band 4 in 2015.
The announcement of Rock Band 4 was a surprise, but there was a clear vision, at least according to Harmonix the reason they felt it was time to revive the series was the distance from 2010. It was a new console generation, the PS4 and Xbox One, which meant it was less crowded and more starved for some new content. Former CEO Alex Rigopulos noted that they wanted to make sure Rock Band 4 was the best game they ever made. "That we had a vision for what Rock Band 4 was going to be, that made it worth making, really."
Part of this strategy was finding capital to help release the title, as unlike Activision and the Guitar Hero franchise, Harmonix was at the time independent. Two major players step in to help with development; the first would be a $15 million investment from Spark Capital and Foundry Group, which not only helped Harmonix in Rock Band 4 development, but also fueled smaller team projects, like a remake of Amplitude in 2016, along with some future VR projects, including SingSpace, Audica, and Rock Band VR.
The second player would be Mad Catz, a company that specialized in creating third-party peripherals and controllers for various console systems. Mad Catz had been around since the late 1980s, and for many people is probably best known for multiple third party console controllers, memory cards, and being the parent division of GameShark which they acquired in 2012. Mad Catz made tons of third party guitar controllers in the late 2000's, but here, they would be the primary producer, seller, and promoter for Rock Band 4, along with handling official guitar and drum controller production.
Mad Catz is not known for having reliable quality in their products, but here, Mad Catz was able to work a few impressive technical feats. Updated controllers were of course made, with better latency for wireless connection and sturdier plastics, but the biggest technical achievement would be backwards compatibility with older hardware. Harmonix and Mad Catz were adamant to make sure all controllers were forward compatible with Rock Band 4. This did require some tricks, such as a legacy adapter for the Xbox One, but Harmonix wisely bundled Microsoft copies with the adapter to ensure players would not be left out in the cold.
One area where Rock Band 4 did make a tough decision was features to include. Rock Band 3 is lauded for its pro mode, which served as a solid teaching tool in playing real guitar, but the ecosystem had changed since then. Partially, it is due to competition with one game that did it better - Ubisoft's Rocksmith.
Released in 2011, Rocksmith was built similar to Power Gig: Rise of the Six String, in that it would require an electric guitar to play along with the game and teach you how to play. Unlike Power Gig, it wasn't a poor cash grab. Rocksmith was designed from the ground up to be a strictly rhythm-based educational game, which served the needs for aspiring guitarists, and continues to do so with the most recent release of Rocksmith+ in 2022.
Harmonix saw Rocksmith as the series that is truly teaching people how to play guitar, and decided that pro mode for bass, guitar and keyboard would be cut from Rock Band 4. Harmonix would go further in removing keyboard support entirely, meaning Rock Band 3 is the only game in the series to use the keytar. On the one hand, removing features after dealing with feature creep is usually a net positive in focusing down the core of your game. The problem, though, is expectations of continuity. Many fans, who by now were used to playing pro mode, would have a gameplay mode removed from them would not be happy, and this did cause some backlash.
That said, the decision was probably for the best. While pro mode drums would still be available, and Harmonix did add some new tricks into the repertoire of the game. The biggest addition would be optional freestyle solos for guitar, a nice consolation prize for the loss of pro mode. The feature has the game suggest a solo style to emulate for yourself, using in-game patterns that give the player suggestions on where to hit their notes. Players can't fail these sections and don't lose any multipliers, but their score is dependent on how close they follow the pattern.
It is a fun addition, and it's not the only update the instruments had. Vocals now have more two and three-part harmony songs, and higher difficulties allow for freeform melody singing, where vocalists who are in tune with the pitch and melody can improvise a bit instead of rigorously following the lyrics. Drums had new triggers for overdrive mode, with pre-created drum fills that fit the timing of the song currently being played.
Again, fun additions that update the experience, but it is arguable it's not groundbreaking in the way Harmonix hoped it would be. Where there are significant changes is progression. Your standard Quickplay is here, along with a new "Shows" mode that follows your typical setlists from older games. Shows have a bit of everything in them, some pre-determined songs, others are voted on by the band members currently playing. Any DLC songs that are attached to all of the game libraries are also included in these Show lists, so long as each band member has the song available. Shows is also co-op friendly in allowing for theming of songs, like based on genre, to be options for selection, and allowing excess overdrive to be carried over between songs and sets.
The new main gameplay mode was Band Tour, a career mode that does attempt to add a pseudo-narrative to the game. Band Tour offers a more risk-reward system, as you are given choices as to which gigs you want to play throughout the mode. Each of these nets you two resources, fans and money, which allow you to unlock customizable options and new venues.
For the most part Band Tour is seemingly straightforward, but to advance the game's narrative, you need to do multi-part tours that unlock as you progress. These sections are often 3 to 6 different venues that need to be played in order, but also are determined by player choices. A corporate-sponsored show, for example, would mean more in-game money but less fans and limited venues, while a small show might open up more smaller venues at the cost of extra cash.
It is a bit of an RPG mechanic in terms of choices, though ultimate progression does follow the World Tour modes in previous Rock Band titles. A few extra challenges are sprinkled in from time to time to keep it fresh at least. My favorite is that players can swap out a song from their setlist if the crowd requests a different song, which is not a major addition, but the little thing that does add some meat onto the pre-determined setlists of the game. All of the added features, such as vocalists improvising or the new drummer overdrive mode, also tie into a new aspect of your setlists in Band Tour - your overall stage presence. Taking crowd requests, completing encores, performing overdrive in unison with the other players, all of these little things add up to a strong presentation for Rock Band 4 that make the game both fun and engaging in a way that is more tangible than ever before.
It is easy to compare this to Guitar Hero Live, which tried hard to sell the simulation through camera perspective, FMV footage, and more realistic guitar playing. Rock Band 4, whether purposefully or accidentally, provided a sense of that simulation through gameplay mechanics over presentation. Harmonix noted that they actively were not looking at Guitar Hero Live as competition, out of fear of starting up another arms race of features that happened in the mid 2000's, and the end result is that, once again, Rock Band 4 plays better and feels richer when you engage with its simulacrum more.
Of course, the major caveat is that a lot of these features are much more engaging with a party of four. Getting a whole band together for Band Tour mode makes it's true potential come out, but singularly, it feels hollow. Still engaging, but something is definitely missing from the experience. That is one area Guitar Hero Live was able to accomplish; in focusing only on the guitar, it was able to have a singular purpose. Rock Band 4 really is a multiplayer game at heart, and it's the first one in the mainline titles that really feels like you're missing out without a full band present.
Thankfully, Harmonix continued to work miracles with their own game setlist. While only featuring 65 songs on the disc, you get a decent mix of songs from classic rock and roll acts along with some, at the time, modern hits. Newer bands include some hits from The Warning, Imagine Dragons, Mumford & Sons, and The Both, while returning champions like System of a Down, The Killers, Ozzy Osbourne and The Who round out the selection. You do get a lot of repeat songs that were often relegated to a random Guitar Hero game, like "Panama" from Van Halen or "Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo" by Rick Derringer, but then you get a few surprises, like Elvis Presley "Suspicious Minds" or "Mainstream Kid" by Brandi Carlile, thrown in and wonder why they have not been featured yet, even as DLC.
Of course, Harmonix revitalized the DLC pattern of releasing songs and albums once a week starting in 2015. They did take this a step further, ensuring all songs still available as DLC and previous Rock Band games, would be transferable to Rock Band 4. While not every single song released would make this journey, players who owned the 360 or PS3 versions of Rock Band would get their purchases and library into the Xbox one and PS4 versions of Rock Band 4, respectively. Though it was console family specific, the fact that the transfer was available is a testament to the overall devotion Hamronix had to ensure that the entire music library would not be lost forever for players.
Harmonix was working on a budget when it came to a lot of the features of Rock Band 4, and it does show in most areas. Side by side comparison, the game visually looks similar to its predecessors, and the overall design does not deviate from what was established with the first Rock Band. This is not strictly a criticism, as that familiarity doesn't get a visceral reaction like Guitar Hero Live's full rebuild did, but critics at the time noted that the formula for Rock Band 4 felt like a throwback that didn't truly innovate as much as they thought they could.
Still, for Harmonix this was the culmination of their now decade-long work, proving that Rock Band as a game can be viable, even on new console hardware, though it would not last. Following the pandemic in 2020, Harmonix would be in talks of being acquired again, this time by Epic Games. They were officially purchased by the company in 2021, and a year later, in December of 2022, Epic announced that they would shut down the online services for all of the older Rock Band titles, while access to Rock Band 4's online mode would require Epic Online Services. The loss of the older servers would then be followed by Harmonix moving on to work on the Fortnite Festival, which is basically Rock Band within Fortnite.
This leads us back to "Send Me On My Way", the final song released as DLC in 2024. Since then, songs available for DLC for Rock Band 4 have been delisted, mostly due to their 10-year licensing contract expiring. As distance, and a new console generation, moves us further away from Rock Band 4, many of those digital libraries, these interactive jukeboxes, are increasingly becoming lost or harder to access. Online, freeware like Clone Hero is able to categorize most of these song charts and make them freely available, if you know where to look, but the work is still incomplete.
It is unknown if Harmonix will ever return to Rock Band. Rock Band 4 is a good, if somewhat familiar experience that doesn't really innovate, even if it was the intention of the developers to do so. Instead, it reminds players why they would enjoy a rhythm game experience in the first place. Harmonix has come a long way since the first Guitar Hero in 2005, and I think it's telling that they decided to end their run with Rock Band the way they did. For Harmonix, it was a final push to provide the joy of challenging players to just have fun again. To be optimistic, but also to not look back at the past with somber eyes. Harmonix would send us on our way to something better, and through these moments of triumph and the final strum of the guitar, the entire series becomes a rearview memory we can reminisce on positively.
Author's Note: I just want to thank anyone who has been reading through this entire Guitar Hero/Rock Band retrospective. When I first started this, it was all about re-writing my older reviews on the site and updating it to a (what I hope is) more mature style of review. As I was going through the first Guitar Hero games, I figured, I might as well cover them all.
Two months later, I more or less did.
In some ways, this entire retrospective of rhythm games has been a journey to re-live that optimism, that sense of fun and whimsy. It truly was a time capsule moment; where what mattered was enjoying the music and the simple pleasures of the challenge put forth for you. From the highs and lows of each franchise, one thing became ultimately clear to me; despite the short timespan, a lasting mark remains, something that only truly great video games can ever achieve.
I just hope you all enjoyed reading these reviews as I enjoyed writing them, even the plethora of new ones that I have never done before, like Power Gig or DJ Hero. It was a lot of hard work and effort for something so silly, but it was worth getting it done. So thank you for reading along. For me though, it's time to send myself on my way to something new.