Poorly Tuned: The Many Technical Headaches of Rock Band 4

Often, when we think of third-party peripherals we think of controllers with niche appeal like flight sticks and fighting game pads, but equally as big a part of third-party hardware are rhythm game controllers like microphones, DDR mats, or the plastic instruments behind games like Rock Band. The smart thing about hardware like this is not just that it makes us feel like we’re playing guitar or drums or keyboards in a way that’s still easy and engaging to pick up, but also that it allows anyone to take one glance at these games and immediately see what the appeal of them is. To the average person, it might not be clear from looking a Dualshock or an Xbox controller how interacting with it is going to translate into driving or shooting or commanding units in any one game, but it’s immediately apparent what makes the instruments of Rock Band fun and how they can be used. This would seem to be the holy grail: Controllers that provide enjoyable, unique, intuitive, and highly accessible gameplay, but of course there are implicit costs involved if we want to have that experience.

There’s the financial cost, then there’s the worrying you might have to do about the technical aspects of the peripherals, and we can also see from the manufacturer’s perspective that it’s not easy to produce cheap, quality equipment everyone can use. Up to this point those of us buying the Rock Band games have had surprisingly little trouble in this area. Instruments have been expensive, there have been shortages of them before, and we have sometimes had to scan extensive compatibility tables to know what peripherals operate with what games, but by and large when we’ve bought these controllers they’ve just worked. For Rock Band 4 however, it felt like most of those things that had been threatening to go wrong with these peripherals finally did go wrong. Similar events befell the game’s DLC.

DLC is often framed solely as a means to expand a game’s content, but rhythm games like Rock Band provide great examples of how it can also be used to customise a game. Few things are as divisive in entertainment as music tastes and individual people are going to look for wildly different genres and artists in the music they consume. Harmonix have reacted with full awareness of this fact, letting us Lego together the kind of content we’d want to see for our rhythm game from a monstrously large collection of DLC. And yet, just as the instruments fell down, Rock Band 4’s DLC was plunged into a well of predicaments that weren’t entirely unpredictable.

If you were vaguely following gaming news in 2015 you probably noticed some of the title’s issues discussed, but I don’t think the large majority of discourse in the gaming space has accurately described all the difficulties consumers have been facing with the game or how deep these problems go, so with that in mind let’s look at the technical trouble with Rock Band 4. I’ll talk a little about the PS4 version of the game further down, but we’ll mainly be focusing on the Xbox One version here as it’s the version that’s had the largest concentration of problems and the one I have first-hand experience with.

It’s unsurprising that the place to start if you’re a returning Rock Band player is the now somewhat monolithic compatibility chart. The large majority of older guitars, microphones, and drumkits are fortunately compatible with the game, but that does not include the wired Rock Band 1 peripherals. Rock Band is now wireless only, meaning that if you want to play with all the instruments you’ll need to keep 8 AA batteries in circulation. Additionally, even if you have your own set of compatible wireless instruments ready to go they won’t be able to communicate with the Xbox One without a special Legacy Adapter. The standard price for a bundle of the game and the adapter is currently £70, and if you were buying around launch you faced the extra complication of the bundle quickly selling out at many outlets. Mad Catz apologised for the lack of adapters on shelves, emphasising that they did tell people to pre-order, but there were customers talking about not receiving their adapters at release even when they pre-ordered, and the state in which Rock Band 4 came out shows exactly why pre-ordering can often be a poor move from a customer perspective.

At launch many players reported the game being drenched in performance, input, and controller issues. Some stated that the game generally stuttered, skipped, or dropped frames, others reported microphone lag beyond what should have been normal for their home entertainment setups, notes on the instrument firmware talk about connectivity issues for many peripherals across both consoles, and there’s plenty more to discover for those willing to tumble down the deep rabbit hole of the Rock Band support forums or the Rock Band subreddit. Then there’s the drums. Listen to the community and you find the drumkit is the source of by far the most complaints and Harmonix’s responses echo this. There’s a whole page on their site dedicated to informing users about problems with the instrument, with plenty of players reporting that every one of the pads and the kick pedal have been dropping hits, typically when they come up against series of notes in quick succession.

Of course, Harmonix did patch the game, and as mentioned above released firmware, but that firmware installation process isn’t going to be something the average user is likely to find very intuitive. As far as I can tell the game doesn’t tell you anywhere that your instruments might need patching, it’s something you have to find out and then seek a remedy to on the web. Then you need to download the appropriate application for your platform and instrument, connect your PC to the instrument using a USB-Micro USB cable, and run the updater program. That’s going to be too much for some people, not that Mad Catz or Harmonix can do much at this point. If you’ve been following the links in here you’ve probably also noticed that many people report the drums continuing to malfunction even with new firmware. Harmonix’s site makes note of this, but leaves it ambiguous as to whether they ever plugged all the leaks on that one. The “Drums Accuracy” page seems to indefinitely advise people that they should wait until “next week” for a revised updater. It’s also difficult to tell the current state of the instruments from online forums, as Rock Band 4 is no longer in that post-release honeymoon phase where everyone is talking about it. For what it’s worth I’ve had no issues using the drums, but I’m not playing them on anything above medium difficulty.

There are other miscellaneous problems, all of them with varying degrees of relevance to the work Harmonix and Mad Catz have done. I called the instruments released for Rock Band 4 wireless, and they generally are, but both the microphone and the Legacy Adapter do need to be plugged into a USB port to function, of which the Xbox One has one on the side and two on the rear. Many peoples’ home theatre setups are understandably not laid out to allow easy access to the back or sometimes even sides of their machines, making this more than a little inconvenient. With the Xbox One’s reliance on HDMI it also feels like the game is always going to be plagued by some latency issues when it comes to freestyle sections, and the game launched with certain exploits that enabled opportunistic cheaters to fudge their way to scores on the leaderboards they never should have been able to get. This cheating went on for three months before Harmonix stepped in to fix it, but with them making such universal changes to the way the game functioned they had to wipe the leaderboards clean. Every online high score that players struggled their way towards over those three months went up in smoke. Then there’s perhaps the most notorious component of Rock Band 4: the DLC support.

For obvious reasons players are only able to transfer DLC over within the same console families. Those who bought Rock Band DLC on the PS3 but are playing Rock Band 4 on the Xbox One, or those who bought DLC on the Xbox 360 but are now playing on the PS4, are just going to have to wave goodbye to their old content. Even those who are playing on the right console may find themselves dissatisfied. It’s taken a long time for some downloadable songs to become available on current gen systems and three and a half months after launch the only Rock Band OSTs that can be reclaimed for the game are Rock Band 3’s and Rock Band Blitz’s. At the time of this writing the Rock Band 1 soundtrack is almost available for download, but the Rock Band 2 soundtrack, as well as the soundtracks for the three themed Rock Bands are nowhere in sight. The game is also missing 2,121 downloadable songs in the form of the Rock Band Network content, and with that service officially having been sunsetted it’s hard to know if they’ll ever be back. As for the songs that are available, the only way to get them into Rock Band 4 is to individually search for and download every one you own. A bulk downloading service is unlikely to ever be supported, with Harmonix citing first-party technical restrictions on such solutions, and to add confusion some players were finding around launch that songs that first appeared available to them were actually not ready for download at all.

The bottom line here is that not only has this game had a lot of problems, some of them still extant, but that many of those worst affected are those who’ve shown the most loyalty to the series: the early adopters, competitive online players, and those who purchased the most DLC. It’s hard to see that as acceptable. Keep in mind that just like Mad Catz feared they wouldn’t be able to properly stock their product and tried to push pre-orders of the Legacy Adapter, Harmonix did the same thing with the new Rock Band 4 instruments. A number of Harmonix employees later began posting five star reviews for the game to Amazon without indicating that they belonged to the game’s developer, helping distort audience perceptions of the product’s quality in its early days. If this still doesn’t sound considerably unfair towards end users, consider how much many customers were paying for these items.

A bundle including the game, guitar, drums, and mic will currently run you anywhere from £140 to £220, and it’s bewildering that there’s still no neat solution for anyone who wants to buy a complete compliment of instruments for their living room band. If you want the full setup you of course need two guitars, and not only is there no instrument bundle including two guitars, but the only place that I could find selling a guitar on its own was the Mad Catz store where they cost about £80. The store also appears to be the only place where you can buy the pro cymbals for the drums, which are priced at £40, meaning that to get all the peripherals for the game you’re looking at £260-340. You can buy consoles for that much, and undoubtedly people were paying more than the current low-end prices at launch.

When you stand back and look at this it isn’t a pretty picture. This is a situation where the developer and manufacturer behind a game and its peripherals were scared they wouldn’t be up to their job of meeting adequate demand and so tried to rush consumers into picking up their products. When their fans responded full of trust, many of them handing over large sums of money for a game and peripherals sight unseen, they were immediately punished for that loyalty with a plethora of software and hardware inconveniences, as well as faulty messaging from the developer on the relevant problems. When other big name developers have abused audience trust in similar ways the games community has been good about calling it out, and yet this didn’t happen to the extent I would have liked to see with Rock Band 4. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to come after Harmonix with their pitchforks and torches or that Rock Band 4 deserves the kind of response games like Assassin’s Creed: Unity or the Batman: Arkham Knight PC version did, but I’m worried a lot of people got screwed here and nobody paid attention because Harmonix don’t have a reputation for this and because Rock Band is not a standard AAA blockbuster. It’s complicated though. Part of the worry here is that these things happened even when Harmonix and Mad Catz were showing a considerable competence at their jobs.

It would be easy to say that the ungracious way that Rock Band 4 has stumbled into peoples’ living rooms is the result of Harmonix and Mad Catz phoning it in, but I just don’t believe that. Mad Catz have cared deeply about peripheral quality in the past, Harmonix have been committed to the quality of their games and to building a large library of DLC, and this was a big gig for both of them. Mistakes were made by these companies that they should be held accountable for, but the really scary thing is companies this well-versed and dedicated to their craft can still fall this far when it comes to trying to ferry old hardware and content into a new console generation. Some blame for the difficulty of that process has to rest at the feet of the console manufacturers, although one more than the other.

Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect the console makers to account for all the far-reaching and specific needs of a game like Rock Band, but running down the multiple potential struggles in getting this game to work, it becomes striking how many more problems the Xbox One has than the PS4. The PS4 doesn’t require a special adapter for older instruments, its rechargeable controller means one less set of batteries, it has USB ports on the front making the mic easier to use, the Rock Band 1 OST is available on it first, and it’s generally seemed to encounter fewer technical snafus. At its core though, I think many of the problems with Rock Band 4 are to do with the basic nature of the current consoles.

The consistent marketing spin is that new consoles are able to improve our experience with and connect us better to the games we love, and in many situations that’s true, but in many others we’re finding the new hardware has helped place a dividing line between ourselves and the games, content, and general products we value. No game stands stronger as a symbol of that dividing line than Rock Band 4. I don’t think newer consoles inherently have to obsolete the products we bought to work with previous platforms, but when so much of gaming has become locked up in digital goods and certain companies have been placing huge emphasis on products peripheral to the console itself, failing to provide proper support for those goods and peripherals is no longer something that is acceptable from the industry as a collective. Thanks for reading.