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Rock Band 4 E3 2016 Update Harmonix Responds to Criticism About Rivals Info

743 views · Published 15 June 2016 · 1:41 · Indexed 22 October 2026

Channel: Rock N' Roll True Stories · 2016 · Gaming

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Harmonix's Response

https://www.reddit.com/r/Rockband/comments/4o8ajp/hmx_continues_to_confuse_me/

You could argue that maybe they just haven't hammered out all the details yet and don't want to announce something prematurely only for it to change before launch.
This is pretty much it. Back in April, we were planning on pulling back the curtain all the way at E3, but we've made some exciting changes recently and wanted to give them a bit more polish before sharing them with the world. There are a few different things at play here, and ultimately saving them for a later time was the better call.
They're about to start taking pre-orders, they ought to know what it is they are selling by now.
About to, but haven't started yet. We'll be sharing more soon, after which we'll launch pre-orders. I don't want to ask anyone to pony up money before they know what you get for that money, which is one of the reasons we didn't launch pre-orders yesterday. We won't have our entire roadmap of 2017 updates out there, but you'll definitely know what's included in the expansion pack on day one. We're sharing a booth with PDP, so it only made sense to give hands-on with the new instruments. For what it's worth, even if we announced the new features yesterday, we wouldn't have offered hands-on gameplay at the booth.
There are a lot of moving pieces here, and there were a few different ways we could have gone, like showing off the new instruments without mentioning the expansion pack at all, pricing the instruments but not the expansion pack (Which doesn't show the value of the bundles very well, if you don't know how much the expansion is worth), and a few other variants, but this ultimately felt like the best call if we weren't going to show the expansion pack features.
It's a fair callout about referring to online as a "free" update, but there's been a decent amount of confusion (less so on Reddit, I think) about what's paid and what's not, and we just want to be sure that people know that you don't have to pay for the expansion in the fall and then pay again to get online later in the year. It's a complicated message for sure, and we're definitely not trying to intentionally deceive anyone by using the word "free" in there. For what it's worth, I'm taking this back to the team so try to clear up the messaging around this so we don't have to use "free" in this way anymore.
The piece that I want to end on is acknowledging some of your "nobody asked for X" comments. It's totally true, nobody asked for Brutal Mode or Rock Band VR. Nobody asked for Guitar Hero either before we launched that in 2005. Nobody asked for adding other instruments when we launched Rock Band in 2007. There's definitely value in listening to community feedback and adjusting the roadmap accordingly (See: Setlists, Practice Mode, double kick support, online multiplayer, etc.), but to be frank, we have some super creative people that work here, and there's also value in letting them bring their creativity, senses of humor, and raw talent to Rock Band by creating brand new additions to the game.
I really do think that the new features coming in the expansion pack will be like that: Things you didn't know you wanted until you saw them.

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