Rock Band 4 DLC News/Thoughts Vertical Horizon & Tonic

My thoughts on this week's Rock Band 4 DLC From Tonic and Vertical Horizon

Tonic – If You Could Only See
Vertical Horizon – Everything You Want
All songs are available for $1.99 each.

Rock Band 4 debuted in October, and developer Harmonix spent more than six months after the launch adding features new and old to the game in free updates. Now, the studio and co-publisher Performance Designed Products are set to release Rock Band Rivals, which will be the game’s first paid expansion when it arrives this October.

Harmonix announced Rivals last month during E3, but didn’t provide any details on what the $29.99 expansion would contain. While convincing people to pony up for new features is a tall order, Harmonix may be up to the task. Like any good expansion, Rock Band Rivals is about giving players more of Rock Band 4, as well as a better Rock Band 4. The add-on contains two parts: a goofy new story-based career mode, and, in a first for the series, an asynchronous multiplayer offering that's both cooperative and competitive.

A quiet success
When Harmonix unveiled Rock Band 4 to the world in March 2015, the studio said it had two primary objectives for the project: to make the game a platform that would receive continual updates, and to bring the series back to basics, with a focus on playing with your friends in a room. It would be hard to say that Harmonix didn't achieve those goals — Rock Band 4 arrived in October as a stripped-down game that delivered on the core of the Rock Band experience, and the studio released free content updates on a roughly monthly basis from December through June.

So far, Harmonix’s updates to Rock Band 4 have generally consisted of adding back in elements from previous games, such as the June update’s Practice Mode, or bringing in new features geared toward the hardcore player base, like last December’s introduction of Brutal Mode. The company has also been adding support for importing songs from the previous Rock Band titles.

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Rock Band 4 review
Having said that, the general consensus around Rock Band 4 seems to be that it was a safe sequel — especially when compared to its direct competition, the starting-from-scratch experience that was Guitar Hero Live and its out-there Guitar Hero TV component. Bringing most of the Rock Band library’s 2,000-plus songs to a new console generation is undoubtedly an impressive feat, especially when you consider Rock Band 4’s high level of compatibility with old instrument controllers. But within the gaming community, the game didn’t seem to deliver the Rock Band renaissance that fans might have been hoping for.

Harmonix, for its part, doesn’t see it that way.

Rock Band 4’s sales numbers weren’t good enough to prevent the game’s original co-publisher, Mad Catz, from needing to implement a restructuring plan that involved layoffs of 37 percent of the company’s staff and the resignations of some top executives. (Harmonix has since signed with PDP, which is now co-publishing Rock Band 4 and producing new instrument controllers for the Rivals launch.)

But Daniel Sussman, product manager on Rock Band 4, told Polygon during a Rivals demo last week that the studio is "thrilled" with the game’s sales performance, which totals $100 million at retail so far (including purchases of the game and instruments, but excluding downloadable songs). As far as DLC sales go, Sussman added that Rock Band 4 has the highest attach rate of any game in the history of the franchise, meaning that Rock Band 4 players are buying more Rock Band songs on average than ever before.

Those two facts, said Sussman, proved to Harmonix that the audience and appetite exist for big new modes in Rock Band 4.

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Friends and rivals
Harmonix announced earlier this year that it is adding synchronous online multiplayer — a feature that had been part of the series since its inception — to Rock Band 4 as part of a free update that’s scheduled to launch in December. Half of Rock Band Rivals is also dedicated to online multiplayer, but of a different kind.

"Rivals [Mode] is sort of the counterpart to the online play, and kind of speaks to our ambition to expand outside of the living room," said Sussman.

The expansion’s titular mode is an asynchronous multiplayer offering — in other words, you don’t play at the same time with or against other people. Instead, you team up with as many as nine other friends to form groups called crews. Your crew competes against other crews that are designated as "rivals" in themed challenges that change every week. The individual progress that each crew member makes contributes to the group’s success (or failure) in the challenges.

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