Hey Rock Banderinos,
We’ve got some good news to share, news that you’ve been patiently waiting a while to hear. You may have heard that some new consoles are coming out this November, about a month from now in fact, and with them comes some new backwards compatibility features. To get right to the point:
Rock Band 4 and all DLC will work on the next generation consoles day 1. We believe previously supported instruments should work as expected. See below for a full list of what was tested.
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty.
Our team has been diligently testing a bunch of old gear on the new systems to make sure everything works exactly as it does today. When you break open those crisp new consoles, you should be able to connect your existing, compatible peripherals and play Rock Band 4 right out of the box.
What about my E-Kit and Adapters?
We have also confirmed that all those various adapters on the Xbox side work, so current e-kit drummers and Legacy Wireless players should all be set day 1.
Will all of my DLC and save data transition over?
All DLC currently available for download will also work on new consoles. No messy generation transition this time, it’s the same DLC!
Save data can transfer over on both consoles. If you're playing on Xbox and have saved on the cloud recently, it'll do so automatically! On PlayStation®, you can use a few methods, like cloud saves for PlayStation Plus members, or hard drive transfers, to get the data from your current console to your new one.
Let me hear about those sweet, sweet load times.
You'll notice a pretty sizable performance increase on both consoles, especially with load times. Getting into gameplay has never been faster, even with large library sizes! Both the new Xbox and PlayStation consoles are on par with each other when it comes to load times. Impressive across the board.
I’m getting a next-gen console, but my friend is not. Can I still play with them?
Online Multiplayer will also function across generations within their console family. So, Xbox Series X/S players will be able to play online with Xbox One players and vice versa, same on PlayStation 5 with PlayStation 4 players.
We hope to continue support for Rock Band 4 for the foreseeable future! Thank you for your continued dedication and passion to the series, we’re so happy to be able to bring you this good news ahead of this next-gen launch.
Anything else we need to know to get started?
On the PlayStation 5, there's a microphone in the controller, and the console defaults to that microphone, which Rock Band 4 recognizes. If you want to use a regular USB mic, you'll have to change that in your console settings. Also, just as a heads up, any USB mic should still work.
Also on PlayStation 5, if you're using the PlayStation 4 era instruments (Mad Catz/PDP guitars and drums), you connect them to the console the same way you did on the PlayStation 4 - via the Bluetooth accessories spot in the options menu.
For reference, here is the full list of instrument controllers we tested. This is not a comprehensive list. Generally, if it worked on Rock Band 4 on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, it should work on next-gen.
**We were not able to test peripherals from other games, but we believe previously supported instruments should work as expected.