New Details on Rock Band 4 Expansion, Rock Band Rivals

Rockudrama is a first for the series, as it brings live-action Behind the Music style interviews to your band’s career. The narration and interviews will follow your band from its first gig to the inevitable breakup due to “creative differences.” The mode will also bring new venues, gear for your bandmates, and gameplay challenges.

Rivals Mode will introduce weekly challenges and leaderboards to the game that players will join “Crews” to compete in. Players will be able to contribute to their crew through any of the game’s different modes, including Rockudrama. It’s unclear at this time how Crews will work exactly, but Harmonix is promising more details in the coming months.

There will also be 10 new songs included with the Rivals expansion, however they will only be for pre-orders. The new songs are:

• Bring Me the Horizon – “Happy Song”
• Capital Cities – “Safe and Sound”
• Eagle-Eye Cherry – “Save Tonight”
• Pharrell Williams – “Happy”
• The Neighbourhood – “Sweater Weather”
• Of Monsters and Men – “Little Talks”
• Semisonic – “Closing Time”
• Sia – “Chandelier”
• Skillet – “Feel Invincible”
• Weezer – “King of the World”

Additionally, Amazon has two exclusive pre-order songs:

• Maroon 5 – “One More Night”
• Matchbox Twenty – “3 AM”

Rock Band 4 felt like a rushed product when it first came out last October. Series mainstay features were missing, the UI was clunky, and the song list was disappointing. Since release, Harmonix has done well with updates to fix the issues and bring back the missing features like Practice Mode. The weekly DLC releases have also been improving with songs like Toto – “Africa” and The Pixies – “Where is My Mind” that have been long overdue. The new Rockudrama mode in this expansion will hopefully fix the one remaining issue I have with the game, which is the lackluster career. It just lacked personality which Rockudrama seems to have plenty of.