The much-anticipated return for the Rock Band series with Rock Band 4, which has the potential to revive the peripheral-based rhythm genre, has been slated for October and will run at 1080p at 60fps. Harmonix product manager Eric Pope confirmed as much in separate articles in the latest issue of MCV via Videogamer.
Pope said that Rock Band 4 has been built on a brand new engine "to make the most of the new hardware" and it's "going to look 'next-gen' with more realistic lighting, character models, and animation."
"It'll be 1080p and will run at 60fps. I know there's a vocal group of players that want to hear that. But what to me is more exciting is the online infrastructure of the consoles. It will open a lot [of] opportunities for us to support the game in more reactive, timely ways."
What Pope said is true. It's not so much a matter of whether Rock Band 4 will run at 1080p at 60fps and more about whether the online infrastructure can handle that much information across four players and sync it all properly. In fact, I would be impressed if it handles regular syncing well, because I've had to deal with audio/video lag more times in Rock Band than I care to remember.
With the game's October release window, we should expect it to be available in some capacity at E3 and PAX. I'm interested to see if it will feature launch-day releases for real instruments that will be compatible with the game, if Harmonix chooses to continue the "Pro" feature; if so, we can expect a rather firm release date with some resistance to delays.
