Rock Band 4 will work with old Guitar Hero hardware, Harmonix says

Upcoming music title Rock Band 4 won’t just work with old Rock Band hardware – it’ll also work with any Guitar Hero gamers may have.

That’s according to Harmonix’s Daniel Sussman who told Business Insider: "We’re planning to support everything that we can: That includes all of the old Rock Band controllers and all the old Guitar Hero controllers.

Our position is really all about respect for our consumers and for the money that they have spent to get into the game space in the first place. They spend a fortune on games: on consoles, on hardware, and we’re sensitive to that. We play those games too. We buy all the same stuff.

A world where you need to have three different guitars and two drum sets and all this stuff is… we don’t want to support that world.”

Harmonix announced its intention” for Rock Band 4 to support legacy hardware when it announced the game last month. It was presumed, however, that this only applied to Rock Band hardware.

The studio’s plans go one further too – it also wants to support the new guitar shipping with Guitar Hero Live.

"I don’t see anything on it that makes me think that we couldn’t figure out a way to support it," Sussman added. "And yet I won’t know for sure until we get one in the office."

The strategy is in contrast to Activision’s new title, which will not support older hardware or any of the series’ previous DLC – again, in contrast with Rock Band 4. Developer Freestyle games says this is due to the fact that the game is trying to do things differently to before.

"It’s not 2010 any more," Freestyle boss Games Jamie Jackson said earlier this week. "There are not many other games that let you use stuff you bought back then in their games now. The difference with this is, it’s completely different gameplay. So, quite simply, the DLC you bought just won’t work. The guitar is different. The way we’ve presented it is different.”