Rock Band controllers are rarely available for a decent price these days, but Fortnite Festival’s success may fix that.
Fortnite Festival could be getting brand new instrument controllers if a teaser by PDP is anything to go by, and this is great news for fans of the Rock Band series.
Fortnite Festival is the latest mode to join Fortnite’s seemingly never-ending mode pool, featuring rhythm-based gameplay where you can watch Peter Griffin from Family Guy hit the Griddy before playing Vampire by Olivia Rodrigo on a keytar. Fortnite Festival comes courtesy of Harmonix, who you may know as the creators of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series‘. While those series’ used plastic guitars to play along with the music, Fortnite Festival uses controller (our keyboard) inputs much like Rock Band Unplugged or the DS titles, at least for now.
Epic Games confirmed in the Fortnite Festival launch blog post, that instrument controller support is on the way, saying “It’s a priority for the team and currently under development. We’ll have more to share in 2024”. This is all well and good but if you’ve been trying to get into Rock Band over the last few years, you’ll no doubt know how hard it is to get your hands on those controllers these days.
However, PDP may have some good news for us, with a recent @PDPgaming Twitter post stating “Rock On this January” with the silhouette of a guitar. It’s worth noting that PDP made the second wave of instruments for Rock Band 4 (for the Rock Band Rivals expansion) following Harmonix and Mad Catz parting ways. So it looks like instruments are back on the menu.
Guitar Hero
Okay, sure, this is technically for Fortnite Festival, and that mode seems like it’ll be way better if you can play with a dedicated controller. But this news is a way bigger deal for the Rock Band community. As I mentioned, picking up a set of instruments for Rock Band 4 these days is a nightmare. Just having a quick look at eBay right now, you can see Guitars and Drum controllers going for around £200 alone, meanwhile, the Xbox One adapter, which allows you to use your old Xbox 360 controllers on modern platforms, will run you about £400. It’s not a good time to try and get into it.
However, if PDP gets back into music controller manufacturing – provided these controllers are compatible with Rock Band 4 – Fortnite Festival could be the best thing to happen to the Rock Band fanbase in years.
