Rock Band 4 has count-ins, drum fills and vocal harmonies

Rock Band 4 will more closely emulate the feeling of being a real musician with some neat personalisation touches.

For Rock Band 4, Harmonix elected to double down on player ownership of their experience rather than technical precision. To this end, it has implemented a number of cool new features.

I am wildly envious of IGN, which visited Harmonix and came back with this delicious intel: songs will begin after a count-in from the drummer.

During songs, drummers will be presented with drum fills at random intervals, so every time you play a song, you'll have a different experience. These authored but unexpected sequences replace the Overdrive-triggering freestyle sections in previous games, which many players found a bit jarring.

As for singers, a fan group has written vocal harmonies for every Rock Band track ever released, so if you have a group of friends and multiple mics, you can really go to town.

For soloists, you'll no longer be required to stick precisely to the original track, but can instead express yourself with improvisations as long as you stay in tune. A separate improv scoring meter will track these exercises in creativity, and add them to your final score.

The full article also contains further discussion of why personalisation is so important to Harmonix, and some snippets on the new, RPG-like campaign mode. It sounds great to me, but I'm a tragic fan, I guess.

Rock Band 4 is coming this year on PS4 and Xbox One, and will support all your old instruments. Now I just have to figure out how to retrieve my band members from around the globe before it hits.