Developer Psyonix has announced that Rocket League will finally receive its long-promised Xbox One X Enhanced support on December 3rd.

Xbox One X enhancements were initially announced for Rocket League in 2017 but, due to technical challenges, were pushed back into 2018. With Enhanced support now mere weeks away though, game director Scott Rudi has confirmed that Xbox One X players will soon be able to experience Rocket League at native 4K at 60 frames per second, and with supersampling enabled when playing on a 1920 1080 display.

Additionally, on supported 4K televisions, "Rocket League will offer HDR with options to adjust Paper White and Contrast settings, as well as a Side-by-Side visualizer."

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Let's face it - everything's better with friends, and this is a mantra Rocket League developer Psyonix has championed for some time. As one of the studios most vocally in favour of cross-platform play, Psyonix has actually already implemented the feature, which currently allows PC, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch players to game together (while PlayStation can still only play with PC - for now).

The problem with the current setup, however, is players cannot party with players on other platforms before heading into matches. This is where RocketID comes in - a standalone system designed to allow cross-platform players to group up. Yet despite promises the highly-anticipated system would be ready by the end of the year, it seems RocketID won't arrive until early 2019.

In the latest Rocket League roadmap blog post, Psyonix explained it has made the "difficult decision" to push the release back in order to make the system "as intuitive, stable, and polished as possible before releasing it to the world".

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Rocket League developer Psyonix has always been a major proponent of console cross-play, and now the feature has been implemented in Fortnite, the studio has issued an update on the future of cross-play in its footballing car game.

In a Reddit post, Psyonix CEO Dave Hagewood said Rocket League had been built as "a cross-platform game from the very beginning". Alluding to the Fortnite cross-play news, the CEO expressed delight he could "now acknowledge that all the major consoles are making progress towards a truly all-platform cross-platform play experience".

Despite the overwhelming positivity of the statement, it sounds like full console cross-play may still take some time to arrive in Rocket League. According to Hagewood, "cross-platform play is not something Psyonix and Rocket League can do on its own". The CEO added that implementing cross-play "takes the substantial cooperation and coordination of many partners, most notably the platform holders themselves". For this reason, Hagewood advised players "have some patience" as Psyonix works to fulfill its vision of a "truly unified Rocket League community".

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Rocket League developer Psyonix has announced that the four-wheeled footie phenomenon will be ushering its ninth competitive season on Monday, September 24th.

The accompanying Season 9 update will be released simultaneously on all platforms and, according to Psyonix's latest blog post, introduces a number of new features. Most notably, Rocket League's ninth season marks the arrival of Extra Modes, formerly known as Ranked Sports. This sees Dropshot, Hoops, Rumble, and Snow Day modes lose their Casual status, and join the game's Rank-based Competitive Playlists.

Additionally, Season 9 adds a new in-game soundtrack - Rocket League x Monstercat Vol. 4 - plus Season 8 Rewards, and various quality of life improvements and bug fixes. The recently introduced Rocket Pass 1 continues into the new season, concluding on November 26th.

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Don't expect to see esports in the Olympic Games any time soon. International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach believes the video games being played still promote violence and killing too much to be included.

"We cannot have in the Olympic programme a game which is promoting violence or discrimination," Bach told the Associated Press during the recent Asian Games - an event where esports were, for the first time, a feature, albeit as a demonstration sport only. "So-called killer games. They, from our point of view, are contradictory to the Olympic values and cannot therefore be accepted."

It's an arguably hypocritical stance given the long list of combat or weapon sports already in the Olympic Games: boxing, martial arts, fencing, shooting, archery and so on. Bach himself was even once an Olympic gold-medalist fencer.

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Rocket League's first Fortnite-style Rocket Pass will go live next week, on Wednesday 5th September at 6pm UK time on all of the game's platforms - PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One.

Rocket Pass 1, as the first pass is called, will last from 5th September until 26th November and include 29 free rewards. You can then pay to unlock the pass' premium tier, which holds 70 snazzy prizes. Simply play matches online to progress up the ranks.

You can take a look at all the premium tier rewards via the Rocket Pass site - the selection includes new cosmetics like car skins, wheels, explosions, and sounds, plus XP boosts and crate keys. Here's a look at them in action:

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Nearly two years after adding crates and keys to Rocket League, developer Psyonix has published the rarity levels found within them for the first time.

Every crate released so far has followed these same rarity percentages, Psyonix said in a new blog posted last night.

Rare items, somewhat contradictrily, account for 55 per cent of drops. The rarest tiers are exotic (four per cent) and black market (one per cent).

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Developer Psyonix's supremely popular four-wheeled footie game Rocket League is having another free weekend, and proceedings are now underway.

The event offers free access to all available Rocket League game modes, playlists, features, and arenas, and runs until 6pm BST/10am PDT on Monday, July 9th. It is, however, only open to Steam users and Xbox Live Gold subscribers on Xbox One.

To accompany the free weekend, Psyonix is knocking 50% off the game until July 9th on both platforms. It'll cost 7.49 on Steam, and 8.00 on Xbox One via the Microsoft Store.

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Developer Psyonix has detailed Rocket League's forthcoming anniversary event - which celebrates three years of the supremely popular four-wheeled multiplayer battler, and comes to PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Switch on July 9th.

More specifically, the anniversary event begins at 6pm BST/10am PDT on Monday July 9th, and comes to an end at 1am, July 24th in the UK, and 5pm PDT on July 23rd in the US.

The event will actually be a bit of a combined birthday celebration: marking three years of Rocket League, and ten years of its predecessor, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars. As such, come July 9th, a new 3v3 'Anniversary' Playlist will be introduced to the Casual Playlists page, featuring Throwback Stadium - an arena directly inspired by Battle-Cars.

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Car football game Rocket League is getting its own version of Fortnite's Battle Pass, named the Rocket Pass.

It works in much the same way - developer Psyonix will sell a pass for each new in-game season of content released throughout the year. If you pay up you'll get extra cosmetic rewards as you play.

There's a free version of the Rocket Pass as well, which everyone gets. It includes customisation options, banners, titles and decryptors.

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