The 1.05 Rocket League [official site] patch has hit meaning the first season of ranked play has officially begun AND you PC players can now eliminate PS4 players (Rocketeers?) from your matches.
Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was a moderate success but the phrases niche genre and cult classic don’t exactly whet the appetites of people wanting to make money, Jared Cone tells me. The lead gameplay programmer has agreed to talk about the making of Rocket League [official site] – its physics, its multiplayer, its tremendous success – but the difficulties start before the coding began, with the 2008 release of predecessor SARBC and its middling reviews and sales.
There wasn’t an inkling of interest coming from anybody. That’s why Rocket League, like its predecessor, is completely self-funded,” says Cone. “We would do work-fire-hire jobs to pay the bills while working on Rocket League in our free time and between contracts. It was difficult and the game had a low probability of ever releasing, but in the end it was probably for the better because we got to make the game we wanted to without having to cater to outside interests.
Psyonix were free to chase the fun. Seven years and five million Rocket League downloads later, it looks like they caught it.
August was a busy month for the RPS community, with action seen in Dirt Rally [official site], Rocket League [official site], Terraria [official site] and others – including Awesomenauts [official site], Natural Selection 2 [official site] and Killing Floor [official site].
Click on for information about each, along with how you can get involved.
I’ve just finished catching up on the grand final of MLG’s first North American Rocket League [official site] tournament and it was a doozy of a best-of-three!
The MLG eSports organisation have been dipping their toes in the Rocket League waters. It’s mostly because their resident FPS expert and exec producer Chris Puckett is (like the rest of the internet) in love with the game and wants to explore its eSports potential – he thinks it has loads and I’m in agreement. After all, it’s a really easy game to explain to anyone – football/soccer with cars – and has the capacity for really exciting, highly gif-able plays throughout the five minute matches.
You can watch the match after the jump! [Spoilers if you’re working through the whole tournament and don’t want to know who reached the final yet.]
Rocket League [official site] is our game of the month for August. Why? Because it’s ace and it’s about to get even more so with patch 1.04 and the upcoming DLC, Supersonic Fury. The DLC is on the way later this month, but the patch is laying groundwork for it and out now. It’s pretty hefty by itself, adding much-needed features such as spectator mode along with a new arena called “Utopia Coliseum” and some apology items for the downtime many users experienced when the game launched. Downtime that happened because it’s ace. Details below.
Rocket League [official site] is RPS’s Game of the Month for August, and part of the reason why is that it’s almost as fun to watch as it is to play. That’s why we wanted to highlight the best Rocket League players and plays. I’ve searched the highs and lows of the internet for skilled backflips, astonishing saves, one of a kind goals and the best of the best are below. Also featuring: some incredible full matches and the one “oh look how bad we are” video that actually managed to make me laugh.
Rocket League [official site] is our current Game of the Month, which means we really, really like it and we think you might too, because playing ballsports with rocket-powered cars is a right lark. But what does the future hold for futuresports?
Developers Psyonix are already working on maps that are more exotic and unusual than flat fields, and seem to have plans afoot for some sort of modding or user-generated content.
Kasketball [official site] looks broadly like Rocket League with basketball, though with fewer rockets. It’s a four-player local multiplayer basketball ‘em up where, er, you race around in a car and dribble the ball with one hand out your window as you speed towards your a net and pull the car into a drift to shoot. Sounds splendid, that. I don’t think you can dunk, mind.
Alas, I’ve recently moved and am without the usual giant tangled ball of Xbox 360 controllers I usually keep at hand for local multiplayer antics. If you have a few controllers and pals nearby, though, you can grab it from Itch to play for free.
Rocket League [official site] is our Game of the Month for August, so Adam, Alec and Graham gathered to kick the tyres – and steer the balls – of the surprisingly nuanced cars-wot-play-football multiplayer game.>
Graham: Rocket League might be my favourite multiplayer game in years.
Game Of The Month rises again, reborn for another 28-31 days of answering timeless questions such as, “What do I do if I don’t have time to play everything I want?” Answer: play just one thing. And “what one game should I play if I only play one thing?” Answer: for the month of August, car-to-ball multiplayer game Rocket League [official site].