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Rocket League’s turbocharged year 2 plans
Rocket League was a definite hit in 2015, but what does Psyonix have in store for us now?
Did anyone else make quite the impact in 2015 that Psyonix made with Rocket League? The game has captured numerous awards – including three BAFTAs and three top prizes at The Game Awards – and racked up over five million sales in just under a year. 15 million unique players now tumble around the game’s arenas, and to celebrate a monumental first year, Psyonix is releasing a disc version of the game for European and North American gamers, complete with all the current DLC packs – Supersonic Fury, Revenge of the Battle-Cars and Chaos Run – as well as a limited edition art print.
“When we were making Rocket League, we never imagined [a physical release] would be an actual option for us!” says Psyonix vice president Jeremy Dunham. “It’s a major milestone and we’re really excited about it, especially considering there's a large portion of people out there that don't buy games digitally – they want that disc in their hand, or they’re not old enough to have their own credit card or account. Plus, it’s a great way to celebrate our one year anniversary.”
But enough of year one, what exactly is in store for year two? Cross-platform play for PS4 and Xbox One? Rocket League VR? “Nothing is off the table for us,” says Dunham, and it all starts with the huge patch that arrived a couple of days ago.
“[The patch] started off as a celebration of our one year anniversary,” says Dunham, “but as we worked towards it we realised there were so many features we wanted to put in the game, particularly ‘quality of life’ things that the community has been asking for. All these new features started piling up, until we realised that this is by far the biggest update we’ve done since release.”
Patch 1.19 brought two new arenas – including a futuristic Neo Tokyo–inspired one – a speight of new quick chat options for faster communication, and loads of new collectibles. Oh, and don’t forget the new ‘Showroom’, where players can preview cars and items before they purchase them. It really is a massive update, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what’s to come.
Rocket League’s brand new Neo Tokyo-style arena
© Psyonix
“Year two for us is about continuing to grow,” says Dunham. “We want to keep bringing new players into the game, but the other goal is to keep the players we already have happy and interested and entertained.
“That's why you've seen a real push in the last few months towards esports,” he continues. “We’re trying to foster the professional crowd and the really high level talent so that people can see what is possible in the game if you have enough practice and talent. But there’s also the additional modes we’ve been adding, new arenas and the quality of life features like our improved quick chat system. For us it’s about trying to expand on all fronts, not trying to sunset the game yet. The fact that we have numbers internally that we’re still seeing people come back and play as much as they are, that’s really encouraging to us, that tells us that people are looking for more in the game. That makes us really focus on improving what's already there to entice new players into giving us a go for the first time.”
The vision that Dunham lays out meshes perfectly with Psyonix’s introduction of cross-network play between Xbox One and PC back in May, and PS4 to PC cross-play, which has been supported from launch. Both of these links open the game up for players across all those platforms, allowing them to join each other in the madness of Rocket League. As Dunham explains, cross-network play adds hugely to the whole game experience, as it allows you to “find good matches, and find them quickly,” as well as allowing you to, “play with friends who you made different hardware choices to you.” Although cross-play is set to become a standard feature for Xbox games going forward, as outlined in Microsoft’s E3 2016 press conference, Rocket League remains the first game to have done it. Which begs the question – could we see Rocket League feature cross-network play between Xbox, PC and PlayStation 4 in the future?
“Well, I hope so,” says Dunham. “We think it’s the right direction to move for the industry, but we also understand that there are so many political ramifications in making that happen as quickly as we would like.
“We understand that these sorts of things take time, but we’re doing whatever we can to try and push the ball along. For example, we’ve built Rocket League with the idea of having cross-network play as a ‘pie in the sky’ feature, and once we got it working with Xbox One and PC, we expanded on that. So now, all we need to do honestly, is flip a switch. It’s a virtual switch – not a big button or anything – but if it ever came to the point where we had permission to do cross-platform on all platforms immediately, we could have it up and running within a business day. It would be very, very quick. We’ve made the game in preparation for that eventuality, so that when it happens, people can come in and experience it immediately. Our engineers are really, really good, and they spent a long time making it, so now we’re just waiting and hoping for that opportunity.”
Psyonix’s Hoops mode is the tip of the iceberg
© Psyonix
Cross-network play between PS4, Xbox One and PC isn’t the only tantalising proposition that Rocket Leaguers can look forward to, either. By Dunham’s own admission, Psyonix is, “an experimental studio that likes to try things,” and that includes taking a serious look at the possibilities offered by virtual reality tech like PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
“We like to explore all the possibilities of new hardware or even existing hardware,” he explains. “We do a lot of internal playtesting over and over to try out different things, so I’d say that nothing is off the table until the game itself is nearing completion, which in our mind, it is not yet. It's really hard to comment on specific hardware or technology because we ourselves are still exploring that, but any time anything new is announced we look at it and say, “okay, is that something we might want to think about and what does it mean, what are the implications?” So, that's one of the hallmarks of trying to support your community as strongly as you can – to keep your eyes open and see what other options are out there and what ways you can keep people interested and happy.”
For all of the game’s achievements, and everything still to come, it’s amazing to think that this time last year, no-one had any idea of how Rocket League would take the world by storm. Indeed, not even Psyonix saw this coming.
“We still anticipated working on Rocket League by this point,” explains Dunham, “it was always part of the plan to support the game in some way, but we never thought we’d be doing it this aggressively. We didn’t expect the game to take off on the level that it did.
“When we first launched on PlayStation Plus, we realised that things were going much better than expected. But by the time we released on all regions worldwide by the end of day one and going into day two, it was absolutely nuts. The two weeks after launch, a lot of us were up all day and night just trying to put out fires and keep the servers going!
Rocket League always throws up plenty of action
© Psyonix
“Even now, our numbers continue to go up, and it’s really surprising to see we’re not just maintaining an audience, but we’re bringing in hundreds and thousands of new players every single month, on every platform. For us, that’s way beyond our expectations! We figured that a year later, right now, we’d be knee deep working on our next game, and we'd be looking at Rocket League in the rear view mirror. But it’s still our main focus, and we don't see any sign of it letting up any time soon, which is both exciting and a lot of pressure. We know our audience is expecting a lot from us, so we have that drive to make sure we live up to it.”
Rocket League is still expanding at such a rate that Psyonix as a studio have been hard-pressed at times to support their own creation. Dunham admits that the game is “growing faster than the studio is able to keep up,” but he’s adamant that the studio will continue to grow responsibly. “We’ve grown from around 40 to 60 people in the space of a year,” he says, “so we’re not a massive studio – we don’t have hundreds of people running around.
“We’re trying to reach a point where we can throw even more resources at the game,” Dunham adds. “We’re not done growing yet, but we’re also not going to be one of those runaway growth studios – we want to make sure we do it intelligently. We don't want to get too big too early, and have too many people without anything thing to do.”
Clearly, Rocket League has been an absolutely massive part of this studio’s story over the last year, there’s no getting away from that. But as a rapidly growing studio that has been thrust into the industry spotlight, have Dunham and co. considered what life might look like after Rocket League?
“We definitely have lots of ideas,” he says. “I think that what’s exciting about choosing our own destiny right now is that it’s really up to us, and that’s really inspiring. Right now we can literally do any project we want, but because Rocket League is the focus right now, we can’t be specific on what that next project is just yet. Rocket League is the focus for us, but it’s not necessarily the blueprint we have to follow either.
“We look at other studios that form their own destiny and, while we’re not like Valve or Naughty Dog, those companies have made interesting games that aren't the same game over and over again. We like examples like that, we think that’s a really good model for us. Just because we made Rocket League, it does not mean that our next game has to be Rocket League-like. But we do know we have a studio that’s very good at making those sorts of games, and for us I think just the fact we’re in the position that we can make the decision is awesome.”
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