TLDR: dunno if anyone wants to replicate it today, because the experience of early years Rocket League is completely gone now. So ‘they’ dont even have a reference point to replicate.
Psyonix fumbled RL so hard its not funny. I have 1500 hours on Steam since launch. In my experience, like with a lot of competitive online games, RL became more and more sweaty and toxic as time progressed - it’s already not the largest pool of players, and even when queuing casual matches you’re matchmade with similarly-skilled players - so once you’ve been playing for say 50 hours you find yourself in quite a few toxic matches with higher-skill players. But, there was thankfully a remedy - anyone wanting to chill simply used the fun modes (snow day, rumble, and hoops) and told anyone who was toxic in game to get bent. I had a crew of several dozen regulars that I’d befriended and we enjoyed hitting those modes because they were taken much less seriously than the standard 2v2 or 3v3 matches. Many many laughs had over the years I played. Then Psyonix retired those modes from the casual queue/playlist and made them competitive-only around 2019 - no reason cited. This pretty much quadrupled the queue times for those modes, and ensured the matches were higher stakes (rank points) and more toxic. Why?
This was not the first or last time Psyonix made decisions that the community at large hated. Every controversial change they made was met with a lot of pleading on the forums (and Reddit) with devs to reverse course, which they would hand wave with ‘we’ll take this feedback on board’ kind of responses, then as time ticked on we saw lootbox after lootbox/decal/season-pass/timed-exclusive-grind-drops/paid-cars hit the game… And dev focus started to become clear. Before you say ‘they had to pay for the game’, this was all before the game went F2P. It became obvious that dev priority was ways to make the game even more of a dopamine-to-wallet loop, and casual fun is not a priority, they wanted an e-sports scene. I guess the casual players fit none of those goals.
At that point my RL friends persisted gettinf together regularly for private matches (so we could still load the fun modes), but the ability to just load into the game and queue up some relaxed no-stakes silly car soccer (or hockey, or basketball) was long gone for experienced regulars - i can’t imagine it was easy for new players to get into the game at that point. Gg. Haven’t even had it installed for a few years now, and I read now they removed the ‘fun modes’ entirely from the ranked queue options now, so they just come back for seasonal events? Why??
Psyonix had a money printer and they broke it by trying to make the money print faster. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
In their defense I don’t think they could have come up with any standard chat lines that wouldn’t be used sarcastically by toxic players.
If I was a dev if you spammed the lines 3 times in a row I’d change the third one to something to diffuse the hate, from a random selection of lines that are hard to take sarcastically. "I love you! ", “Wooo!”, etc
I bought the game about 6 months after it was released and I had over 3000 hours in that game before I stopped playing a few years back.
The first 1200+ hours was in Snowday alone, and I doubt I’ll ever have as much fun in a video game than I did in that mode. I started to play all the modes plus the steam workshop mods (for hundreds of hours) just to get better car control to play Snowday.
Unfortunately at the end it was all competitive and it had started to be more of a chore than fun but I stand by those first thousands of hours at the most fun I’ve ever had.
Hell, most of the time even the losing part of Snowday was enjoyable when playing against and with the right people.
Yeah i’ll remember the good times fondly for sure. In its peak it was a great time and I don’t regret the time spent one bit.
The puck added a fun dimension, being able to fairly effortlessly run it up walls or onto the roof (compared to the ball), and the wonderful semi-glitchy physics of pinch hits on the flat surface of a puck. Nothing like pinch-hitting it against another player’s vehicle and watching the puck rocket unstoppably across into the goal. “Calculated”.
Im completely oblivious to any of the enshittification, but like any online game the fun is long gone for most people. Skill floor is way too high. As soon as you join a match youre completely outskilled by everybody and its clear youre nothing but a hindrance to your team.
Your opponents laugh at you and style as hard as they can and your teammates resent your existence, assuming they stick around long enough to make it clear.
Hyper-competitive games are fun for about 3 months and then youre either in or out.
Yeah agreed. Best time to get into most competition games is when they’re in their ‘growing playerbase’ phase with lots of new players, still room for casual players. Then they slowly get pushed out.
There’s room for modes that encourage casual fun though to keep that part of the playerbase active, which is what made Psyonix’s decisions so frustrating.
Not much to understand. A chunk is a small part of a map. People do challenges to do everything in a chunk then move to the next. This guy chose a part of a map that took hundreds of hours to complete and did it.
Have you heard of Cookie Clicker? It’s an idler game where you click a cookie to get points. You can spend those points on upgrades like automated clicking and more points per click. The goal is to get like a billion points or something but with the upgrades you’re eventually getting millions of points a second without even clicking. Now imagine saying “I want to hit a billion points without buying a single upgrade. I’m literally just going to click the cookie a billion times.” That’s what this guy did, but with Old School Runescape.
There’s been a trend of extreme OSRS players trying to one up each other in dedicating years of their life to doing a repetitive task for 18 hours a day, every day.
But how does controlling the karts feel there? Last I tried STK (~2017), the controls felt floaty as fuck, like there was no gravity or friction between karts and the ground
Epic has been trying real hard to remove the mojo tho. I have 1000+ hours in Rocket League, very few of those are from after Epic hyper-enshitified the game.
How about getting rid of casual Snow Day. I got on a year or so ago and you couldn’t even play Snow Day as they moved it to some rotating schedule where it was swapped out every other month with some other game mode. Who does shit like that?
For me, it started when they took the non-standard maps out of competitive play.
I’m guessing you’re talking about the old neo-tokyo map. I felt it was a bit chaotic for ranked myself, so I liked that change. But Epic is still trash, don’t get me wrong 😂
In case you didn’t see the trick further down the thread - you have to make sure to install the windows version of the game that runs with proton. Then you can connect to online matches. Installing the linux version is a trap; frankly, they should just delist it at this point.
FYI, playing the Windows version with Proton is often better than native Linux versions. I almost always at least try using GE-Proton, even if a game has a Linux runtime.
Not long ago I tried to log in for the first time in a year or two, and I was stopped by a big long TOS agreement that promptly made me switch to another game
Clearly never played proball, a quake3 mod which was a fucking hoot and laid a lot of groundwork for Rocket League. Did hours of this at LAN parties
Soccer tournament for unreal was also excellent. Deathball for 2004 for was also brilliant. I’d love to see CoD or Fortnite do a modern fps take on the concept
Rematch hasn’t released yet, but a few public playtests happened. While there are some strong similarities to Rocket League like controlling a single player, the walled arena and having a form of boost, it’s still very different and hasn’t yet given me the same thrill.
Rematch does not have the verticality, and so it’s missing a whole dimension (and multiple degrees of freedom) of skill expression. The arena is significantly larger, as it’s built for more players, which results in a much slower game. It has the potential to be a very solid new esports game, however I can’t see it pulling away many players from Rocket League.
First and foremost it’s bold to put this out before Drag x Drive releases which is just weird enough to become its own thing. Second, even the owner Epic doesn’t even seem to know what to do with Rocket League because they seem to be trying to make it part of Fortnite. Thirdly, esports are everywhere, sorry not all of them look like legacy sports but that’s not a problem for people playing the games
Look man, as someone who thought Switch 2 mouse controls were a gimmick and has sunk 17 hours into Civ VII, I don’t feel confident enough to tell all these people that they are wrong. If I had been in college and was told people could get scholarships for NASCAR Soccer I would have laughed in your face. Being that cocky is asking to be wrong
I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would put good money on this being closer to Excite Truck in the public consciousness a few years from now rather than one of the most successful games of all time. So no, it’s not bold to think that Drag X Drive isn’t going to supplant Rocket League.
It doesn’t help that Nintendo seems to actively hinder competitive play in their games. It’s not starting from a winning position, but I wouldn’t count it out entirely.
My partner and I had a lot of fun playing RL back when it released. We both purchased it. Toxicity in matches grew exponentially soon after and she was the first to eventually get tired of it’s chat, players scoring against their team, and so on. We both stopped playing and then it’s dev studio was sold to Epic Games and the EGS account requirement was that last little push we needed to know we wouldn’t play it ever again. Still, we share some very good memories of that game. I’d say it was worth the purchase.
I have a friend who does game QA. A lot of the time issues this major are caught, documented, and then management decides the extra delay to solve it isn’t worth the effort because “it’s not going to impact enough people to matter”. Then, once a firestorm erupts due to public backlash, they try and blame it on QA.
My friend has gotten very good at ass-covering, and makes sure every issue ticket is very explicit, not only in terms of what the issue is, the cause, reproducibility, but also how likely the average user is to hit it just to avoid blame.
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