Rocket League isn't Psyonix's first go at car football. It's the sequel. The original was a 2008 PlayStation 3 download called Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars, and the studio's own design director has called that "the worst game name of all time".
Psyonix said so on launch day, too. Its post on the PlayStation Blog on 7 July 2015 told readers that players all over the world were starting to play "our sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars". It added that even more were joining in for free, because Rocket League launched on PS4 in PlayStation Plus's Instant Game Collection.
Same game, different result
Here's the bit worth knowing if you like systems. At GDC in 2016, Psyonix design director Corey Davis opened his talk with a clip that looked like Rocket League with the frame rate and detail wrong. It was Battle-Cars. "It was basically the same game as Rocket League," Davis said, as Game Developer reported. "It was our first independent game, and we weren't sure what went wrong."
His list of what went wrong is refreshingly blunt. There was no marketing and no time to polish. The frantic gameplay looked choppy at 30 frames per second. And PS3 online play wasn't as robust as it had seemed when the team tested over a LAN on their PCs. The game didn't sell or review well, Game Developer wrote, but the players who got it loved it. Davis remembered endless community montages and clips, helped by YouTube exports Psyonix supported back in 2008.
Push Square saw the same thing from the outside. When Rocket League was announced for PS4 in December 2014, it called Battle-Cars a "secret PlayStation 3 smash" that never won the plaudits of the platform's biggest games but quietly built a passionate fanbase, with a sizeable online community more than six years after release.
What Psyonix changed
Davis put the turnaround down to a few specific calls. Three of them are worth spelling out:
- 60 frames per second. "Response is so critical that the extra frame rate is essential," he said. "It felt bad and sluggish on PS3."
- Bespoke physics. Real physics, he said, were too random and unpredictable. Psyonix wanted predictability and consistency.
- PlayStation Plus. Rocket League was free at launch for PS4 owners on the service, which Game Developer says led to 6 million downloads. Davis called it the "best decision we ever made".
Psyonix's launch post adds the rest of the 2015 package: dedicated servers, cross-play with PC, Season Mode, four-player splitscreen, eight-player online and a replay viewer with cameras anywhere. Ranked matches arrived as a launch-day surprise, with a "Pre-Season" before Season 1 started in August.
The old game wasn't written out of the story, either. The same post said Rocket League's first DLC map, Utopia, was inspired by the classic Battle-Cars arena, and that like all of Psyonix's future maps it would be free.
Beau's take: The physics call is the one competitive players should thank Psyonix for. A ball that behaves the same way every time is what makes practice pay off: you can learn a touch, repeat it and trust it in a match. The frame rate and the free PS Plus launch got people in the door. I'd argue the predictable physics is what gave them a reason to stay and get better.
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