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San Diego, the home of snowboarding legend, Shaun White and Psyonix, the makers of rocket league.
Psyonix is currently testing the Xbox version of the game set to release in about a month.
Other than that, they're making more art assets to bring players new cars, antennas, and some secret stuff they wouldn't talk about just yet.
I'm here to see what they've been up to lately.
You might not know this, but Bionics makes more than just Rocket League.
This studio's been churning out games since 2008.
The year they first released the original Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars.
Over the next seven years they would grow to over 50 people strong, and work tirelessly to find a better name for the same game.
The success of Rocket League was a surprise to everyone, so now they work to add new content to the game, and to come up with new ways to get players involved.
So I sat down with design director Corey Davis to talk at length about the game's release and their new focus on community maps.
I would say up until the day it came out we weren't really sure how well it would do.
We still kind of had an itching feeling on the back of our heads that it was like a niche game and no one would really like it was too hard So it was really flabbergasting the reach that it had.
I think that Playstation Plus still really got it into a lot of people's hands who might not have tried it, but it was really awesome.
We were just blown away.
Depending on how well the game did we didn't know if we could make [UNKNOWN] if we could afford to so It's really allowed us to kinda stretch our legs a little bit, and see what do we wanna do for Rocket League?
For the release of Rocket League, we really wanted to focus on a really good standard arena and build around that.
And some of our original [UNKNOWN] were like, what did you guys do with the crazy mats in the first game?
And Frankly the real limitation is it just takes us a lot of time to make a map to the art quality that you see in the game.
Rocket labs was just an internal sort of like pet project of a couple of us where we said what if we made a not holo deck but kind of like bare bones style set that we could just release a bunch of maps on more quickly and see what the community Thought about then.
We're gonna have three maps to start with for the first release, they're all just completely different types of maps than what you've seen before.
So there's a throwback to the first game, it's a circular sort of donut map, we're calling it a retro-utopia.
And you can actually drive between the goals in a tunnel.
And then the other two are more focused on different ways to play Rocket League, so one has very raised Sides to the map so there's a lot more verticality than you normally see.
And the other one actually had a split so there's two goal entrances, and we find that really changed up the game play, too.
We had some of our pro players saying they wish there was more height variance because they wanted to see what kind of interesting aerial play you would get when it wasn't just everyone leaping from flat ground.
And that one, even our limited testing has seen really cool, people diving down onto the ball from above, rather than just flying up, but everything we're doing is just sort of step by step.
Let's let you guys try this out, and then if everyone likes it, or most of you like it, then we'll push it into ranked.
But we're being very careful about tampering with what we feel is sort of the very pure Core essence of [UNKNOWN].
So let's take a better look at these maps and what you can expect.
First up is utopia retro, which is a throwback to the original game but with Tron skin.
You can drive through the goal to get on the offensive or defense much quicker.
There's also a ramp in the middle of the donut that's got a boost in it so it feels real good to hit it in the middle of a battle.
Underpass is two tiered, with a second level on the outer rim that ramps over the goal, resulting in more teamwork based aerial hits.
In fact the whole level lends itself more to high flying action to keep up with the elevated sides.
Finally, double goal is what you expected, it's the double goal with the net in between.
This one's my least favorite of the three, because the extra lip in between the goals increases the chances of your car getting out of control.
You can drive those these goals as well which will make for some interesting team play.
All three of the maps encourage more communication and new play tactics.
You'll have to adapt your skills to meet the needs of each map.
And all though these maps aren't currently in ranked playlists, they have the potential to be added.
Rocket Labs might be a breath of fresh air for players looking to mix up traditional gameplay but not everyone is interested in [inaudible], snow day, and my least favorite, Wasteland.
And with all the various match option, they are dividing their player base.
Which can make it harder to be match against someone with a similar skill level.
So at the end of the day, what is the core gameplay Psyonix wants their players to experience?
And how does Rocket Labs add to that?
When you play a match, you win on your skill alone and your team skill alone and not like dice rolls or, you know.
It's not like a MOBA where you pick your hero poorly, it's every match is just shearly.
How well you can manipulate your car and your team's cars.
I think that's why we think there's room for maps like this because it's like soccer wouldn't change the layout of the field is sometimes the argument we see against changing up the core playing field.
But when you look at [UNKNOWN] more as a physics sport and reacting to how interacts with your environment, then we think there is potentially room In there.
So that's something I wanna explore with the community.
You can expect to play Rocket Labs in the next February update.
And whether or not these maps are up your alley, at least Psyonics is listening.
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