Rocket League Dev Tracker

We've been exploring a transition to a newer version of Unreal for quite some time, but the team was quite small until this year.

We're not ready to share timelines yet about the overall project, but we have goals to start testing next year. Obviously we'll need a lot of feedback from players (and pros!) to ensure a complete rebuild of Rocket League feels right.

Our general intent is that UE5 will replace the current Rocket League. I can't say for certain today if it will be a new application or a major patch - there are too many dependencies and details around how each platform works, content ownership, etc.

Your inventory in Rocket League will carry forward and be supported and respected in the UE5 edition.

Thank you so much for being a fan! This is a great question 😄. We put a lot of thought towards this, but the main goal for us is introducing all of these new things in the cleanest and simplest way possible. Traditionally, NA and EU have always lived on the main channel, so we didn't want to change that for now.

In the future we may consider creating new regional handles, but we'll keep looking at how each region's growth goes and our own data to see the best way to divvy up regional channels!

Thanks for the question. It's a bit of a tricky problem to solve because we want to make sure casual remains a quick experience, and we don't want to create loopholes for potential abuse of the bans system. That said, we know this is an issue and we're looking for ways to address it in the future.

We 1000% want to do this, it's simply been a significant tech lift in the past. We're getting close to having something here, but unfortunately we can't say much more just yet on the when and exactly what form this will take in its first iteration.

Any updates on SideSwipe?

We don’t have anything to share on Sideswipe just yet, but you’ll definitely be hearing from us before the end of the year.

Having Regional Events become LANs in the future is totally possible, although as you mentioned dependent on how the global pandemic unfolds.

Covid hit the esport hard last season, causing us to cancel all live events for the entire year, and that was super tough to deal with. One of our biggest focuses for the 2021-22 season was making sure we could stand up live events, and do so in the safest way possible.

That's why this first event in December in Sweden will not have fans. However, we know that fans are a integral part of Rocket League esports events. We recently put on an announcement livestream w...

Introducing new RLCS regions is always something where we have to strike a delicate balance, because we always want to make sure when we do introduce new regions that they have enough depth in order to maintain competitiveness over the long term. So, every time we do add regions, we've looked at tons of stuff like player populations, competitive data, grassroots tournaments, and more before we make the decision to add a RLCS region.

In terms of big challenges, it's always a bit scary launching new regions. From straightforward stuff such as potential language barriers to making sure we choose the right administrators, talent, and support staff, it's a very intensive process.

Each RLCS region has its own unique challenges when managing them, and new issues and problems are bound to happen throughout the season, so we try to make sure we can help tackle those effectively as they arise.

And lastly, I, personally, think our biggest opportunity lies in making...

Hey there! Thanks for the question.

The main reason we combine tournament skill has to do with the rewards system. Players are rewarded differently based on the skill in which they compete. We didn’t want to build in extra incentives when playing one mode over another. When we examined the data, we also found that in general the delta in 'level of play' between Doubles and Standard games wasn’t so great that it warranted separating them.

Roman Colosseum would be cool! We actually took a bit of inspiration from the Colosseum when we made Utopia.

I would love to see something medieval or something like an old timey circus/carnival - would also be a blast to work on.

Thanks for the question. Social is a major focus of ours going forward. We can't share details yet, but Clubs, how to find other players, and things to do with others in your community are high on our list. But, to temper expectations, UE3 is one of our constraints right now, so we'll to see what fits short term, but expect much more in the future.

Hey great suggestion. Eventually there's an upper bound where you're going to have duplicates no matter what, but we'll see what we can do here in the future and keep an eye on community suggestions like these.

Great question! This was a super fun project that the esports team got to work on with so many other awesome peeps at Psyonix AND so many awesome teams/designers in the community.

Trying to create a custom decal while going back and forth with teams and then integrating them into the game was extremely hard and extremely time-consuming, thus limiting the number of teams we could realistically include in the shop. So, we went to the drawing board and came up with a brand new templatized method to create a ton of awesome decals.

Long story short, we sent over design files for the Octane, Dominus, and Fennec to the teams and gave them very specific guidelines. The goal was trying to make team "jerseys", which is why you'll see somewhat strict guidelines in terms of where the logo should be placed. We had some other small guidelines as well, like making sure the designs aren't too detailed (there are some intricate visual constraints that we have to consider, l...

That's the plan! We've made a lot of changes to the Esports Shop and how to introduce new teams, and the idea is we're able to accommodate all the regions in the RLCS in the future. Obviously this is all dependent on a bunch of things, like internal bandwidth, but we're pushing towards that direction and we hear you loud and clear!

I'm afraid I'm not allowed to crack this egg specifically. Being UE3 Based, we still use the UE3 Material Editor to create our materials/shaders. http://waylon-art.com/LearningUnreal/UE3-11-MaterialBasics.htm

how, and from what sources, do you gather honest and critical feedback?

We tend to gather feedback from a variety of sources including social media channels, Reddit, steam, and discord to name a few.

Each platform has its own tendencies and nuances. For example, we find that Reddit, in general, tends to have more of an emphasis on the PC community. Usually, when gathering feedback, the way we weigh sources is variable and will largely depend on the quality of the feedback itself.

Thanks for playing and being a fan! I'm also trying to get better after playing for thousands of hours 😂. Good to hear that you're excited for the RLCS 2021-22 season and, honestly, our studio is stoked that we've finally kicked it all off today!

I love you <3

Hey! Thanks for the question.

Detecting and combating smurfs is a difficult problem, but one we are constantly working on. We've seen other games opt for a more restrictive system to keep new accounts from interacting with certain areas of their games, and while that may work to a certain extent we don't feel that is the right system for Rocket League. Our goal is to make Rocket League as accessible as possible, so we have been putting in work to combat this issue is other ways. Forgive me for being a little vague here, but we don't want to make it easier for bad actors to circumvent our systems. But rest assured, it is an issue that we take seriously and we still have a lot of work to do in that area.

Hey thanks for the question. We use in game screenshots, but at a much higher resolution ( 4x desktop resolution ). We also use a combination of in-game green screen and post-editing. Green Screen was originally an internal tool but it was so useful we included it with Replay FX to empower players to make their own stellar shots.

How many people have you actually banned for smurfing & boosting? Don't have to be specific, ballpark number is fine.

Can't really get into specifics, but it is a lot, and we do it every day. :D