A Cataclysmic Dawn: Rocket League Shouldn’t Be Played Alone

I’ve been playing a lot of Rocket League recently; I enjoy Psyonix’s blend of football and vehicular madness, and it’s a good time killer between my university work, classes and other obligations.

A lot of the time, I play at odd times — between my lecture which ends at 10:20 and my next one which starts at 11:25, for example. As a result, often none of my regular teammates are playing since they have jobs, classes and other obligations which occupy their time.

Playing during these times has led me to one conclusion — I absolutely detest playing with randoms.

Despite the obvious downfall that playing a team game like Rocket League with a group of people you have no clear communications with, other than arbitrary messages assigned to different combinations of arrow buttons, is a clear path to a rage-filled gaming session, I can’t bear playing with a team who are so utterly obsessed with personal glory. This isn’t personal glory in the sense of anything tangible — they’ll leave glaring holes in their defence for the mere hope of scoring a goal, knock teammates out of the way because they want to get at the ball themselves, and quit at the first sign of an issue.

It’s frustrating, infuriating and it’s making me want to play something else — something like FIFA, where the players are programmed to make supporting runs, or Call of Duty, in which your teammates can be awful, but you can still have a good game. Bit by bit it’s striking me that this isn’t a game to be played alone.

This is at no fault of the designers — building a sports game which relies on the efforts of several different players being in sync is difficult, and Rocket League is about as good an implementation of a workable system in this as you’re bound to see — but the game suffers when the team has no unifying aspect. When you play with friends, you play to each other’s strengths so that everyone can get a good go at the ball, whether in centring, shooting or clearing, but playing with randoms is far less reliable, as you have no prior knowledge of them.

This means a couple of things:

• Better players’ strengths are stifled
  In an attempt to retain sanity, better players will resort to playing the team game — whether that’s hanging back to mop up the loose ball which is released by an errant shot or powerful clearance, or lunging for the ball on the wings so teammates in the centre can have a chance to score.This completely disregards their strengths as they play a game which more arbitrarily focuses on making selfish players somewhat useful than to what they’re good at; a good player in goal may be useful, but if their best attributes lie in attacking, having them sweep up the back is painful.
• Worse players clog up the game
  When children learn to play soccer, they’re introduced to positional play. This assigns specific roles to different players and ensures that all areas of the pitch are covered, however, children usually disregard this advice completely and bunch up around the ball, forming a sort of football mosh-pit until the ball skews off in one direction or another. This is exactly what it feels like playing Rocket League with strangers.
  Everyone wants to score — it just happens. I want to score goals, but I also don’t want to lose and typically the latter is more important to me. Not for many randoms, however, who aggressively pursue the ball wherever it goes. If there’s a player with collective glory at heart, they’ll likely pull back to wait for a loose ball, or get into a position to claim a pass, but in all likelihood, you’ll wind up with a roving death ball of flying cars.

• This should be building into a meta, but it isn’t yet
  Everything has a metagame of some description — for soccer, the ideal way to play the game for a long time was the 4-4-2 formation, and of course, the metas of popular MOBAs make for constant debate. Rocket League doesn’t have this yet.Sure, the preferred method in Standard may be to have one player chase the ball, one hang around in the goal or on halfway and have the third move into a position to challenge for the ball if it comes loose, but there’s no indication that this is the best way to play yet. Part of this comes from the fact that many players are still trying to grasp core mechanics, but another is that the tutorials only deal with individual skills.

  Both Gamespot and Polygon have starter guides out for Rocket League, but the game itself has no tutorial situations which require you to pass to a teammate, or to play amongst other players. There’s no pointers on how the best teams play in-game, and there’s no tips on where to position yourself in-game. While the higher echelons of ranked Rocket League will undoubtedly build into an ideal game eventually, there’s comparatively little hope for the standard playlists — which see Pro-ranked players regularly crossing paths with Rookies.

Rocket League isn’t a bad game by any description, but it needs solid teammates to truly thrive. And that’s what playing with friends gives you. Even if there are leagues and ranks between you, at least you can call for the cross, or the space to hit a ball without causing an issue.

While you may get a team who gels really well together in an online lobby, these are few and far between. It’s more likely you’ll get two players who form an impromptu partnership while the third tries to get into the game, but it’s unlikely you’ll have true team cohesion without having players that you can communicate with clearly and know well enough to play basic positions with. This may be unfortunate, but it makes waiting for my regular partners-in-crime to get online that much more rewarding.

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