Rocket League is a very popular game in the GameZone office. We're not necessarily all great at it, but it provides countless hours of fun during the downtime. And as we get better and play new folks, we see all sorts of different strategies.
You may recall, earlier this week, we ran an article essentially complaining about the tactic of having a designated goalie in matches. Though this article reflected the opinion of just one of our writers, it elicted enough response from the Rocket League community to have us follow-up with Rocket League developer Psyonix Studio.
In a recent interview with Psyonix VP of Marketing and Communications, Jeremy Dunham, we asked about the strategy of using goalies in Rocket League, and if they thought it was something valid or actually hurting the game.
"Any tactic you can do within the rules of a game is legitimate," Dunham said. "The skill of the player that you’re up against and your teammates kind of determine whether or not something can be consistently done or not consistently done. If it’s a recurring problem where there’s a constant exploit in the game where it’s obviously a big problem that is affecting everyone’s games, then that’s something we’ll take a look at."
Dunham went on to explain that the developer saw a lot of games played during beta, with a lot of different tactics, and couldn't find a single strategy that seemed unfair or too strong, including goal camping.
"People that only stayed in the goal, people that were aggressive the whole time, people that would hang back and wait. We watched all these different approaches and what we saw was there was no one key to victory because they would find — either facing AI or another player — if they were facing the right group, they would find a way to circumvent them and beat them," Dunhame explained.
"So that is our goal, to make sure there is no one guaranteed way to win."
Dunham acknowedged "there might be trends" that players discover, "realizing that they can do certain things that help them in other situations," but defended "the more people play — and especially true with the better players — the more those players are going to find a way to counter that tactic."
"So in our opinion, we have yet to see a specific tactic that is unfair or not valid," Dunham concluded.
And with that, Psyonix basically said we suck at Rocket League and to git gud. My take on the strategy? If Psyonix didn't want it, there wouldn't be a Trophy encouraging saves.
You can listen to the full interview with Jeremy Dunham, in which we talk about Rocket League coming to additional platforms and the game's next batch of DLC, here.
