A few weeks ago, at the recommendation of a friend, I started playing Rocket League. In Rocket League you control a rocket powered car in a game resembling indoor soccer: you score points by knocking a ball into the opposing team’s goal, and you try to prevent the other team from knocking the ball into yours. While I’m late to the party (Rocket League has been out for a bit over a year now), in these past few weeks it’s completely won me over: right now I’d say I’m spending the majority of my free time playing Rocket League.
I’ve also been playing some actual soccer this summer, and after playing soccer one day I realized why Rocket League is so compelling to me. Rocket League is the most authentic soccer video game I’ve ever played. A natural response might be: “That’s ridiculous! How could a game about cars playing soccer be more authentic than games like FIFA, which are about the actual sport of soccer?” I would not contest that watching a game played out in FIFA is more like watching an actual soccer game, but playing Rocket League captures the feeling of actually playing soccer better than any other video game I’ve played. I am not the first person to share this opinion, but nonetheless I thought I’d take this entry to explain my reasoning in a bit more depth.
The first reason is that the mechanics of Rocket League make the experience much closer to playing soccer. In an actual soccer game, when you want to shoot, pass, or clear the ball, all of these are accomplished by kicking the ball with your foot (well, usually contact is with the foot, but occasionally it could be with the leg, head, etc.). In FIFA-like video games, you perform the different kicks by pressing different buttons, e.g., [x] to pass or [y] to shoot, even though an actual soccer player kicks the ball in both cases, just in a different way. In Rocket League, the “kicks” are collisions, and all the contact between the car and the ball is physically simulated in the game. So whether you want to pass or shoot, in both cases you need to drive your car into the ball. Whether it’s a pass or a shot depends on how fast you strike the ball and at what angle, there’s no pass button you can press that will cause your car to knock the ball towards a teammate.
The result of these mechanics is that when you’re bearing down on a ball in front of the opponent’s goal in Rocket League, it feels like running up to shoot the ball in actual soccer. In both cases you’re acutely focused on how to strike the ball to maximize the chance of it going into the goal. In FIFA, on the other hand, you just press the “shoot” button and hope for the best (I’m probably underselling the control in FIFA a bit here, but you get the idea). Likewise, in Rocket League when you’re trying to clear a ball in front of your goal, you’re trying to get some part of the car between the goal and ball (similar to real soccer, but replace car with leg), not just mashing the “clear” button in the proximity of the ball.
The other big reason that Rocket League recreates an authentic soccer experience is the perspective. While not technically played in a 1st person view, Rocket League is 1st person in the sense that you only control one car, and your field of vision is limited to originating from around where that car is. This is different from FIFA-like games, which let you swap control of players so you’re typically in control of the player with the ball (on offense) or the player challenging the ball (on defense), and are viewed from a perspective similar to how professional soccer games are broadcast, so you can see all the relevant action around the ball.
In a real soccer game, what you do off the ball is very important: your position is critical to creating scoring opportunities for your team and shutting down chances for your opponent. This aspect of team play is largely out of your control in FIFA-like games: what the other players do on your team is automated. In Rocket League, since you only control your own car, you need to decide where to position yourself for the entire game, not just when you’re on the ball. And similar to real soccer, this positioning is very important: if you play like a 5-year-old plays soccer and just chase the ball the whole match, your team won’t have the structure to both attack and defend, and you’ll doom yourself to many losses.
The view that Rocket League is played in (psuedo 1st person) also makes the experience more authentic. In real soccer, situational awareness is an important skill to have, which is recreated in Rocket League by necessitating that you pan the camera up and down the field if you want to know where your teammates and opponents are. In FIFA-like games, the positions of everyone is simply laid out for you by the high viewing angle of the field. The Rocket League view also means you need to actually be able to judge distances and trajectories to know where you should head to intercept a ball or player (as in real soccer), whereas FIFA-like games put a glyph on the ground where the ball is going to land, since it would be intractable to assess a ball trajectory from the high viewing angle they use.
To me, this combination of mechanics and perspective end up making Rocket League so much more fun because it feels like actually playing soccer. In Rocket League it feels like you scored the goal, whereas in FIFA it feels like the character in the game scored, you just happened to tell him to shoot.
