Rematch is still going strong after its release, with around 33,000 players on Steam alone as I write this very sentence. Talking to them about their successes, PCG's own Evan Lahti asked co-founder Pierre Tarno and lead game designer Dylan Allen what goes into making the game's balls feel so good to kick.
"There's multiple ways to approach it," Allen explains—see, Rematch is a sports game, but it's also got a ton of fighting game DNA inside it, too. Duels on the pitch sometimes give me Absolver flashbacks, and that's all very much deliberate.
"One of the most important aspects of making Rematch, which is one of the biggest things that comes from Sifu and the way Sloclap makes games, is worrying about the gamefeel. Whenever you hit the ball, you want it to feel good, right?"
However, you need to "balance that against the rest of the game, because if you have a ball that goes too fast, too far, how do defenders react to it? How does the goalkeeper react to it? Does it mean that you can just go from one side of the field to the other without having to interact with the midfield?"
The answer to that wound up being yes, sorta, but not without caveats. After playing a bit of Rematch myself, the actual surgical precision is clear; a goalie can punt their ball to the other side of the pitch, but their kick stops just shy of landing in the other net. That means you're often just feeding control over to the other team—unless you have a mate in prime position to punt it for you.
Still, Allen says that sometimes, "it feels like you have to sacrifice one for the other."
As for whether Sloclap'll change how the ball works? Both devs gave the impression that, now they're locked in, they'll need to be similarly surgical about any changes they do make: "It's a big part, as you say, of the way the game feels. It's the basic brick of the game. It's like an atomic component … but yeah, we had to build a lot of the game around it."
Tarno does state, though, that the team isn't "ruling out making tweaks to it," however, they'll "need to be done in a very considerate and deliberate way. Always taking player feedback into account."
He then went on to share the kinds of questions that surround such choices, like "When it bounces on the ground, how high does it bounce back up? How is the effect curve applied?" Because if they do make those tweaks, it'll mean "that players have to relearn how to perform specific actions. How do they judge distance? How do they judge their ability to get there before their opponent does?"
Which makes sense to me. Fighting games are two parts muscle memory, and the same'll apply to Rematch—humans aren't great at doing math, but they are great at judging approximate distances. At least, once they've had a chance to see something fly a few times. Any adjustments to Rematch's ball would start that process all over again.
"There are certain tweaks that you can do on a regular basis, and some others that are really sensitive and that should be done with a lot of care. If we really consider that, it'll significantly improve the game experience," Tarno adds, before emphasising: "Yeah. We'll be very careful about that."
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