I've been having a blast slowly crawling out of Bronze in Rematch (I'm Silver now, so I'm kind of a big deal). I've a few gripes, mind—some of which are the developer's fault, like the wonky netcode, while others are the player's fault, like that one guy who keeps spamming 'good job!' at me because I hit the post. I know I didn't do a good job. It's okay.
The developer Sloclap, who also made Sifu and Absolver, is keen to keep the game updated in the future. In a conversation with PCG's own Evan Lahti, co-founder Pierre Tarno and lead game designer Dylan Allen talked about their plans for the future.
Much of their ideas are exciting, but covered in a mid-June blogpost: Stuff like a tournament and club system, casual game modes, and basic quality-of-life features like being able to stick with a player you really like. However, before anything else, the devs are gonna improve Rematch's sometimes-ailing stability.
"So right now, our main focus is really stability," Allen explains. "Keeping the game stable, not adding any more bugs, correcting as many bugs as possible as fast as possible, also answering everything that might affect the quality of the game."
Part of that equation includes when players find new mechanical techniques (shortened to "tech" in the fighting game community or "tekkers" in soccer), such as the 'dolphin swimming' tech that saw players flying across the pitch like graceful, flying fish. Somehow faster and yet very, very silly-looking.
That arms race has been a challenge for Sloclap: "There's a lot of stuff that we wanted to do, either in the core gameplay or in the systems that we were thinking about for the long term—and once the game is in the players hands, you see [it].
"They do some things that you weren't expecting, and the game has evolved really quickly in our player's hands. We expected it to go fast, but not nearly as fast as it is going right now. So we're really trying to keep a close eye on it."
When it comes to those additional features, especially those optional game-modes, Allen is keen to emphasise that it's all about quality:
"In all of these things, our objective is always to deliver something that's as high quality and as fun as possible. We don't want to just take the game, add a couple of modifiers and be like, 'okay, yeah, that's enough'. We really want to drive down on what would make a new game mode fun."
Personally, I'm very hyped—both for these new features, and to get to do lots of weird science on all the new ankle-breaking tech the community's cooking up.
