Rocket League outlines 2018 plans, will focus on improving online servers

It's been a bumper year (apologies) for Rocket League, and now more than 38 million people are playing football on wheels. But developer Psyonix knows there's still a long road ahead, and has released details of how the game will change in 2018, with a major focus on online performance improvements.

The developer says it's going to start acting on player concerns about wonky game servers, firstly by adding a tool that makes it easier to understand and report bad connections.

"We’ll be rolling out improved connection quality status information in the game client in 2018 that will tell you if you’re experiencing packet loss, latency variance, or legitimate game server performance issues," it said. "We’re looking into how we can allow the community to report servers they think are performing poorly to help us identify and resolve problems more quickly."

So, it sounds like the developer doesn't yet have all the answers—but getting more concrete information on what's going wrong could be the first step. It's also planning to add new servers to the matchmaking system, like US-Central, which should help some players without affecting the quality of West or East coast servers.

A Tournament Mode is definitely inbound and a beta will start early next year, which is later than the team initially hoped. It also plans to "revamp the progression system to make XP meaningful again", which means you'll unlock banners, titles, and free Decryptors as you level up.

Lastly, cross-platform play is definitely incoming next year, following a series of successful Steam server tests this year. "We’ll begin rolling it out to all of our players sometime next year," Psyonix said.

For the full blog post, click here. What would you like to see added to Rocket League in 2018?

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.