Speaking of some of the things you might want to bring back, are we ever going to see different and weird level layouts in Rocket League?
Hagewood: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. We wanted to start with the standard fields this time because we wanted to make sure everyone understood what the base game was, how we see the standard Rocket League experience being. We also wanted to promote competitive play in the game, and people who want extremely balanced competitive play and ranked modes and things like that, without adding a lot of extra noise. But we know the majority of players arent super competitive, they just want to have a good timeand we have a great time with the crazy different maps and so on. So we already have some of those in production to roll out later on.
One of the things that struck me about Rocket League is that its very microtransaction friendly for something like pay a dollar for this hat! Did you ever think about doing that?
Hagewood: We did. We briefly considered whether we should go the free-to-play route.
Why didnt you?
Hagewood: Weve had a lot of experience with free-to-play. Weve had ups and downs with it, and we dont see free-to-play as being a definite, automatic youre gonna get a million people playing your game, as some people do. I think there may have been a time at which a free game was kind of a novelty, like oh my gosh, this game is coming out for free, but its not anymore. Youre competing with a lot of other free-to-play games. We saw a lot of people have been turned off by that model, and weve really built a theme around this game about trying to listen to our fans and see what they really want. Not necessarily whats going to make us the most money or whats the hottest thing going, but what do people really want? What is gonna make us popular in the eyes of gamers and make them talk about us and say this is a company that really gets it. Thats what we want. Thats the kind of message that we wanted to hear people saying, is that at least one company is willing to listen to what the fans want and deliver on that.
So we decided we wanted to go more, you might even call it the old school or traditional way of doing things. You pay a price for the game, we have DLC but were not piece-mealing it outyou know, you pay $1 dollar for one hat. Were giving you a big pack of really cool stuff, we dont want to overprice it. And we also want to give out a lot of free DLC as well, just to keep people playing. Because we believe as long as we keep supporting the game, we keep having people come in and buying the game and telling their friends to buy the game, we dont really need this microtranscation based model.
Do you have any plans for mod support?
Hagewood: Were talking about it. One of the challenges is because were cross-play, and the cross-play means everything has to be updated on both the PC and the PlayStation version. So thats a big challenge. I cant go into it, but were already working out some really interesting ideas on how we can start working with modders and user-generated content.