Ball-provement: Rocket League to offer custom training

"GET YOUR BOOTS ON!" you shout, making an exquisite football/car crossover pun that doesn't work in America because they call the darn thing a "trunk", "because Rocket League [official site] is getting a custom training mode!"

If memory serves, Rocket League already offers some basic training, in that it tells you how to move the car around and how to do a few bits of car-ball manoeuvring. I think it tried to teach me how to do a sort of flying kick at one point although I've not achieved anything so fantastical since said tutorial. Definitely not on purpose, anyway.

As per the official blog: "We've heard the requests for new ways to train and elevate your Rocket League skills and we've also seen the fantastic work done by PC modders with tools like Rocket League Trainer, so we set out to build a feature that lets all of our players build and share their own training sequences within the community."

According to the announcement players will need to specify things like the name for their training session, the map they want to use, whether it's a goalie or a striker scenario, the difficulty level and assign it some tags (presumably so people can find it a bit more easily). Then you start to edit your sequence.

"What you'll see first is your 'Shot List' that contains every shot you’ve set up as part of your new sequence. From here you can pick a shot to edit, add new shots, or delete ones you don't want to keep.

"Editing a specific shot is the most important aspect of this new feature. You can place the car and the ball wherever you want on the field and you can specify the direction and speed of the ball with a full trajectory preview that helps you plan things out.

"Each shot can be tested in real-time, modified, and tested again to make it quick and easy to develop your new training sequence."

Each sequence can then be uploaded and is assigned a code which you can search for specifically, or people can just browse and find things that are relevant. You can also update your sequences and refine them if you want as well as favouriting the sequences created by other people so you can access them easily.

I played Rocket League for about a month when it first came out but the thing I seemed to struggle with was my perception of the arena as a 3D space. As in, the ball tended not to be where I thought it would be in that digital space. I have no idea why that would be as I'm good at catching and throwing and other things which require depth perception in real life. Maybe there will be a training mode for "WHERE IS THE BALL AT THIS MOMENT IN TIME JUST DRIVE AT IT FOR GOODNESS SAKE".

More info here on the official Rocket League blog. It'll be live in the game as of the next update.