Rematch dev on Rocket League, shooters and esports hopes: "We're in contact with a number of organisations"

I recently spoke to Sloclap co-founder and CEO Pierre Tarno about the game, and about how the developer of the notoriously difficult martial arts beat-'em-up Sifu came to be making a football game.

"I think the two games share more similarities than maybe can be felt from the get-go," Tarno explains.

"We've been doing third-person action games, sometimes in online environments, for a long time now, because these are the games we were doing when we were working at Ubisoft on franchises such as Ghost Recon, and so I really think it came from the love of third-person action games, of team-based multiplayer games, and especially shooters and of football itself."

Tarno initially pitched Rematch while Sifu was still in development. He recalls that his partners were not initially as enthused about the idea as he was. "Often, game developers aren't really fans of football," he laughs, "but it was a project I had in mind for a while."

Just as some of the developers aren't football fans, Rematch has been surprisingly popular with non-football-enjoying players, too, something Tarno puts down to good presentation and, more importantly, deceptively simple mechanics.

"There's not that many [mechanics], but still, most of them have different levels of granularity," he notes. "A basic functionality is rather immediate and accessible, but then it's a matter of, how long are you pressing the input? When are you pressing it and in what situation? Are you applying curve to the ball? Are you just shooting?"

Not content with this level of depth, Tarno and the team intend to add even more layers of granularity, such as greater control of slide tackles, cancelling ball control, and letting passes go through you to a teammate behind.

The high skill ceiling this mechanical depth allows, combined with the natural spectacle that the game presents, certainly appears to lend itself to esports, something I ask if Tarno is interested in pursuing.

"For sure," he replies, almost immediately. "It's up to the players, and our job as developers is to make a game that's engaging, that's deep and challenging and that warrants playing for a long time."

He goes on to confirm that "we're in contact with a number of organisations", before stating that "we do want to support these efforts if players really pick it up and think, 'This is a game that's really worth being played competitively.'"

On the subject of esports, Tarno reveals that the team brought in esports players from three different games to playtest Rematch, something that led to a rather surprising result.

Despite the natural comparisons to EA Sports FC and Rocket League – pros of both of which were represented in playtests – the standout players by far came from Call of Duty.

"By a significant margin, the Call of Duty players were the best at the game really fast, because they have these aim and shoot reflexes. They know how to communicate as a team, plus most of them actually enjoy football, and so they understand the basics and the fundamentals of positioning on a field."

In describing why he thinks this is, Tarno discusses how he and the team view the game, subsequently saying something that I found fascinating: Rematch is not a football game, but a third-person shooter.

"The game at its core is essentially a third-person shooter. It's a third-person action game with aim and shoot mechanics, right?"

Despite having played a dozen hours of Rematch by the time we spoke, this truly changed how I viewed the game entirely.

"We wanted to leverage that third-person perspective," Tarno continues, "not only to be close to your character to have that feeling of connection and that very specific perspective on the action, but also because it does allow you to very precisely aim your shots in a way that a game like EA FC doesn't."

As well as drafting in some esports pros to test the game, Sloclap has also enlisted the help of one of modern football's most iconic footballers, Ronaldinho, as part of the marketing, of which I am extremely jealous.

"We wanted [Ronaldinho] as an ambassador because he does incarnate some values around positivity, sportsmanship, love of the game," Tarno explains. "It's 'o jogo bonito', right? It's the beautiful game, and having somebody who's very positive was great."

As for the beautiful game itself, Tarno would like to see one change made to the rules to make it as exciting as Rematch, and it involves bringing back an old favourite.

"In Rematch, every time there is an overtime, it's a golden goal rule, so the first one to score ends the game there and then," he explains, before conceding that "there were great reasons to remove the golden goal rule".

However, he believes that bringing it back could deliver some of that Rematch spark back into football as a whole.

For Tarno, the rule is "intense and radical", and it's exactly that kind of thinking that has made Rematch such a tense and gripping experience.

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