Psyonix has announced that with the arrival of Rocket League’s Autumn Update, only standard arenas will be playable options for both competitive and casual games.
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News of the transition to more traditional arenas came from an announcement posted by Psyonix on Thursday that focused on two specific maps in the discussion: Starbase ARC and Wasteland. Both of these maps will be receiving their own standard versions while the current nontraditional editions of the maps will be no longer be available during public matches. They’ll still be playable during private and offline matches under the names Badlands and ARCtagon, but their new standard versions will become the norm.
This isn’t the first time that non-standard Rocket League maps have been converted into traditional versions, but with the beginning of Competitive Season 6, the decision has been made to make only standard versions of each map available for online play. In their announcement, Psyonix explained that their decision stems largely from players’ feedback regarding the maps. Their atypical layouts weren’t always a huge hit with Rocket League players, and after listening to players’ feedback over time, they’ve made the call to switch to the standard maps.
Listing several reasons for the change, Psyonix brought up the competitive nature of Rocket League, referring to it as a “digital sport.” The non-standard arenas were first designed to diversify professional and competitive play, but according to Psyonix, they haven’t been embraced so far. Standardization is important to Psyonix, and the Rocket League devs stated that they no longer feel like the map variety is a necessary part of competitive play.
According to their tests during Rocket Labs where they previewed different map ideas, they found that only a select few maps were received well by the community despite how close some of them might’ve been to the more traditional maps.
To those who might’ve enjoyed the non-standard maps appearing in the rotations, Psyonix also apologized for the removal of the arenas. They say they still appreciated the variety that the maps introduced to the game, but from here on out, expect only standard maps to show up in your playlists after the Autumn Update.
