Rocket League New Player’s Tips

by Reprivation

Tl;dr. You should customize your controls and camera and everything to your liking, but enjoy the game first and foremost. Dont worry about rank at first, rather use ranked as a way to be on an equal playing field with your opponents! That’s the good part about it, rather than flaunting whatever rank you can achieve. Although setting a rank as a goal for yourself to attain one day is definitely a great way to keep pressing forward.

Controls

Aside from bindings, you should take a look at your dead zones and sensitivities. A small fun fact, is that the controllers normal read of the analog stick only reads 70-75% of the input when pushed diagonally. Imagine a square and the corners are 100%, well the joystick is in a circle and the corners are cut. In order to avoid this affecting your gameplay, you can change your sensitivities to 1.4, this allows the input on the corners to reach 100%, although will take some getting used to. You might not want to do this when just starting as it may be a little too sensitive, but after you have some practice with controlling your car, I highly reccomend it

Your deadzone is how much you need to push the stick before it starts processing an input, you want this as low as possible without having your car turn on it’s own because of stick drift. .05 – .10 is a good place to be. Your dodge deadzone is the opposite, in order to avoid accidental flips in the wrong direction, keeping this around .7 – .9 is a good idea.

I played default controls for a long time, and while they arent BAD, much could be done better. For more advanced car control, you need to be able to Powerslide/ Air roll/ Boost/ Accelerate/ Reverse/ Jump at the same time. Which seems really crazy right now but after a while it’s not as hard as it sounds. Besides you dont need all of those at once, just the ability to use any combination of them at once. I’ve gone through a few different control Setups and I have ended on this one, my control setup is

LT / RT = Reverse / Accelerate

LB = Air Roll / Powerslide

RB = Boost

D-pad Direction = Scoreboard ( I put it on there to save space on the other buttons, you just hold the direction for the scoreboard and tap for quickchat)

Y = Ballcam

X / B = Free buttons, I put directional air roll left / Right on them. These air rolls allow you to do certain spins that arent usually possible, but are 99% unnecessary.

A = Jump

Right Stick Click = Rear View / Skip Music

Left stick Click = Rumble Item, Reset Freeplay Shot

Anyways, controls are entirely preference but after putting over 3000 hours into this game ove found this to be the most overall useable setup, allows you to use any buttons whenever you need with a regular controller. However, playing with more than one finger on the back sometimes feels uncomfortable at first. But it is just muscle memory, and after a few days it feels entirely natural

Camera

Camera settings are once again, preference. But overall a lot of pros use similar settings and the general ranges you want to stay within are as follows

Camera shake is usually off, although can make the game a lot more chaotic feeling at the start 😂

FOV: 100 – 110 (usually 110)

DISTANCE: 240-300 (most sit around 270-280)

HEIGHT: 80 – 120 (most use 100-110)

STIFFNESS: this controls how attached the camera is to your car, a lower setting means less attached, where if you go fast it will zoom out or without ballcam it will swivel less when you turn. – I reccomend between .40 and 1.0 (a lot of pros use around .45, it’s just preference)

ANGLE: between -5 and -3. This affects your cameras tilt

CAMERA TRANSITION SPEED: This is how fast the camera switches between ball cam and car cam. I’d stay between 1.0 and 1.5

The swivel speed is just fast the camera moves when you push the analog stick.

So with those out of the way, my advice is also to make sure VSYNC is turned OFF. It will make the game look slightly better because it eliminates screen tearing, but aside from that it adds input lag and makes you feel like you are slowed down. If you really want it on, go for it! But most turn it off.

No car has a significant advantage over another car, (except the batmobile, its pay to win /s) all cars move at the same speed but can have slightly different turning radius’ and hitboxes, it really is all personal preference though.

Some mechanics that are interesting to learn eventually after the basics: Half Flipping, Wavedashing, Fast Aerials, and Stalls.

Also something to note, when you leave a surface without jumping, you keep your second jump forever. If you jump off a surface, you have 1.45 seconds to use your dodge before it goes away.

Another Something to note, is most people prefer to dribble without ball cam, and turning it off for a sec to go get boost is fine, but the majority of the time you should learn to play with ballcam on.

There are a lot of Easter eggs in the game. Like the konami code on the menu, and on the extras screen you can redeem some codes for free items.

Great YouTube channels to check out for different reasons are listed below:

Gregan: Tabletop Tactics Series – an AMAZING guide on rotations and positioning in 3v3, the mental part of rocket league.

SunlessKahn and FlUump – More entertainment focused, although there are a couple of good videos, SunlessKhans “Why You suck at rocket league” series is a great watch to learn 2v2 and improve as a player overall!

Rocket Science: A lot more technical, and as a beginner you probably wint learn much from this. Although knowing the ins and outside of rocket leagues physics and sciences is what this channel is for.

SquishyMuffinz: The mechanical god of rocket league, he is a professional Player for Cloud 9 who recently won RLCS. Watching his gameplay is great because you can see a lot of high level things to add to your own to improve as a player!

AMustyCow / Kevpert: musty has some cool entertainment videos, and also a few that are filled with tips. Kevperts Aerial car control series is a bunch of drills and trainings you can do to improve your own play.

Rizzo / Sizz / Jonsandman: Their OLDER videos are HILARIOUS in my opinion, and entertainment wise you cant go wrong with their old challenge / gameplay videos.

Honourable Mentions: Jhzer (Freestyler), Johnnyboi_i (Streamer and content creator, some really informative stuff)

Training packs and Freeplay are great places to be! Whenever you have the game open, freeplay is really fun and can help you learn to control your car and interact with the ball a lot better and improve faster, and you can search for games while you practice which is great. Most training packs are geared toward players with the fundamentals of the mechanics already learned, so the basic Striker. Aerial, and Goalie packs are good to start with. If on PC, find out how to check out the custom training workshop, theres some really cool maps on there to practice in as well once you learn the basics.

Last but not least, HAVE FUN! There are always toxic people in the community ,and it’s really easy to get frustrated on this game. But there are also amazing moments, and this is the only game I’ve enjoyed learning and playing for so long consistently! The feeling of improving over time is great, and the skill ceiling is incredibly high. It’s easy to get discouraged but if you find the game fun then nothing can really stop you. There are quite a few amazing people in this community. The most fun and memorable moments I’ve had on rocket league were from the beginning, when missing the ball and accidental own goals happened all the time, and were hilarious. Find some friends to play with and enjoy the game for a while before it sucks you in and never lets go lol.