Mental Awareness in Rocket League
A guide into Rocket League's mental game. Focusing on player and board awareness.
When playing Rocket League, it is very common to think that in order to improve you need to be doing training pack after training pack or game after game, hoping that one day, you will be able to hit ridiculous shots like the pros do. Mechanical skill is obviously important, however, the reason the pros are pros is not dependent on their ability to perfectly execute insane, upside-down air dribbles. Sure, it helps, but any high-ranked player will tell you that the reason for their success is that their mental game is a far greater asset in their skillset than their aerial ability.
The good news is this mental side of the game is relatively easy to learn and pretty easy to implement. There are several aspects to the mental side of Rocket League. One of the most important aspects of the mental game in Rocket League is awareness and that doesn’t just mean being aware of where the ball is.
Consider a situation (as pictured above) where your teammate has just collected the ball to attack your opponents. From the still image, it’s easy to see where everyone is on the pitch. However, to improve in Rocket League and ascend through those ranks, you need to be aware of this in real-time. The way I like to train my player awareness is to go into a casual 2v2 game and play very passively, not getting too involved in play but just watching what everyone is doing on the pitch and only hitting the ball when it comes to my area and hitting it with purpose. This is also a viable strategy when playing in the lower ranks as it isn’t until the mid-Platinum rank when players really start to have any real sense for rotations and not until high Diamond where you will start to encounter it consistently.
Player awareness is the key ingredient in knowing when you should be contesting a ball and, more importantly, when you shouldn’t. For example, in a 2v2 game, if (as pictured above) your teammate rolls the ball up the wall from the corner towards your opponent’s goal, you may be inclined to go up in the air and finish it off, giving you all the glory and celebrating like the victorious hero you are. However, looking at the image above, we can see that one of our opponents has positioned well in the goal mouth and our teammate is still on the wall after playing the ball. In the somewhat likely scenario that our opponent gets a touch on the ball to clear it, our teammate is not in a position to recover the ball so that means it would be up to us. Which we wouldn’t be able to do if our car was flailing about in the goal after making such a critical error in judgement.
In the case outlined above, we would need to assess the position of our teammate and opponents and hold the position ready to either capitalise on a whiff from the defenders or rotate back to recover the ball and start another, hopefully more productive, attack.
Being aware of your teammate’s position(s) is equally as important as being aware of your opponents’ positions too. If your opponent plays a bad clear resulting on an open net, every fibre of your being will want to rush that ball to hit it at the net for the ecstatic feeling of punishing a critical error. The only problem with this is that your better positioned teammate has also had this brainwave and you collide before you reach the ball, resulting in a hilariously open net at the other end for your opponents to capitalise on. In situations such as these, you need to utilise the use of your right-analogue stick (or whatever keyboard button you have bound the control to for you KBM players out there) to look around to see where your teammate is positioned and listen for their engine/boost noise in case they’re also rushing the ball.
Awareness of your teammate’s position in attack is arguably the most invaluable thing you can have at your disposal when playing this game. It provides you with so many options, if your teammate is in a position to receive a pass, you can cut an infield pass to them, or you can play it off the backboard to switch the play, or perhaps you can see they are in a position to cover you so that you can try a solo play. Once you move up the ranks, passing becomes more and more important so it is a great idea to implement this as early as possible.
Attacking awareness is one thing but defensive awareness is another altogether. When you are under pressure and have to defend your goal from your opponents, the opportunity for complete tunnel vision presents itself as you know you absolutely cannot concede a goal. This lack of awareness is one of the most common mistakes I have seen, particularly in the Platinum and lower ranks.
In the play above, we can see that our opponents are bearing down on our goal from the side of the pitch. There are a lot of things we need to be aware of in this situation. One thing is the angle that our opponent has to our goal which we need to close down to limit their ability to shoot on net, this means we need to know where the posts of our goal is and this is just something that simply comes with experience, another thing to beware of is our opponents positioning, we can see that a pass option is available whether it be an in-field pass or off the backboard, either way, this passing option needs to be considered, finally we need to be aware of our teammates position.
Teaching yourself to become aware of the goal size is something that I find is best done on an arena like Mannfield or DFH stadium as it has very clear dotted lines going up the length of the pitch that are in-line with the goal mouth. This allows you to see, while facing out, exactly how much room you have. Head into a 1v1 private match either against a bot or a friend and try to focus on how much room you have on either side of your car in the net.
Being aware of your teammate’s position(s) is probably the most difficult part of defending because your eye will always be drawn to the threat bearing down on your goal rather than the support of your teammates. The best way to be aware of your teammates position is to spot them early, before the attack becomes a threat. Ideally you would like to see your teammate coming down the opposite side of the pitch to the ball to give you support in behind so that you can challenge the ball. This is rarely the case in the lower ranks and you’ll often see them coming down the same side of the ball which means you have to guess whether they are challenging the ball or not.
If you are the car rotating back to support your teammate in net, then you need to pay as much attention to everything around you. You would hope that your teammate will spot you rotating back early and can challenge the ball early, allowing you to mop up at the back if required or get back on the counter-attack. It is imperative that you do not challenge the ball if you are the car rotating back on the opposite side to the ball, you are likely to end up cutting off your teammate, allowing your opponents to capitalise on your double-commit.
One final thing to be aware of that is very rarely utilised in the lower ranks is boost awareness and, in particular, the positions of all the small boost pads on the field. The image above shows all the small boost pad locations marked in pink and if you can start utilising these then your speed of play shoots up by a considerable margin as you are able to challenge balls quicker and half the time, your opponents won’t realise how much boost you have. It is very common for the lower ranked player to think that they require 100 boost as much as possible and while it is useful to have as much boost as possible, it is not essential. With less than 30 boost, you can reach the top corner of your goal, from the bottom corner.
To train yourself up with boost positions, head into free-play, switch off unlimited boost and spend a good 10-15 minutes boosting around, hitting the ball and ignoring the big boost pads in the corners and the sides and just collect the small ones.
With all this information in mind, you should be able to watch back some of your replays and see how important being aware of your surroundings is in this game. Go forth and get yourself up into those purple ranks. Happy Rocketeering!
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