"The essence of football is not in the rules": Rematch's creative director on nailing that five-a-side feeling and making a game "about kicking a ball rather than kicking heads in"

Rematch, Sloclap's new multiplayer football game, has been percolating in creative director Pierre Tarno's brain since development finished on Absolver, Sloclap's first game, released back in 2017. The game, which just hit a unique player count of more than three million, is a celebration of football and movement – something that becomes evident when Tarno sits down to speak with GamesRadar+.

While Rematch may be a change from the visceral fights of Sifu and Absolver, the same fluid animation is present too, with "action that is grounded, that is credible, but that can still feel epic". Yet the game's broader shift from violence to soccer came from Tarno becoming a father. "Now I've got small kids that are looking up at my screen and I'd rather they see me working on a game about kicking a ball rather than kicking heads in," he says, smiling.

World in motion

Tarno adores "bodies in movement and how cool and beautiful it can look". His fondness is infectious, and it's a perspective that extends to Rematch's long list of influences. While some, like Rocket League, will be immediately obvious to the game's players, other connections are more abstract. One of Tarno's earliest loves was the original Prince of Persia, due to its smooth rotoscoped animation, while Splinter Cell and its ability to do full splits between walls in a corridor is another. Finally, Tarno adds that clambering around Damascus in Assassin's Creed "blew my mind".

Without Sifu and its "very tight, very reactive controls, game feel, feeling of impact, having challenges both in terms of mechanical challenges but also developing your vision", there would be no Rematch. There's a natural progression from one game to the next, which may not be immediately obvious when looking at the two games as distinct entities rather than part of a continuum. The crystallization moment came from watching footballers volley, with one inspiration being Benjamin Pavard's goal in the 2018 World Cup match against Argentina. "[Pavard's] body is almost horizontal when he kicks it, like, fully extended", says Tarno, describing it as "the essence of what a beautiful volley is".

Indeed, the recent successes of PSG and the French national team have had their own impact on the game's development, with Tarno noting that the beta was extended by one more day after PSG won the Champions League "to celebrate as a Parisian studio".

Tarno also spoke on the decision to include microtransactions, a choice that some have found troublesome in a game that isn't free-to-play. He notes that they were always a part of the game's plan, and that part of keeping a game running means allowing "your most engaged players to keep supporting development by buying purely cosmetic and optional content".

"Since it's a game that we hope to be able to maintain and improve and increase in scope as we move forward, having these systems in place, I think, was very important for us," says Tarno. Asked about the issues that Rematch had at launch, which have now largely been fixed, the creative director says that Sloclap has been "pretty busy" but "monitored [the issues] very, very closely" after release.

Back to basics

Unlike many other football games that have a deep love for rules and regulations (looking at you, Football Manager's VAR addition), Rematch is remarkably simple. There are no offsides, no fouls, just focused footballing fundamentals. Tarno says that the vision of the game was to "convey what the essence of football is, and truth be told, the essence of football is not in the rules". Instead, he thinks the essence of football lies in "observation, positioning and execution", which ties into the pillars of the game he outlines: "feel like an amazing player, feel part of a team and feel the pressure".

Part of this desire to seek the essence of football comes in the size of the pitch, which needs to be compact enough to make action interesting but big enough to give you a little thinking time. It's something Sloclap tested rigorously throughout development. Despite being more compact than a standard pitch, the difference isn't actually as large as you may think. Rematch pitches are, according to Tarno, around 94x60 meters, compared to a standard pitch's 105x68 meters.

One brilliant part of Rematch is playing with people from all over the world, and I'm curious to see whether different footballing philosophies will shine through as regional scenes develop. Will we see Spanish players favoring tiki-taka and Italians repurposing the catenaccio into Rematch? The data that Sloclap collects is exhaustive, with Tarno saying "every action is pretty much tracked, whether it's to display on the scoreboard at the end, or just for us to inform our game design decisions", and mooting a heatmap appearing in the future, while also noting that there's only one person on Sloclap's data team. Sloclap has already seen, for instance, that European players pass more than those on US-East servers, so regional differences in football are already at play in Rematch, even so soon after release.

At its lower levels, Rematch is infused with chaos. Those who have played it will recognize the feeling as being akin to playground football, a chaotic and fraught experience. This, however, is something that Tarno believes disappears as soon as you play at a higher level. While it may initially feel like "kids running after a ball", matches with higher skill ceilings feel far more like structured football. That is something I've noticed when playing ranked, too, where a lot of the elements of chaos necessarily fall by the wayside, leading to more teamwork, which, as one of the core design pillars behind Rematch, is likely the intended way to play.

In essence, Rematch has an incredible amount of potential, even in these early days. Will we see organized teams becoming the next big thing, with tactical diagrams and Club World Cup style worldwide scraps? Tarno says Sloclap's internal tournaments during development were taken incredibly seriously, with one developer's heart rate going up to 110 BPM, so I imagine serious tournaments cannot be too far off – even if they're only player-organized. Hopefully, the game is able to harness the attention and love that it's got in recent weeks and become a keystone of multiplayer gaming sessions for a long while to come.

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