Rocket League goes where there’s no accusations, just friendly crustaceans — under the sea

Is a man not entitled to the goals of his car? No, says the man at FIFA. “It belongs to Sepp Blatter and his insider cronies.” Well, developer Psyonix has rejected those answers, and it has built a new vehicular-soccer utopia where each man is his own striker.

Rocket League is getting a new free Arena called Aquadome that takes its beloved automotive footie under the sea. Teams will go head-to-head in a dome with the sea and its flora and fauna surrounding them on all sides. As you might expect, the aesthetics of Aquadome is reminiscent of publisher 2K Games’ sci-fi shooter BioShock, which has players exploring the submerged city of Rapture. Aquadome will hit PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in October.

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Psyonix has kept up with a regular update schedule for Rocket League, which has helped keep its huge audience engaged and coming back for more since it first debuted the summer of last year. It is regularly among the most popular games on the PC-gaming service Steam with tens of thousands of simultaneous players. Today more people are playing it than the open-world crime adventure Grand Theft Auto V or perennial strategy favorite Civilization V.

But Psyonix isn’t just trying to keep players around for the hell of it. While Aquadome is free for everyone, the studio is debuting two water-themed cars as premium downloadable content. For a few bucks, dedicated fans can get a sleek sedan with a three-pronged grill called Triton and an unmanned-underwater-vehicle-inspired crossover named Proteus. The new cars will debut alongside Aquadome.

With its engaged audience, Psyonix is continuing its business model of selling microtransactions to fund further support and development on Rocket League. That system has worked so far, and the studio doesn’t plan on stopping now … even if the man in Washington says those goals belong to the poor.