Dev Blog - Season 5 Gameplay Changes

Hey everyone!

The Blue Lock collab is finally here! Alongside some of the coolest content we’ve been able to work on, this update brings more depth to how the game plays, with changes across four core gameplay systems: Stamina, Goalkeeping, (grounded) Volley Cancels, and Tackle Contests. These will change how the game feels and plays, so we wanted to walk you through the changes, and why we’re doing them.

Let's dive in!

Stamina Rework - Exhausted State

Rematch is built around one ball. That means that how deep and engaging a match is is directly tied to how often all players are interacting with it. The more one player hogs those interactions, the less everyone else gets to engage with the ball. Stamina is our tool for making teams naturally rotate who is playing at any given time by following this logic:

• High stamina lets players reposition themselves and look for opportunities to interact with the ball.

• The more players interact with the ball, the more stamina they consume.

• Low stamina leaves players more vulnerable to losing the ball.

Let’s go over how Stamina works:

• Abilities drain the gauge when used. When no ability is used, stamina starts to refill after a short delay which varies depending on the ability used.

• Moving without sprinting. But sprinting drains stamina, and your top sprint speed scales with how much stamina you currently have. The more a player uses up stamina to chase the ball, the less resources they will have to effectively interact with it.

• Extra Effort charges up faster when your stamina gauge is full. This is another incentive to be frugal with stamina consumption until a play-making opportunity comes up.

Stamina is a central part of our balancing strategy, and a piece of feedback we often hear is that having an empty stamina should limit your ability to perform dribbling moves. We agree with this idea but we do not want the Exhausted state to lock players out of performing moves altogether; feeling like an amazing athlete is a core pillar of Rematch.

When Exhausted (out of stamina), abilities can still be performed, but they’ll lose effectiveness:

• Dribble: Normally you can chain dribble moves and cancel into a shot whenever you like. Exhausted, you're limited to a single Exhausted Dribble, one swift move with a longer recovery. It's enough to avoid an incoming tackle, but you can't chain into another dribble afterward. You can still cancel out of an Exhausted Dribble into another ability, but doing so gives you the exhausted versions of Push Ball / Lob Push Ball rather than their normal versions.

• Push Ball / Lob Push Ball: these are the core dribbling abilities that cost stamina, specifically because they're built to keep the ball close to you. Exhausted, they push the ball noticeably further away and take longer to recover from, with the player stumbling slightly. This is a deliberate tell: it signals to everyone on the pitch that you can't immediately follow up and interact with the ball again.

A player who chases the ball and dribbles non-stop will quickly end up running on fumes, unable to control or protect it effectively against an opponent with stamina to spare. The reward goes to teams that rotate, pass, and position well, which the Exhausted state aims to incentivize.

Goalkeeper Dives

Goalkeeping is one of the hardest roles to get right. Too weak, and it's miserable, you wait the whole match for your moment to matter, then whiff and concede a goal. Too strong, and strikers can barely ever score. We want keepers to feel strong and dependable, while leaving noticeable weaknesses that a good striker can exploit. Those weaknesses need to be skill-dependent, so a newer keeper can shut down a weak striker, while a great striker can still find and create opportunities to score.

The Goalkeeper Dive is one of your main tools for stopping shots. There’s a lot going on under the hood, to make sure it performs adequately, and as expected. When you input a Dive, the Dive Assist system kicks in: the game looks at a range of what we call “targets” (put simply, one of the future positions of the ball) around the direction you pushed, and picks whichever animation gets you closest to actually catching the ball.

In practice, this means Dives are forgiving to use, and the system helps you get to the ball. In this update, we’ve improved the Dive Assist, and we’re taking this opportunity to also tackle one of the more long-standing frustrations as a Goalkeeper: seeing your character dive low (or high) when you expect the other version to come out. 

We also want to introduce more player agency in how goalkeepers want to stop the shots and interact with the ball.

This is where the new Long Range Dives come in.

• Long Range Dive (performed with a Modifier + Dive input): it lets you stretch to cover shots the regular Dive simply can't reach, but there is a trade-off: Long Range Dives always result in a deflect, which keeps the ball in play for longer.

• Regular Dive (performed with a simple dive input): it covers roughly half the goal and can't reach the very top corners, but if you connect with the ball inside that range, you can reliably catch it. The only ways to end up deflecting instead are diving too early or in the wrong direction and the ball hits your legs.

  
  

In short, the Regular Dive now gives keepers a dependable tool they can rely on to catch the ball, assuming proper positioning. The Long Range Dive on the other hand acts as a fast, long-reaching, last resort option or when the ball’s trajectory is difficult to guess and you have to dive on reaction. These two options provide more agency to the Goalkeeper and add to the decision-making process.

Volley Cancels

When multiple players are performing a volley at the same time, all players losing the contest are forced to cancel their action. When cancellation happens right at the beginning of the action, players can’t even see it happening. This gives the sentiment of the player input being ignored by the game.

To clarify what happened, we started implementing visual feedback around the ball in previous patches to notify cancellation. However, to reinforce the feeling of having tried something, the character should also be involved in the action. For this reason, we now trigger a new animation when a volley is cancelled, specifically at the beginning of the action (with the character still on the ground).

This is a very first step to refine how volley contests are solved in the game, for now with very low impact on gameplay. But new volley resolutions are on their way, meant to bring more physicality and fairness to contested situations both grounded and aerial with considerable changes to the balancing of volley actions. 

This, however, will take a little bit more time to be launched as it represents hard technical work, with heavy production of animations to make it look as great as it should be.

Tackle Contests

When two defenders go for the same ball at almost the exact same time, the old system didn't always produce results that felt fair or readable. We wanted tackle contests to reward good timing and the right choice of ability, instead of feeling random.

How a contest resolves now depends on how close together the two tackles happen:

• More than 0.15s apart: both tackles are treated as normal, successful tackles. No special interaction.

  
  

• Between 0.04s and 0.15s apart: the first tackle succeeds normally. The second won't deflect the ball outright; instead it gets knocked off at an angle (30° for a Standing Tackle, 60° for a Sliding Tackle), or caught cleanly if it's a Goalkeeper Tackle.

  
  

• Under 0.04s apart (essentially at the same time): neither lands as a clean deflect. The ball instead gets knocked away in the combined direction of both tackles. A Goalkeeper Tackle always wins outright and catches the ball, and a Sliding Tackle has more influence over a Standing Tackle in determining where the ball ends up.

  
  

• With 3 or more players involved: a third tackle also factors into the outcome, and any players beyond that don't affect where the ball goes.

  
  

The result should be contests that feel earned, less random, with a clear outcome.

That's everything we wanted to share regarding the upcoming changes in Season 5! These represent some of the larger gameplay tuning we've done in a while, and we're excited to see how they play out on the pitch. With all that said, we hope you’ll have an amazing time playing Rematch during the Blue Lock collaboration!