ArcSys is a little torn between using rollback or delay-based netcode for Guilty Gear: Strive according to Daisuke Ishiwatari
It was 10 years ago now that the fighting game community really started to move to online battles en masse, and general expectations have evolved from seeing strong netcode and online performance as a privilege to a right.
The upcoming Guilty Gear: Strive is currently being slowly but surely revealed to the public, and while there's been plenty of deserved, excited praise, there have also been reservations about netcode approach, specifically whether or not developers will continue to use delay-based netcode or switch over to the rollback model. Franchise creator, Daisuke Ishiwatari spoke on this in a recent interview with Ars Technica.
When he gets to the topic of online play, the interviewer at Ars Technica asks Ishiwatari the following: The big hot topic in the fighting-game community now is rollback netcode. I interviewed French Bread battle director Kamone Serizawa earlier this year at Evo, and he said that adding rollback netcode to his company's game would require a "super programmer." What is the ArcSys response to the demand for rollback netcode?
"Where we are right now at ArcSys, in terms of rollback netcode, is we haven't really arrived at the conclusion that we'll need a super programmer as much, as the engineering team is kind of divided, actually," replies Ishiwatari.
"There are some that say this would be really good and others that say, you know, implementing this wouldn't really work with the Guilty Gear system. And it makes sense for a game like Street Fighter, but how Guilty Gear is designed—this wouldn't really fit the bill. So we're actually right in the middle of investigating on the engineering team how that might look."
More than a few times we've seen community members express some trepidation about Strive's netcode approach, more often than not speculating that Arc System Works will stick with the delay-based model that the FGC is now fairly disapproving of.
It does sound like there's a chance Ishawatari and his crew will jump on the rollback train, but the jury really is still out at this point. There's plenty more to the interview including discussion concerning Strive's user interface, chip kills, revamping old characters, and more. You can read it in full right here.
