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Dragon Ball FighterZ and other delay-based game players are having trouble returning to their games after trying Guilty Gear Strive's rollback netcode

The gospel of good rollback spreads

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Posted by Dakota 'DarkHorse' Hills • February 28, 2021 at 11:10 a.m. PST • Comments: 62

The Guilty Gear Strive open beta brought just about every single corner of the fighting game community together, and for many, it was an eye-opening experience to the importance of not just rollback but good rollback implementation for the current landscape of our world.

None have probably felt that more than the players of titles using delay-based netcode with some of the best in the Dragon Ball FighterZ and Super Smash Bros. scenes not being able to look at their normal games of choice the same way.

Some like DBFZ World Tour finalist Supernoon have expressed wanting to avoid playing the Dragon Ball fighting game as much as they can to not engage with the netplay.

Regular streamers and content creators for FighterZ including Supernoon have either not streamed as much since the end of the Strive beta or only include the title as a smaller section of them.

Panda|HookGangGod has expressed similar sentiments with his latest YouTube video being titled 'DBFZ don't hit right anymore...' in which he appears to call the game's netcode the "worst of the worst."

"This game is so sleep now after playing Strive for a while," said HookGangGod in the video. "Honestly, if [FighterZ] had rollback, this would be godlike."

A number of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate pros like Liquid|Dabuz and CLG|Void also spent days grinding in Strive's online to make it to the top-ranking floor before the end.

Though the experience didn't seem to dissuade them as much from playing more Ultimate after the beta, both expressed their desires to keep going in on Strive and feeling dejected because of the wait until release.

Dabuz even seems to have taken the opportunity to go back and learn the previous Guilty Gear games in the lead up to the release of the next generation of Arc System Works fighting games.

Bandai Namco, as the publishers of Dragon Ball FighterZ, have the final say as to whether rollback could be implemented into the popular title, which they've addressed in the past previously. The game is now over three years old, however, and is looking less and less likely to happen as time continues to grow.

"The team and I are of course aware of the feedback and comments we're receiving from players regarding rollback [netcode]," said DBFZ Producer Tomoko Hiroki. "Although this is a feature that we would most definitely like to implement, it is technically difficult to have this supported."

Similarly, Smash Director Masahiro Sakurai has also stated that his team had looked into something like rollback for Ultimate, but they couldn't get it to work properly to actually put into the game.

This all is not to say that these players are switching from their game of choice to Guilty Gear Strive or that all delay-based players should jump ship immediately, but it serves as hopefully a big step forward to our FGC that everyone is aware of the necessity of good rollback.

It's especially important right now due to the global coronavirus pandemic shuttering the vast majority of offline events and viable online connections being a must for sustainability and growth.

With SNK recently confirming that they too are working on their own rollback solution for The King of Fighters 15, the days of seeing new fighting games releasing with delay-based netcode could very well be over forever.

Banner tweets from Void and Supernoon.

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