Guilty Gear Strive, the last entry in the long series of fighting games launched in April “/>
As a big fan of fighting games, I am always excited when a new game is released. No other genre captures my attention in the same way. The feeling of discovery, the community and the competitive spirit – a good launch potentially means thousands of hours of play and learning, not to mention all the sharing and conversation with other players.
This week I’m excited about Guilty Gear Strive, released on April 9 on PS4, PS5 and PC. There is an open beta this week, and Ars had early access to test it, including the new improved network code.
I’m happy to report that the beta is already doing the right things to make an online game look as offline as possible.
The offline experience
On pre-pandemic days that look like years ago, I would host a night of weekly fighting games. People gathered in my garage to manage friendly but competitive sets, to help each other learn the games and just talk about life. Fighting games for us are not just competitions – they are about community and connecting with people.
For me, there is simply no purer gaming experience than playing against another human being. No opponent of the CPU or a player’s narrative can bring the same feeling of giving and receiving, testing his skills and reflexes, but also his ability to adapt and explore his opponent’s psychology.
If you are the best player? It is a chance to teach someone or test ideas against someone more tolerant. The moment when you see them avoiding the trap they’ve been walking all night in or challenging the movement you intimidated them with can be as good as winning.
If the situation changes and you are the weakest, it is a chance to learn, and this is much more satisfying when you finally get a match. One night, I made a first to 20 against a friend who is a much stronger player than me, I lost the set by 3-20. Those three games I played? The best feeling in the world, even after receiving my ass in hand.
The real joy, however, is when you encounter an opponent that you are almost equal to. Exchanging games, constantly striving to find an advantage, adapting and seeing them adapt back, is when fighting games shine in a way that few games can. It may be a good friend or a complete stranger, but it is like talking in another language.
A year ago, when COVID started showing up in Los Angeles County, I had to cancel my night. All other weeklies, tournaments, friendly games at your friend’s house – they all dried up. Offline fighting games have become an endangered species worldwide, and the only way to achieve our solution was to play online.
My garage on happier days, when we could play offline.
Ryan Gan
Fighting in an online world
Fighting games, by their nature, depend on reflexes and the ability to quickly evaluate data. We count frames, we look for things that we know are not safe and that we can punish, we observe the telltale movements that may indicate that an air attack is coming so that we can change our blockade upwards. If someone is running in your face, can you react quickly enough?
In short, it is a miserable genre to stick to Internet tubes. Any delay can destroy the feeling of the game. Without offline play, totally dependent on the Internet, what can a fighting game fan do?
Fortunately, there is a little bit of smart grid technology, called rollback netcode, that can alleviate most of the distance and physical disadvantages (no matter how good your Internet connection is – there is no way to beat the speed of light).
Unfortunately, not every fighting game has a reversion netcode, especially those from Japanese developers who are the titans of the genre, but were slow to adopt the technology. They relied more on delay-based network code, which provides a much less consistent or enjoyable experience. Or, in the case of Street Fighter V, incomplete rollback that provides both frustrating and good online experiences.
We have already published what is probably the most comprehensive explanation of fighting game netcode and how reversion works. It is a deep dive, with technical explanations and many short video clips to demonstrate the concepts – I highly recommend it to the curious. Here’s a quote that acts as a quick summary if you don’t want to dig deeper:
Since choosing a game’s netcode can never magically change the distance between a player and his opponent or prevent networks from dropping or delaying information, you may wonder how a netcode strategy could be drastically better than any other. The key is how the network code handles uncertainty.
When there is no information from the remote player, the delay-based network code needs to pause and wait, as described in detail on the previous page. The rollback’s main strength is that it never expects a lost entry from the opponent. Instead, the netcode rollback continues to run the game as normal. All input from the local player is processed immediately, as if it were offline. Then, when the remote player’s input arrives a few frames later, the rollback corrects its errors by correcting the past. It does this in such a smart way that the local player may not even notice a large percentage of network instability, and can play for any remaining instances with the confidence that their inputs are always handled consistently.
In short, a good reversal seems much more offline. Your time is the same as offline, and with a reasonable ping, it is almost indistinguishable from sitting next to your opponent. Even games played from California to New York or across the ocean can be very playable, with minimal visual flaws.
To type Guilty Gear
In late 2019, I interviewed Daisuke Ishiwatari, the creator of Guilty Gear series, about the next release of the latest version of your game. I didn’t know the pandemic was coming, but I wanted to ask him about the reversal netcode. Previous one Guilty Gear the games didn’t have, and their online experience was hampered by it. Even in a world where offline gaming exists, it is much more convenient to jump online at home to play whenever you want. Did the designers intend to do the job to add reversion to the game?
Daisuke’s response did not generate much confidence, but it left the door open for hope:
Where we are now in ArcSys, in terms of rollback netcode, we have not really come to the conclusion that we will need a super programmer so much, since the engineering team is actually half divided. There are some who say it would be very good and others who say, you know, implementing it wouldn’t really work with Guilty Gear system. And it makes sense for a game like Street Fighter, but how Guilty Gear is designed – it really wouldn’t be suitable. So, in fact, we are investigating in the engineering team how this might look.
Your quote from my interview was widely broadcast on Twitter as part of the fan outcry that developers take netcode seriously. It was difficult to find any discussion about the game that did not include hopes of a reversal. The question was, would the developers listen?
It just so happens, and I was able to go online and play some sets to get a practical idea of what the game is like and netcode.