Guilty Gear Strive, the latest entry in the long-running fighting game series coming in April “/>
As a big fighting game fan, I’m always excited when a new game comes out. No other genre attracts my attention in the same way. The feeling of discovery, community and competitive spirit – a good release can mean thousands of hours of playing and learning, not to mention all the sharing and talking to fellow players.
This week I’m excited about Guilty Gear Strive, which will be released on April 9 on PS4, PS5 and PC. There’s an open beta this week, and Ars got early access to try it out, including the newly improved network code.
I’m happy to report that the beta is already doing the right thing to make an online game feel as much like an offline.
The offline experience
In pre-pandemic days, which felt like years ago, I would host a fighting game night weekly. People gathered in my garage to drive friendly but competitive sets, help each other learn games and just talk about life. Fighting games for us are not just about competition – it is about community and making contact with people.
For me, there is just no purer player experience than playing against another human being. No CPU opponent or single-player narrative can bring the same sense of give and take, which tests your skills and reflexes, but also your ability to adapt and deepen your opponent’s psychology.
If you are the better player? It’s a chance to teach someone or test ideas against someone who is more forgiving. The moment you see them avoiding the setup they walked in all night or challenging the move you bullied them with, it can feel just as good as winning.
If you turn the tables and you’re the weaker one, it’s a chance to learn, and it’s much more satisfying when you finally pack a match. One night I ran a first-to-20 against a friend who was a much stronger player than I was. I lost the set by 3-20. Those three games I did? The best feeling in the world, even after giving myself my butt.
The real joy, however, is when you find an opponent that you are approximately equal to. To trade games, to constantly encourage yourself to find an advantage, to adapt and to see how it adapts again, this is when fighting games shine in a way that few other games can. Can be a good friend or a stranger, but it’s like speaking in another language.
When COVID started popping up in Los Angeles a year ago, I had to cancel my night. All the other weeklies, the tournaments, friendly sets at your friend’s house – they all dried up. Offline fighting games have become an endangered species around the world, and the only way to fix that was to play online.
My garage in happier days when we could play offline.
Ryan Gan
Fight in an online world
Fighting games are by their nature dependent on reflexes and being able to judge data quickly. We count frames, we look for things we know are unsafe to punish, we look for the movements that could indicate an overhead attack so we can move the blocking to high. Can someone respond quickly enough if someone shoots up in your face?
In short, it’s a fun genre to plug through internet tubes. Any delay can ruin the feel of the game. Without offline gaming, which is completely internet dependent, what should a fighting game fan do?
Fortunately, there is a bit of smart network technology, called ‘rollback netcode’, that can alleviate most of the disadvantages of distance and physics (no matter how good your internet connection is – the speed of light cannot be beat).
Unfortunately, not every fighting game has a return net code, especially those of Japanese developers who are the titans of the genre but who are slowly using the technology. They rely more on delay-based netcode, which provides a much less consistent or enjoyable experience. Or, in the case of Street Fighter V, half-baked return that offers just as many frustrating online experiences as it does well.
We have already published what is probably the most comprehensive outline of the fight against game network code and how backlinks work. It’s a deep dive, with both technical explanations and very short video clips to demonstrate the concepts – I highly recommend it for the curious. Here is a quote from it that serves as a quick summary if you do not want to dig in:
Since choosing a netcode game never magically changes the distance between a player and his opponent, or that networks can drop or slow down information, you may wonder how one netcode strategy can be drastically better than any other. The key lies in how the net code handles uncertainty.
If there is no information from the remote player, the delay-based network code should stand still and wait, as described in detail in the previous page. The main strength of Rollback is that it never waits for the missing input from the opponent. Instead, the feedback net code continues the game normally. All input from the local player is processed immediately, as if it were offline. If the remote player entry appears a few frames later, the bug fixes the error by correcting the past. It does so in such a clever way that the local player may not even notice a large percentage of network instability, and they can play all remaining cases with confidence that their input is always handled consistently.
In short, good feedback feels much more like offline. Your timing is the same as offline, and with a reasonable ping you can hardly distinguish your opponent. Even games played from California to New York or across the ocean can be very playable, with minimal visual skip.
Tap in Guilty steering wheel
Late in 2019, I interviewed Daisuke Ishiwatari, the creator of the Guilty steering wheel series, about the upcoming release of the latest version of its game. I did not know the pandemic was just around the corner, but I did want to ask him about resetting the network code. The previous Guilty steering wheel games did not have it, and their online experience suffered for it. Even in a world where offline gaming exists, it is much more convenient to jump online at home to play whenever you want. Were the designers planning to do the work to add the game back?
Daisuke’s response did not elicit much confidence, but it did open the door to hope:
Where we are now at ArcSys, as far as the repurchase network code is concerned, we have not yet come to the conclusion that we will need a super programmer just as much as the engineering team is actually divided. There are some who say it will be really good, and others who say that you will implement it, not really with the work Guilty steering wheel system. And it makes sense for a game like street fighter, but how Guilty steering wheel is designed – it will not really fit the bill. So we’re really in the middle of researching the engineering team what it might look like.
His quote from my interview was widely distributed on Twitter as part of a call from fans for the developers to take netcode seriously. It has become difficult to find any discussions about the game that do not contain hope of replay. The question was, would the developers listen?
It turns out they did, and I was able to jump online and play a few sets to get a practical feel for how the game and the netcode feel.