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Bad network code kills your favorite fighting games

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It was painful to watch the release of the second season DLC Samurai Shodown . The game continues to grow and develop, not trying to solve its biggest problem: the terrible online mode. Does it make sense to develop a competitive game, no matter how beautiful and well-made it is, if most players can hardly play against each other?

The game itself is amazing. When we get together with friends, I often launch Samurai Shodown ; she is gorgeous and friendly to new players, and powerful blows make everyone breathless in the room. Everyone really likes to play it, regardless of skill level.


I would like to be able to play Samurai Shodown against powerful opponents online as well as against my friends at home, but the network code of the game is terrible - worse than any other game I know - so I quickly give up. The unpredictable peaks of tough delays turn polished gameplay into boring, slow and uninteresting. It’s hard to motivate myself to improve, if I can’t even be sure that my own movements will be accurately displayed on the screen.

Online fighting games deserve much more. NetherRealm Studios ( Mortal Kombat ) and Capcom ( Street Fighter ) over time created excellent network code, and even small indie games, including comic ones like fighting memesFight of Animals , thanks to improved technology, achieved excellent results.

But genre leaders such as SNK and Arc System Works, along with other developers, mostly from Japan, have not changed their approach to online battles for many years, even releasing exciting new games. Although Granblue Fantasy Versus is at the forefront of 3D animation progress, its network code level is a thing of the past.

Such an outdated approach to network code is a story that is repeated with almost every new fighting game from Japan. The only ones who can change things are fans who demand change and who vote for the improvement with a dollar.

Why is this such a big problem? Let me explain, and during this explanation, you can learn a little more about how online fighting games work, which will be useful in general. Let's get started.

Deprecated Status Quo: Delay Based Network Code


Most modern fighting games use a network code based on delays , the task of which is to compensate for the inevitable delay time that occurs when transferring data between players separated by many kilometers.

This means that to ensure a smooth gameplay, the game delays the input of both players by several frames (in most cases, the frame is the sixtieth of a second).

And this approach works to some extent. Players remain synchronized with each other - this is very important when there is so much relevant information in the frame. But postponing the input of each player, even for a short time, completely changes the gameplay and the feeling of it. There is a big difference between the rounds that are played at home and the rounds online. Games using network code based on delays, when the best players play them, turn into something else, not so competitive and honest.

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The  Under Night In-Birth and the other games in the top of the screen shows the delay, measured in frames.

In addition, this approach implies that the players are geographically close to each other and use a stable (best wired) connection. For network code based on delays to work well, these conditions must be met, but in reality they are rarely enforced.

What happens when problems arise in a connection? Games begin to twitch and pause, which does not allow players to use strategies that depend on frame-by-frame accurate timings. The transfer of player input can even get lost somewhere, which often affects the outcome of the match. The victory can be won not by the one who has the best strategy and its execution, but by the one who is more efficiently able to adapt to the changeable, uncertain nature of network code. And this is death for any serious competitive scene.


From the clip above, you can see what the delay peaks look like in Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 .

Note that the number in the upper right corner of the crane changes from two frames (and this tells us that the connection is much faster than average!) To seven, 11 and even 13 delay frames. It looks bad for the observer, but worse for the player. I managed to do the combo only by intentionally pressing each button a quarter of a second before the right moment.

A delay of five frames or more usually means difficulty. With more complex connections, for example, for players from different countries, or when using Wi-Fi, lag peaks win and network code based on delays quickly becomes unplayable. It cannot be a serious solution to the problem of online battles. He's just ... bad. And he gives the players bad lessons.

Experienced players rely on fast, accurate and consistent timings. They are forced to play in a state of instability and deal with a delay of two frames in one match, six frames in another, and four frames in the next. I have tournaments friends who do n’t play online at all , because they would rather give up more practice than risk losing their own instincts.

Muscle memory and reaction time is the most important thing for fighting games, and the network code based on delays has a very real opportunity to spoil the player’s reaction to difficult situations. It harms the game of the most competitive fans, those thanks to whom the games live.

The delay-based network code was acceptable when we considered it a miracle to play an active game online with another person. It was not perfect, but nothing is perfect, including rollback, the meaning was different. We were shocked that this even worked. But that was the time of the first Xbox, and by the standards of video games, it has been an eternity since then.

Today, developers are capable of more, and some of them can cope, but let's talk about what happens when they fail. This lesson is much more important in fighting games than probably in any other genre.

The consequences of linking to delays


The popularity and relevance of fighting games has always depended on communities of ordinary fans , long before the possibility of online matches appeared. Not every game is mainstream enough to provide a constant flow of players, like in Tekken or Street Fighter, and games that are unable to find their community of competing fans are doomed to fade.

Offline meetings and tournaments have always been the best way to host games, but they only represent a small fraction of the total number of players. In most communities, arcade machines and meeting places for rivals are simply not enough. Fans who buy fighting games today usually only play against other players .online, if at all playing multiplayer. An online mode that does not work or does not contribute to the development of their skills interferes with the development of any sufficiently significant communities. And this again threatens the game with death.

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The New York City-filled, open lobby of Granblue Fantasy Versus . Even before the official release in the USA, the number of simultaneously playing users in the evenings reached one hundred, and this is more than enough.

If the game is new, for example, as the recently released Granblue Fantasy Versus, which users who bought it abroad, could enjoy a month before release in the US, then everything is in order, even when the network code is based on delays. With a good connection, there is no problem finding a rival, because the game is popular in the community and everyone wants to try it. The more players, the better the connection between the rivals, because they are closer, so when the game is just released, players rarely have to worry about a bad network code. Indeed, for games like Samurai Shodown, this may be the only time that players are able to find good matches.

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Open lobby in Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 , empty for at least two years.

But what if you move forward for half a year, when additional characters have already stopped appearing? Everything is becoming very gloomy. What happens when Guilty Gear Strive comes out later this year and fans of anime fighting games switch to a new, interesting game? Suddenly, there may not be many active players in your area, and sometimes, depending on your location and the quality of the connection, they may not be found at all.

If you want to play at all, you will have to rely on a less fast connection with more distant players, and here the network code with reference to delays begins to show its weaknesses. The gameplay almost always turns out to be so bad that at this stage the players give up and switch to another game. In the most extreme cases, they can generally lose their patience and completely abandon fighting games. This turns into a deadly peak, from which few games can escape.

The worst part is that the fans do not leave out of dislike for the game. They leave, despite the love of her. They were let down by technology, not the design of the game, which they would gladly continue to play and improve in it.

Rollback - a Better Way to Work Network Code


This is a serious problem for fighting games, so, probably, someone is already looking for ways to solve it? And this is the saddest thing: a good online game for fighting games is a solved problem, and the solution arose more than a dozen years ago.


If you do not go into technical details (which are described in this exhaustive article ), in the network code based on “rewind” (rollback), along with the traditional method based on delays, several tricks are used to minimize and hide the lag, as well as adjust the player’s input, which leads significantly smoother and more accurate gameplay with much less stringent connection requirements. It's not perfect, but it's damn better than other, much more popular solutions used in online games.

The name “rewind” (“rollback”) is associated with how the code “rewinds” the game state to maintain input constancy. With the correct implementation of rewinding, such shifts are invisible, but in the case of a bad decision, it seems that the characters are teleported around the screen. However, in the general case, such a scheme is much more efficient.

In 2007, I used the first rollback client GGPO ( Good Game, Peace Out ) to play emulated Street Fighter Alpha 2 with friends on the network , and the result was perfect - it seemed to me that I was sitting on the same sofa with my opponent. It was a real revelation. I decided that such a system should have a future. Capcom and other developers from the world of fighting games will definitely use similar ideas, for example, in the upcomingStreet Fighter 4 . Is it true?

Uh ... so right?

(Spoiler: they never used it.)

Despite the fact that 13 years have passed, little has changed during this time. Western fighting games eventually came to rollback ( Mortal Kombat , Skullgirls, and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid can be mentioned as examples), but the largest Japanese developers continued to use their own systems based on delays. In some games, the network game based on delays was better implemented than in others, but in general they simply could not provide smooth, stable results and a wider community of players provided by the rollback architecture.

The experience of playing with network code based on delays varies from completely unplayable to barely adequate. When using rollback, the gameplay on fast connections is excellent, while slower ones change from playable to adequate. More people play high-quality fights, and this means that in each game more people remain for a longer time. The community and developers are winning, and everyone is good.

Rollback is not a perfect magic key, and it takes a lot of work to implement it - in fact, the Mortal Kombat development team took two years to do this - but its benefits are more than worth the effort. In fact, they are vital for the long-term survival of fighting games in a crowded niche market. You can see for yourself: in Killer InstinctYou can play for free on Xbox One and Windows PC. Older SNK games, such as Mark of the Wolves and Samurai Shodown 5 Special, use rollback on ports on PC and PS4. Even the aforementioned Fight of Animals , which, as we recall, costs only six dollars, can boast of a better online game than many modern fighting games.

Japanese developers: the last frontier of resistance


Western fighting game developers mastered rollback, but the genre itself was born and raised in Japan. Companies like Capcom, Arc System Works and SNK continue to be productive in it. Of these, only Capcom has released a major rollback-based network game, and its implementation in Street Fighter 5 , according to one member of the Capcom Cup , leaves much to be desired.


In part, this may be due to the fact that the network game based on delays in Japan can cause fewer problems due to its small geographical size, high population density and high-quality broadband Internet access. So why change something? When playing online fighting games in arcade arcade halls in Tokyo, the connection was always smooth, even when I played games notorious for the poor quality of network code, for example, in Million Arthur Arcana Blood . Probably the whole problem is this: why bother with the fact that it will require more work if the ready-made solution works well at home ?

But not only people in Japan play Japanese fighting games. There is a Tekken World Tour, which includes the top tenplayers from Korea, Pakistan, France and the USA. The level of competition and e-sports is increasing, and it was high time for developers to recognize that this community is global and that it is necessary to serve this community as much as possible and using the best tools.

Fortunately, the changes seem to be starting. Capcom, for example, has finally decided to start work on fixing Street Fighter 5’s junk rollback code . And after many years of indifferent reaction to the demands to improve the network code - fans spammed “GGPO!” For months on all the company's streams - Arc System Works announced that it was going to embed the rollback code in the upcoming largest game of Guilty Gear Strive .

Although Arc is not a Bandai Namco or Capcom- sized publisher, Dragon Ball FighterZ has only recently turned this company into mainstream, it is one of the Japanese experts in the genre. Wherever he goes, the rest of the niche market will begin to move there. If an improvement in online battles would mean an increase in sales, then Strive could be a game that made the rest of Japanese companies take rollback seriously.

All that remains is SNK. If you do not pay attention to the company's old games, you might think that SNK has never heard of rollback, and its network code based on delays has always been one of the worst fighting games of all. Last year at Evo, the developer announced that he was working on The King of Fighters 15, a new part of its largest franchise. The King of Fighters 14 was an excellent game , but it was not able to gather a significant community in the United States, and to a large extent it was caused by terrible online fights.

Actually, this was the case with The King of Fighters 13 . SNK has been repeating this story for generations, but other fighting game developers (even those who have previously resisted the change) have shown that this should not be.

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