SEGA Repeatedly Asked Virtua Fighter 5 Devs to Use Rollback – Deemed ‘Unfeasible’
Today, we’re returning to the apparently bottomless Virtua Fighter well for our story. You know, for a franchise that hasn’t seen a new instalment (not counting ports or remasters) in several years, there’s a lot happening with this bad boy of late. Something on the low-res, polygonal horizon, maybe?
This time around, it’s broken that Seiji Aoki, the series’ producer, conducted an interview with 4Gamer in which he addressed fan discontent with Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown‘s online elements. As EventHubs reports, Twitter user Gosokkyu gave us a pretty thorough, succinct rundown of Aoki’s comments, which we’ll start by letting you have a gawk at below:
The report goes on to transcribe parts of the interview. “Basically, the game uses P2P netplay, and rollback was not included at this time,” said Aoki via 4Gamer. “SEGA of America repeatedly said to us though ‘Put in rollback anyway!'” In essence, it appears that SEGA higher-ups were keen to include what’s known as rollback netcode an industry standard to many. For the uninitiated, this refers to the ability of an online game to ‘predict’ what input a player is going to give, to create the illusion of smoother gameplay on poorer connections. If the system ‘predicts’ the wrong input, things quite literally ‘roll back’ a number of frames. We break it down even further in our Guilty Gear Strive preview. And here I thought rollbacks were just an ASDA marketing gimmick.
As you can probably imagine, though, programming a game to clairvoyantly foresee what a player is going to do takes a ton of effort, and often isn’t feasible in fighting games where any number of options are open to a character at any one time. Wrong predictions by the netcode can also unfairly throw off opponents, making matches feel like a guessing game rather than an actual test of skill.
It’s for all these reasons and more, Aoki says, that it was “ultimately decided to essentially build off of the netplay they created for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Virtua Fighter 5 instead of trying to retrofit a new system.” Complicating matters is that things were in motion “at a time when “rollback was not well known to them.” In short, it would have been too difficult; and they probably wouldn’t have known what they were doing anyway. Good call.
Aoki does acknowledge that there’s fan demand for rollback to be implemented eventually, so Virtua Fighter fans will, as ever, just have to wait. After all, isn’t that all we know?
Are you interested by this finding? Would you like SEGA to introduce rollback to the online experience at some stage? Let us know!
Via, EventHubs.
