Online Fighting Games During COVID: How Restoration Helps Us Connect

As a big fan of fighting games, I’m always excited when a new game comes out. No other genre captures my attention in the same way. The feeling of discovery, community and competitive spirit – a good outing potentially means thousands of hours of play and learning, not to mention all the sharing and chatting with other players.

This week I’m excited Guilty Gear Strive, released 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 netcode.

I’m happy to report that the beta is already doing the right things to make an online game look as much like an offline game as possible.

The offline experience

In the pre-pandemic era, like years ago, I used to organize a weekly fight night. People gathered in my garage to organize friendly but competitive sets, to help each other learn games and just talk about life. For us, fighting games aren’t just about competition – they’re about community and connecting with people.

For me, there is no purer gaming experience than playing against another human being. No CPU opponent or single-player narrative can bring that same sense of give and take, testing your skills and reflexes but also your ability to adapt and deepen your opponent’s psychology.

If you are the best player? It’s a chance to teach someone or test ideas against someone more forgiving. The moment you see them avoiding the configuration they had been walking in all night or challenging the movement you intimidated them with can feel as good as you win.

If the tables are turned and you’re the weakest, it’s a chance to learn, and it’s a lot more satisfying when you finally win a match. One night I ran a first at 20 against a friend who is a much stronger player than me, I lost the set 3-20. These three games that I took? Best feeling in the world, even after getting my butt back.

The real joy is when you find an opponent that you are pretty much equal to. Trading games, constantly pushing yourself to find an advantage, adapting them and watching them adapt, this is when fighting games shine like few other games can. It could be a good friend or a stranger, but it’s like having a conversation in another language.

A year ago, as COVID started popping up in Los Angeles County, I had to cancel my night. All the other weeklies, tournaments, friendly sets at your friend’s house – they’ve all dried up. Offline fighting games have become an endangered species all over the world, and the only way to get our fix was to play online.

Fight in an online world

Fighting games, by their nature, rely on reflexes and the ability to quickly assess data. We count the pictures, we look for the things that we know are not sure we can punish, we watch for telltale movements that could indicate an overhead attack is coming so we can move our blocking up. If someone rushes in your face, can you react fast enough?

In short, it’s a lousy kind of stuffing internet tubes. Any lag can destroy the feel of the game. Without offline gaming, completely dependent on the Internet, what should a fighting game fan do?

Fortunately, there is a smart networking technology, called netcode rollback, which can alleviate most of the distance and physical inconvenience (no matter how good your internet connection is, there is no beating the speed of the internet. light).

Unfortunately, not all fighting games have a restore netcode, especially those from Japanese developers who are the titans of the genre but have been slow to embrace the technology. They relied more on the delay-based netcode, which offers a much less consistent or enjoyable experience. Or, in the case of Street Fighter V, a half-baked restaurant that offers as many frustrating online experiences as good ones.

We’ve already posted what is probably the most comprehensive explanation of fighting games netcode and how restore works. It’s a deep dive, with both technical explanations and lots of short video clips to demonstrate the concepts – highly recommend for the curious. Here’s a quote that serves as a quick summary if you don’t want to dig in:

Since choosing a netcode game can never magically change the distance between a player and their opponent or prevent networks from dropping or delaying information, you may wonder how drastically a netcode strategy could be. better than any other. The key lies in how the netcode handles uncertainty.

When there is no information from the remote player, the delay-based netcode should pause and wait, as described in detail on the previous page. The main strength of Rollback is that he never waits for a missing entry from the opponent. Instead, the restore netcode continues to run the game normally. All local drive entries are processed immediately, as if it were offline. Then when the input from the remote drive arrives a few frames later, the restore corrects its errors by correcting the past. It does this in such a smart way that the local player may not even notice a high percentage of network instability, and it can play through all the remaining instances with the confidence that their inputs are still being handled consistently. .

In short, a good restore is much more like an offline one. Your timing is the same as offline, and with a reasonable ping it’s 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 leap.

Enter Guilty equipment

At the end of 2019, I interviewed Daisuke Ishiwatari, the creator of the Guilty equipment series, on the upcoming release of the latest version of his game. I had no idea the pandemic was imminent, but I wanted to ask him about restoring the netcode. The previous one Guilty equipment games didn’t have it, and their online experience suffered. Even in a world where offline gaming exists, it’s much more convenient to jump online at home to play whenever you want. Did the designers intend to do the work to add a restore to the game?

Daisuke’s response didn’t engender a ton of confidence, but it left the door open to hope:

Where we are now at ArcSys, in terms of restore netcode, we haven’t really come to the conclusion that we will need a great programmer so much, because the engineering team is a bit divided, actually. . There are some that say it would be really good and some that say, you know, that it wouldn’t really work with the Guilty equipment system. And that makes sense for a game like street fighter, but how Guilty equipment is designed – it wouldn’t quite fit the bill. So we’re now investigating the engineering team what that might look like.

His quote from my interview was widely disseminated on Twitter as part of an outcry from fans for developers to take netcode seriously. It became difficult to find discussions about the game that did not include hope for a flashback. The question was whether the developers would listen?

Turns out they did, and I was able to jump online and play a few sets to get a feel for how the game and netcode feel.