Fighting Games Friday: Maybe Capcom Doesn’t Care About Fixing Street Fighter V’s Online

Plenty of justifiable complaints have been directed at Capcom’s Street Fighter V since it launched in February 2016, nearly four years ago. The biggest among them has involved the online play, the connections players have while fighting each other. It’s good that Capcom attempted to implement a form of rollback netplay, which puts them above other developers too content to rely on the old, tired, and should-never-be-preferable input-based play. But they implemented it poorly, which explains the wildly inconsistent connections. It’s common, for instance, to have the first round of an online match handle fine, while the second is a mess of rollback actions that make players participate in a frustrating guessing game to determine which hits landed.

Not only has Capcom not even attempted to fix it, they’ve barely acknowledged the problem. Producer Yoshinori Ono and the game’s development team have undoubtedly heard the complaints from fans given how vocal and numerous they are, yet the responses have been underwhelming every time. There’s a chance that Capcom’s higher ups and project managers don’t want to provide the resources necessary to make fixes, but a recent development shows how it wouldn’t need much attention.

Redditor Altimor decided to handle this matter himself by developing a netcode patch for the PC version of SFV, one promised to massively improve performance and mitigate lag in matches between players. This sounded good on the surface, but it was easy to be skeptical of a mostly-random fan who claimed something on the internet. Several tournament players tried it, the most capable at determining the difference between how online and offline matches should feel. Turns out, the patch actually did result in smoother matches. Players in the United States reported better connections, but the results were also much improved with players between countries.

It reportedly only took Altimor around two days to fix the online issues, which seems believable given how he’s been otherwise truthful thus far. It would take Capcom even less time to fix it, around 30 minutes by his estimation given their resources. Either the developers who handled the online aren’t sure of how to fix it, or Capcom doesn’t care to dedicate any time towards it. It’s unlikely that Capcom’s programmers are inferior to fans, so the latter is more likely. What a real shame.

Not all is perfect with this patch, however. It’s apparently making cross-play with PlayStation 4 users an even bigger pain the before, with worse connections. Most PC users still playing the game are big fans of SFV, and they’ll undoubtedly use this fan patch if they aren’t as of this writing. It might be best if PS4 users disable cross-play if connections are so bad. That is, unless Capcom gets bitter and starts detecting and banning the PC players using the patch. Absolutely do not put it past them.

Iron Galaxy’s Adam “Keits” Heart previously mentioned that good online play was imperative for maintaining Killer Instinct’s community, which is still going strong more than six years after its release, and over three years after Microsoft stopped releasing content for it. You’d think Capcom would give more of a damn about SFV’s online considering the amount of new content still being released, with the full Champion Edition upgrade coming on February 14th. But maybe that would be too logical, for a company that’s made illogical moves within the fighting game space for a good part of this console generation.

Capcom coincidentally announced that SFV’s servers will go offline for an hour on Tuesday for maintenance just as reports about this patch hit mainstream gaming websites. Thinking they’re actually taking this opportunity to fix the online sounds too good to be true, so this announcement is likely pure coincidence. Unless, you know, they really do plan to take this time to disallow the online fan patch and potentially ban players who use it. Brace yourselves.

In other news: Following its December release in Japan, Samurai Shodown for Switch will release in the US (and maybe Europe) on February 25th. Like the Japanese version, preorders will include a digital copy of Samurai Shodown! 2 for Neo Geo Pocket Color, a solid handheld adaptation with alternate move set versions of certain characters.

This version struggled to maintain 60fps when it launched, a crippling matter given how critical framerate is for twitch-based games. But it’s reportedly been patched to stabilize the framerate, and it’s far more solid than SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy’s Switch version. Sticking to the topic of online connections: Samurai Shodown has bottom-tier online play on other platforms that SNK hasn’t — and, let’s be honest, won’t — fix, and it will be worse with the Switch’s Wi-Fi connections. Good luck.

I don’t have much faith, but I want to emphasize again that I really hope Japanese developers start implementing better online play for future fighting games, perhaps starting with the next generation of consoles. As Japanese arcades become less of a focus for them due to the once-again declining industry, they should work to build as solid a worldwide online fanbase as they can. If they don’t, companies and fans are in for a rough ride in the future.