Dragon Ball FighterZ Gets Turtle Power
Dragon Ball FighterZ has received a good variety of DLC characters over the last couple of years, though it hasn’t always been great. Don’t get me wrong; they’ve been mostly welcome with popular faces like Bardock (outside his consistently high-tier nature and the divisiveness of his Super Saiyan form), Cooler, Jiren, Fused Zamasu, and Super Saiyan Blue Vegito. Others have even been a little out of left field, like Videl and Janemba, who few fans had on their prediction lists but didn’t mind. They haven’t all been winners like Base Goku and Vegeta and perhaps Kid Goku, but the list is mostly good.
The newest character is within the same category as Videl and Janemba in being slightly unexpected: Master Roshi. He was formally revealed on the recent Dragon Ball FighterZ Show (it starts at 00:14:11) as the third character in this third season of DLC, following Kefla and Ultra Instinct Goku. I say “formally” because they leaked him in a hilarious fashion on the roadmap chart before the trailer aired. (His appearance was also teased through a hint from an Android 18 win quote.) I’d love to tell you about how he fights here, but the trailer was so short — shorter than usual, in fact — that it only provided the sneakiest of peeks. I can tell you that he’ll have the Evil Containment Wave, and the Kamehameha considering he’s the one who taught Goku and Krillin how to use it when they were young. But that’s it.
This trailer being so short along with Roshi himself not being planned for release until September, four months after UI Goku released in May, has upset several fans. I understand how they feel, but they should also take time to understand that we’re going through an unprecedented pandemic that’s upended development pipelines just as it’s upended lives. I’ve mentioned too many times to count on this blog that Japanese society has been uniquely impacted thanks to having little work-from-home culture, though even that’s not a perfect anodyne.
If Roshi’s really coming in September, they should show much more of him in the near future. This Dragon Ball FighterZ Show format would make for a good opportunity to display him in action, before Fighting Game Community YouTubers go in even further detail with him.
In her address, producer Tomoko Hiroki mentioned that the development team is looking into implementing rollback netcode, but admitted how hard doing so would be. She is reportedly not fibbing about the difficulty. It was shortly after this when Adam “Kiets” Heart, who’s advocated at length for rollback netplay in fighting games, commented on Twitter that “Converting a game without rollback into a game with rollback IS very hard!” But he continued by saying that “Also, it needs to be done.” He’s right. No one’s saying rollback is perfect or that it’s easy to implement, but it’s far better than delay-based netplay for precision-driven games, something FighterZ very much is.
It’s a pity Hiroki didn’t provide any kind of timeline for when rollback could be added, though that she commented on it at all is an encouraging sign. (This is another situation where I’m sure the pandemic isn’t helping.) My hope is that developer Arc System Works can patch rollback into a bunch of games, including this and Granblue Fantasy: Versus, after they’ve released Guilty Gear Strive. I’m no expert here; I have no idea if this will be possible to do quickly. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
It was tempting to ask why they even held this stream when the preview of Roshi in the new trailer was only around 30 seconds, and the address from Hiroki totaled around three minutes. But the real purpose of this stream was to promote the esports side of FighterZ. Well, to promote what little there will be. The Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour was cancelled this year thanks to tournaments being largely impossible to hold in person with the continued pandemic. In its place will be an online tournament, the Dragon Ball FighterZ National Championship, one they’ll have to get picky with the players they allow to compete.
It sure would be really nice if they had rollback ready for this. Hopefully Hiroki isn’t just saying they’re looking into rollback to placate a vocal fanbase that wants it, and that my hope for Arc System Works pans out. A fast-paced and highly precision-based game like this one could seriously use it. Whether they’re picky enough with players to ensure that each match will have as minimal an amount of lag-based interruptions as possible remains to be seen, though even the most stringent selection processes for online tournaments such as the recent Capcom Pro Tour bouts have had occasional hitches.
The development team still has two more characters to release for this season. From what I’ve seen, they haven’t been leaked through datamining or other hints, so feel free to make guesses in the meantime. Just don’t be surprised if they take a while to release, thanks primarily to the ongoing pandemic.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
