Fighting Games Friday: Questions Around The King of Fighters XV’s Rollback
It was difficult to believe that SNK wasn’t aware of how important rollback netplay is to their audience at the time they first announced The King of Fighters XV. This was made clear through how they revealed the since-released The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match for PlayStation 4 alongside it, where they didn’t hesitate to advertise that the game would have it. There was also no way SNK director and producer Yasuyuki Oda didn’t know how fans felt about rollback with all the positive reactions on social media after previous classic games were patched with the feature. Both he and the company have Twitter and Facebook accounts they frequently update, and they can’t avoid seeing the replies.
Still, the timing of the announcement that KOFXV will actually have rollback is curious. Oda chose to announce this after a number of characters were shown, days after Chizuru Kagura’s reveal during the second Fighting Game Roundtable. It’s one thing for a company to desire to keep the audience in suspense about whether it will have a necessary fan-favorite feature or not, while continuing to let a segment of that base insist that the game will be dead on arrival if it doesn’t have it (very true, by the way). But if that’s the case, they didn’t keep the façade going for long, and the game is nowhere near a release given the glacial pace at which they’re revealing characters. So, what’s the plan here?
I won’t be an entirely negative Nancy here. It is indeed very good that the game will have rollback. SNK has for years insisted on keeping their old delay-based netplay code for new games, one they’ve been using and barely updating since their Xbox 360 releases in the late 2000s. To call a netcode where even players who live about ten minutes apart have trouble with input-delay-based lag during matches “bad” is an understatement. It was unacceptable when The King of Fighters XIV and Samurai Shodown released in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and is beyond unacceptable now. SNK is embracing the present with KOFXV. But again, timing of the announcement raises several questions.
SNK announced this after a roundtable with other fighting game developers, which happened during the Guilty Gear Strive open beta where players tested its superlative rollback netplay. Arc System Works is undoubtedly proud of their work on it, and Guilty Gear director, producer, character designer, and music composer Daisuke Ishiwatari tried and somewhat failed to hide how good he felt about it during the stream. But as James Chen noted, Oda wasn’t willing to approach the subject, and KOF fans consequently feared the worst for its online play. They perhaps had no reason to with the aforementioned announcement that it will have it after all, but the mysteries I alluded to above remain. There are two possibilities here, the second of which would be a worse outcome.
One is that SNK always planned to implement it, and wanted to announce it after several characters had been revealed as a nice surprise. Since it was announced after only seven were, Oda might have underestimated the level of concern fans had about it, especially following the stream, and decided to reveal it via tweet to quickly assuage fears. I’m also hoping Oda and others within SNK were a little jealous at the reception to Strive’s netplay following the open beta, which would make for hilarious drama.
I certainly hope that’s the explanation, because the other possibility could spell peril at best. They might have announced it as an immediate reaction to all the criticism they’d received, without prior plans to implement it. This would mean that key SNK developers were somehow blind to the number of vocal fans who’ve wanted rollback for future fighting games for years, a testament to how out of touch they could be. But a reactionary announcement would involve SNK underestimating just how much work it takes to implement rollback into games, especially newer titles. NetherRealm Studios’ Ed Boon mentioned how difficult this can be when discussing how necessary rollback is, while the implementation was one of the reasons for Strive being delayed from fall 2020 to spring 2021.
I hope the second case isn’t the actual one. If it is, and rollback isn’t ready for the currently-planned release date, they should delay it until it’s complete. The longevity of the online community will be better off if the game launches with it instead of the team patching it in down the line. If they wait on implementing it, players who purchased the game at release would drop it after struggling and failing to adjust to delay-based netplay, and there’s no guarantee that all of them would return when rollback is patched in. I’m not exaggerating when I say the game will be doomed upon arrival if it doesn’t launch with it. SNK also shouldn’t rush to insert it in there. When a team misjudges how much work this takes and insists on having it available for release, through development crunching if need be, you get Street Fighter V’s online play.
There remain several more characters for SNK to reveal from here, following recent showcases for Chizuru (the only character revealed thus far who wasn’t in KOFIXV), Andy Bogard, and Yuri Sakazaki. In time, we’ll get a better impression of which aforementioned scenario is closer to the truth, especially if — or, if they’re serious about this, when — they let the audience test it.
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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
