Fighting Games Friday: The Ultimax Ultra Rollback Necessity
The announcement that Atlus is porting Persona 4 Arena Ultimax to current-generation consoles and PC was more of a surprise than it should have been. The company isn’t against porting their popular older titles to newer platforms, but they’re inconsistent about it, as the lack of ways to play Persona 3 and Persona 4 on modern platforms can attest. It was a total mystery as to how they’d treat an older fighting game given how few of them the Japanese arm has published in the last couple of decades. But it’s nonetheless good that Ultimax won’t stay bound to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, especially considering those ports never received the arcade version’s final update. I’m considering this as their way of making up for that.
There’s a problem, though, beyond the lack of a physical version being officially released outside Japan and Asia. It’s clear the game will ship with the same delay-based online netplay the original version came with. That’s bad.
This should have been expected from the second they noticeably weren’t promoting it alongside the bullet points for the port with the announcement. But it’s funny how there can be a little voice in the back of a person’s mind that will sometimes provide an optimistic viewpoint. “Maybe they’re saving the announcement of that feature for later,” the little voice told me.
Later word from a member of the Ultimax development team, of course, pretty much confirmed that it won’t have it, per a mention from an interview with creative director Kazuhisa Wada from Famitsu: “In a later patch, we are also considering implementing rollback functionality,” he said, as translated by Persona Central. If they’re only “considering” it now for a port releasing in late March, it means the game will release without it. There’s no chance they’ll have time to add it and test it for release unless they’re willing to delay the port. If Wada seriously wants “players and community members from back in the day” to “get nostalgic and get excited once again” about the release, this cannot do. It is 2022.
I’m trying to deduce the logic behind releasing the port without the feature, as painful as that can be with how confounding Atlus’ decisions sometimes are. There’s a chance that by “players and community members from back in the day,” Wada and the company are referring to Persona players who played the game for the lengthy story mode and familiarity with characters from the third and fourth Persona titles, who likely accounted for a good number of players. The deeper-than-average fighting game story mode made the perfect complement to it being the easiest Arc System Works-developed title to play at the time.
They couldn’t possibly be talking about the tournament community, who will refuse to play this online without good netplay up to modern standards and largely won’t buy it. It’s not easy to assemble players for local matches considering the continuing pandemic that refuses to let up. It’s one of the key reasons why rollback has been pushed for in all fighters.
A number of vocal members in the fighting game community are clinging to the chance that rollback could be patched in after it releases. Arc System Works has, to be fair, confirmed that it will be added to Blazblue: Central Fiction and Blazblue: Cross Tag Battle in the coming months, which shows their willingness to patch the feature into their older games. Notably, neither of them are as old as Ultimax, though Central Fiction also received a PlayStation 3 release. The Blazblue games are also developed and published by Arc System Works, with no other such companies involved outside overseas publishers.
There’s no guarantee this will happen for P4AU. Dragon Ball FighterZ fans have been requesting it for that game for over a year now, yet there’s no movement from Arc System Works or Bandai Namco to add it despite the game still receiving support. There’s a chance Arc System Works wants Bandai Namco will have to fork over the money for the cost, resources, and time required for implementing and testing a new netcode. There could be a similar case with Granblue Fantasy: Versus and publisher Cygames, despite that title also still receiving DLC support. If Bandai Namco is unwilling to do this for a Dragon Ball game, it’s hard to see Atlus doing so for a quick rerelease.
This could go either way, but regardless of the eventual outcome, remember: It’s always important to complain LOUDLY on the internet. Good decisions have been made because of it, like the very rollback netplay seen in games like Guilty Gear Strive and the upcoming The King of Fighters XV, with online play up to 2022 standards. Those “standards,” of course, involve the continued need to socially distance and quarantine, allowing for games to be played with others in a safer environment. If Wada and Atlus truly want to revive this in the fighting game community, they’ll let Arc System Works add it. If they don’t, they don’t care.
About The Author
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
