After months of silence, rollback netcode will finally make its Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator 2 on Steam this Friday.
Fans got a taste of the netcode back in October when Arc System Works ran a two-week beta test for it, but what is rollback netcode?
‘Rollback Netcode’ is a particular way of coding online play for fighting games that handles poor or long-distance connections better than any previous code. The introduction of rollback revolutionised the genre, or at least it should have. Although it’s been around for over a decade, the biggest fighting game developers around were shockingly slow on the uptake. Rollback netcode didn’t see popular use until COVID when we were all stuck playing online.
For the beta test, ArcSystemWorks’ implementation of rollback was well-received, even with the standard few bugs here and there. However, many fans criticised the company’s decision to remove the netcode at the end of the testing period.
When ArcSystemWorks added rollback to Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R and BlazBlue Central Fiction, the rollback betas were kept in so that players could enjoy the game online until the official rollback release. Due to technical difficulties, Xrd players haven’t been able to play the game online smoothly for months.
Or at least that would be the case, but word on the Twitter feed is that some Xrd players found an exploit and have been playing on the rollback beta this entire time! At least, come Friday, they won’t need to be discreet about finding people to play with anymore.
For those who were holding out on picking up the game due to the lack of rollback netcode, you can find it relatively cheap over at Fanatical, priced at $14.99.
The Steam version of Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator 2 will receive its official rollback netcode update on January 20th, 2023. There isn’t any update if the rollback netcode addition will make its way to the console versions.