Latest BlazBlue Games to Receive Rollback Update

Over this last weekend, the CEO (Community Effort Orlando) Fighting Game Championships took place. While not as big as EVO, it’s still one of the biggest fighting game tournaments. It was one of the many physical events that were canceled last year due to Covid-19 but were able to open for physical competitive games this year. Among all the incredibly hyped tournaments, there was some exciting news revealed through two trailers from Arc System Works.

One of these huge reveals (technically the second) was that the character Baiken was set to return as the fourth DLC character for Guilty Gear Strive. She’s always been a huge fan-favorite character and the community is ecstatic about her showing up. As big of news as that is for Guilty Gear fans, BlazBlue fans were given an arguably bigger surprise in the announcement that BlazBlue Centralfiction and BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle are going to be updated with rollback support.

Online play has always been a big gripe in the fighting game community. Fighting games operate with 60 frames (i.e. 60 frames per second) and when you consider how important it may be for you to out-jab an opponent in one frame or one-sixtieth of a second, it’s important for gameplay to be as smooth as possible. There’s already time needed just to send button inputs over to each other, and other issues also factor in.

The common and cheap way of solving this problem for online play is delay-based netcode. The overly general way to explain it is that it tries to keep everything balanced by creating an artificial delay so both opponents are playing in the same condition.

It’s typically not the most ideal solution. It works much better if both players are relatively close to each other. However, if the delay isn’t too bad then it keeps everything level and casual players won’t even notice. I briefly mentioned this last month when talking about the Fighting Juggernauts Bundle

Unfortunately, it runs into the problem that online connections are rarely (if ever) consistent. The amount of delay experienced can jump around and even with attempts to predict what the connection will be like, it can easily become an experience that takes out a lot of fun. This has been a problem especially large with Japanese fighting game developers, as Japan is a small country and doesn’t commonly have the issues that two players on opposite sides of the United States have connecting, much less those who try to play against others worldwide.

This brings us to the arguably better alternative, rollback netcode. Again, to explain it as simply as possible, this netcode doesn’t add delay but tries to mitigate it all together by attempting to predict what an opponent is going to do. Given how often it checks, it does this with surprisingly good accuracy.

If it receives data that conflicts with its prediction, it rollbacks and brings the game up to date with the correct inputs and game states. Since plenty of actions and game states in fighting games take time, most players won’t even notice any small corrections.

There’s a lot more to it than that, but that would warrant a different and much longer article. What is important to take away is that players have been begging developers to consider it for years, but these appeals weren’t met with much response.

That is until the Covid-19 pandemic started and forced everyone from the casual player to the biggest tournament pros to play their games online. The overwhelmingly negative response and the hugely positive response to Arc System Works using rollback netcode in Guilty Gear Strive, along with them adding it to their older entry, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, has made online functionality the biggest priority it’s ever been.

As the last two BlazBlue games came well before this increased push for better online play began, all their fans were left hoping that the series will see a new entry one day and they would be able to play that with rollback. Needless to say, this latest announcement is a welcome surprise that nobody saw coming.

Rollback support is expected to release for BlazBlue Centralfiction in February 2022 for Steam while a public test began on December 6^th. BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle meanwhile is receiving rollback on both the PS4 and Steam versions with a vague date of 2022. You can be sure that I’ll be reporting the first news I hear when a more concise date is provided.