Fighters’ History: Japan ignores GGPO for 15 years
The greatest fighting game on the planet isn’t worth anything if you can’t play it, and for over a decade- Online Play in many of the most popular fighters has felt like drunken boxing.
Fighting games, like most genres, predate online multiplayer. The scene was born in arcades, where there was no lag, no privacy, and no excuses. Virtues from the arcade era are held close in fighting game culture, and lots of players over thirty will be quick to tell you that “Netplay just doesn’t matter.”
And can you blame them? Before 2006, playing nearly any game over the internet was a liability, fighting games especially. You might know the story from here: Dissatisfied with Capcom’s Street Fighter II Ports to the 7th Generation of consoles, Tony Cannon got to work on a new networking solution. By the end of the year he had a functioning prototype, and had made fighting games finally work online. GGPO was born.
“GGPO”, and all Rollback Netcode by extension, is a clever way to hide lag by rapidly saving and loading game states. If things aren’t in sync, the game loads to when they were, introducing a slight popping effect. In practice and on a wired connection, neither player will have their inputs delayed and the game will feel very close to offline. You can add features on top from here, and some of the best online fighters hide their rollbacks in clever ways.
All this, in 2006! GGPO was so good, players were getting matches going from Southern California to Australia- All in beta! Seth Killian, personal friend to the Cannons and then Community Manager at Capcom USA, approached Tony for a pitch. They (Capcom) ended up purchasing a license to GGPO, and used the tech on several of their games throughout that console generation.
Unfortunately, the biggest fighting game of the decade, Street Fighter IV, did not feature GGPO. SFIV launched with utterly terrible delay-based netcode- And it’s a dammed shame it did. By launching in such a state, SFIV set precedent for hundreds of other titles that generation: Why implement this “experimental” system if delay-based methods still top sales charts? Playing online was once again an entirely different game. Landing one-frame links on a constantly fluctuating input delay sounds just as hard as it is, and it’s likely that many regions were held back by bad netplay. The tech was there, and it was proven. Why didn’t Capcom use it?
For the next ten years, Japan would ignore rollback netcode. Dozens of titles launched without it, and the few that did were poor imitations. It took multiple marquee failures, a global pandemic, and overwhelming community outrage for Japanese fighting game developers to finally acknowledge that their games were unplayable online- And they still haven’t fixed them!
How many titles had to die before Capcom, ArcSys, SNK, and Namco were finally put on notice? And of those “Big Four,” only one has a release with quality netcode as of writing.
A working online mode is the tide that rises all ships. When you release a game without good rollback, you’re building walls that separate your community. Games like Killer Instinct (2013) had amazing netcode, and you saw more online players placing offline as a result. I’d wager that the runaway success of Japan and South Korea as regions in Street Fighter IV was because of their large offline scenes and lower average ping. The netplay for these users was likely workable, letting them grind out more high quality matches throughout the game’s lifespan.
If you lived in the Midwestern United States and wanted to get competitive with Street Fighter IV- The game would fight you at every turn. That’s something I never want to see again.
Fightcade 2 has just implemented its biggest update of the year. Naomi, Atomiswave, and Dreamcast games are now playable online with GGPO- The original rollback netcode. The implementation is nothing short of incredible.
This milestone isn’t just a feather in the caps of Marvel VS Capcom 2 or Capcom VS SNK 2, either. FlycastGGPO has added rollback to Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur, two series that have never featured stellar netplay.
The doors are open for players in any region to hop on Fightcade and get quality matches with players all over the world. With the right settings, you can play coast to coast, across the ocean, or even cross continent with ease. And the tech is only getting smarter.
I’d never predict that the best online fighting games in 2021 would be titles from 20 years ago, but here we are. We’re entering a new era not only for netplay, but for the genre at large. Don’t be fooled into thinking that good netcode is the future, because it’s the present.
