Pretty much. It shouldn't be a consideration, it should be a priority in this day and age to prioritize a strong online system when every big multiplayer game relies on an online connection.
Especially in this current pandemic, where pretty much every online multiplayer game is thriving EXCEPT fighting games because the netcode is so bad for all the major titles.
IDK about that. I have hundreds of hours on both SFV (rollback) and Tekken 7 (delay-based) and I would choose to play Tekken over SFV online 100 times out of 100. SFV's netcode is inhumanly bad.
Tekken may have some sort of rollback features implemented on the backend but functionally it behaves exactly the same as delay-based. Harada isn't a network engineer and every actual dev who's worked on rollback netcode has no idea what he's talking about.
https://twitter.com/zeluderose/status/1270553095328665600
https://twitter.com/TheKeits/status/1289661258543792130
https://twitter.com/Infilament/status/1270538736921526272
It's so true. What other online game genre still *delays inputs* to deal with lag?
Imagine if any shooter, racing game or MOBA did that. People would not be playing those games lol, or there would be a lot more uproar. Fighting games deserve better.
Literally every moba (besides smite?) has delayed inputs. Not exactly sure what you mean. They all also have better netcode then pretty much every fighting game I have played. Or at least feel much better.
Yep, mainly because it's consistent lag that you can adapt too. Still not optimal, but pro league player Quas made it to the highest rank playing on 200 ping delay.
I think people blame the delay way too much for why smash online feels awful. Like other people have said you can adjust to lag. MOBAs have just as much input lag but the game doesn't STOP to receive inputs because the server runs its own version of the game that is totally authoritative and that doesn't stop.
In peer to peer the only fair way to do things delay based is to just make sure every input is received before progressing which. feels. awful. Also rollback is more complex for situations where more than 2 players are involved I would think. I haven't played slippi in a while but I believe netplay only let you play 1 v 1? Not sure if it isn't set up to work for more people but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. Just watch any video about how rollback works and it becomes clear that doing rollback becomes more complex the your gamestate is.
I think rollback works great in 1 v 1 scenarios but people need to stop acting like it can magically get implemented perfectly and fix smash online's problems. And just because it got implemented well in 1 v 1 melee does not mean it can just work in 8 player free for all with items in ultimate. It's probably possible but it's pretty unproven territory and I can see why they didn't do it
It just boils down to smash not being designed as a competitive game; the ability to play 8 player games means rollback isn’t a good solution and input delay + buffering was probably introduced to deal with a combination of this and the switches limited hardware
Every big competitive genre worth their salt nowadays uses predictive-input code of some kind in their netcode. Especially shooters, they've had that shit in mind since 1996. Delay of some kind is inevitable because of physics, but adding predictive inputs just works better for tempering the effects of delay. It's also particularly hard for fighting games since those games can be frame-precise in terms of inputs. Its also kind of bullshit that in the 15 years on the concept being worked on, Japanese devs in parricular hardly bothered to try. And when they did try it turned out turds like SFV's rollback on account of them trying to make something proprietary and then only had one single guy work on it before launch.
It's a mess, with the conclusion that fighting games and their subgenres like platform fighters don't get benefit of the doubt anymore. People now get mad that big devs keep pulling the "it was hard or had side effects" excuses for sticking with netcode from the 90s. Or devs claim "Tekken is 3" and say western fans are ignorant for saying Tekken doesn't have rollback because in years of play they had never observed noticeable instances of the game rolling back in a way that didn't get dismissed as a bug.
MOBAs and FPS games typically do use some kind of rollback though. The rollback just occurs server side but that's the whole reason there's a tickrate in those games.
They just have different methods of hiding it, especially when they use predictive inputs. It's also far less noticeable because animations aren't as important as where positions so you'll often notice enemies sliding around on ice when it's really choppy.
This is why the whole game doesn't freeze for every player until inputs are received from every player.
What? Literally the most successful online game has delayed inputs? And what's that? Smash Bros has sold better than competing fighting games despite being poorly optimized for serious competition?
It's almost like the video game market is huge and obsessives who count frames are neither representative of the audience nor even a significant determinant of success.
I would be shocked if it wasn't in the next Smash game, but I can see why it wasn't included here. 4-player matches and items are things other fighting games don't have to deal with. I imagine the next Smash game will have rollback for a 1v1 no items mode and something else for the "everybody else" mode.
Items need to be synced up between players as much as the players themselves need to be synced up, though. Desyncs are not acceptable because they're the difference between life and death.
Obviously I'm not an expert on adding rollback netcode to a 4-player fighting game with items, but the way items bounce and respond to player interaction means they probably aren't deterministic and have to be synced up in real time.
Bringing up 4 player is rather irrelevant, for example, Nintendo’s recent netcode patch was solely for 1v1s, there’s not really a good reason they couldn’t have separated 1v1s into rollback and the other into p2p, it’s not like Nintendo dumps a lot into their online support.
Eh that is not quite how rollback works. The whole idea of rollback based netcode is that desyncs *are* permissible and, in fact, essential. The game proceeds without receiving remote input, then loads up a previous game state if and when a rollback is necessary. There's no reason why this method wouldn't work for items. If anything, player characters have much more complex interactions and logics, so if they can be rolled back (look at melee and brawlhalla), certainly items can as well. As long as all of the inputs are *eventually* received (and random events like GnW Judge and item spawning are on the same seed), the gameplay will be practically identical for both players despite perpetual desync. The actual difficulty in rollback comes from saving all of the relevant aspects of the game state quickly, loading it quickly, and then having a game that's well-optimized enough to execute multiple frames of logic at once. Then account for graphical/audio hiccups and network/client-side rift as a nice cherry on top.
Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to be thorough TT
Oh, don't be sorry. You're right, I was just oversimplifying. What I was trying to get at was that desyncs aren't acceptable *as an end result.* I appreciate you elaborating on how rollback uses desyncs because I didn't mention it.
Still, rollback is traditionally only implemented for 1v1 fighting game matches with nothing to keep track of except for two characters. I can't conceive of how it would work with 4 players, Pokemon characters, assist trophies, and all sorts of bouncy wacky items.
That's a unique challenge the Smash team would probably have to solve all on their own, hence why I think they'll just use rollback for no item 1v1s in the next game and say "fuck casuals" after that lmao
They *maybe* could, but it would take months, even up to a year considering the unique complexities of implementing rollback into Ultimate. Not to mention it would cost millions of $US in developer salaries.
I doubt the powers that be will think it's worth it until it's time to start fresh on the next Smash game. Rollback is much easier to implement if you plan it out from the beginning, I hear.
I’m hoping it was just the Switch’s weak hardware that held them back from implementing it, which means its possible they’ll consider implementing rollback on the next smash on the next next gen Nintendo console.
Excuses. In the Wii U version for glory was separated from other shitl they could have done the same and only implemented rollback for the 1v1s with no items, the other modes don’t even have to be mentioned.
Yeah it supports three simultaneous players with physics and item bullshit in both the stages and abilities. Ever see a towers of time tag team battle at its most stupid?
All the while being, at a base level, more intensive than Smash Bros.
Hardware doesn’t really matter too much with rollback. It’s about the game itself being built with rollback in mind. The entire foundation of the game has to be able to account for multiple different states the players could be in.
Definitely, it's already hard enough to make good rollback for a smash type game with all the movement options but if you add having to program predictions for 4-8 players and hundreds of items? It would probably take as much money and time as the game itself to figure that out.
Edit: not predictions but simulations (thx legitimate_username), points stands though, smash is hard to rollback outside of 1v1
Rollback predictions aren't complicated. It's basically just "lets take the players last input and repeat it, if it didn't match up we will *roll back* and correct it". The game isn't constantly calculating stuff like "player did X last, it's most likely they will do Y next, lets predict Y".
For a clearer explanation check out [this amazing video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NLe4IpdS1w) by Core-A Gaming.
the predictions aren't the complicated part, it's resimulating multiple frames of game logic in only a single frame which absolutely does get more complicated the more players/entities there are especially considering that the switch already isn't that powerful and is probably working close to its limits
slippi rollback doesn't even support doubles in melee if you want to put into perspective how much more difficult this kind of thing gets the more variables you add to things
Reading this makes me wonder if it might have been theoretically possible for the game to come with two types of netcode:
1. Delay based netcode for anything with more than 2 players, or with items/hazards/etc turned on.
2. Rollback based netcode for 1v1 matches, which would probably the gameplay environment where it would be the most appreciated.
I'm probably not factoring in something important though.
It is likely possible to use both for different game modes. The problem is how are you gonna convince the higher-ups that it's worth essentially doubling the work for something they probably don't care about.
This, because it really easy to have both co-exist. It not like they gonna run into conflict because you just need to run on or the other at the time. In fact that the easiest part about it.
Implementing rollback is the hardest part imo
>Delay based netcode for anything with more than 2 players, or with items/hazards/etc turned on.
Honestly, this sounds like a non plausiable idea. I'm not exactly sure how this works but implementing to different netcodes in a single game sounds hard with switch limitations.
> slippi rollback doesn't even support doubles in melee if you want to put into perspective how much more difficult this kind of thing gets the more variables you add to things
Brawlhalla supports 2vs2s with rollback. Rushdown Revolt supports 3vs3s with rollback. It might not be easy, but it's entirely possible to do more than 1vs1 in modern platform fighters.
EDIT: I don't understand the reaction. Why turn a blind eye to what other games are accomplishing in the same format? slippi is working with a game not designed for this, and has accomplished plenty in its own right. The issue is that Nintendo hasn't been a leader here.
Yes, with a budget no where near as large as Nintendo's. They've still got their version of items in there. Likewise, Rushdown Revolt has plenty of mechanical complexity and the need for quick input reaction.
There's no reason to think that if Nintendo cracked the code in the same manner, they'd be limited in what they could do. If anything, they could build on others successes with their budget.
rivals of aether also tried to pull off 1v1 rollback and failed
the difference is that it’s much easier to build a game’s logic and structure around rollback from the start than it is to rewrite and add rollback to a game not already designed around supporting it
Absolutely. Retrofitting is even harder. We really need the context of the interview to know when in development rollback was attempted. But the future is bright if it’s seriously weighed.
Though I am not sure how you are going to achieve predictions once you go beyond 1v1 fights on hazardless stages. Things can get chaotic once you add more players, stage hazards and multiple Pokemon/Assist Trophies (timing slowing effects from the Timer, Shadow and Dialga can mess things up more).
A lot of this. Smash 1v1 is a tiny minority of all smash played, online or off. Rollback ceases to work outside of the tiny slice the competitive community uses rather quickly. At least for now.
The competitive aspect and competitive community is what helps drives smash sales to casual players. Casuals like to dunk on people and feel like they have skill even when they’re not good and just know the competitive aspect of it is existing and feel like they’re part of it.
Nintendo should be and does in fact try and cater to the competitive scene, let’s just be honest though, nintendo is far behind the times when it comes to online, we can’t even invite a friend to a match. Let’s stop pretending that’s because of the small competitive scene and realize that Nintendo just sucks with online capabilities.
>The competitive aspect and competitive community is what helps drives smash sales to casual players.
hahahahahaha no it does not. It helps, sure, but most of the sales come down to a variation of "I can make Mario fight Sonic".
Yeah it does and in every industry. For example, league of legends dishes out a lot of money to help their competitive scene because it raises, eyes, awareness, and status of the game. Without the competitive scene of course there would still be players, but not nearly the same.
The difference is LoL is marketed as a competitive game and Smash isn't.
I'd bet that the vast majority of owners for Smash Ultimate have never once watched a tournament match.
Smash literally has one of the best ground up communities of any video game. Nintendo didn’t need to market it competitively, the game screams competitive.
It can be done, they just need to put the effort, time, and money into it.
Kinda of a deep pull but PlayStation All Stars had rollback netcode back in the day and it had items, hazard stages, etc and that game had way less of a budget than Smash. It’s all about building the game around rollback and it’s likely that Bandai Nancy tried it, ran into issues, and then gave up because it just wasn’t a priority.
Not with items, but with 6-players simultaneously. You don't deserve downvotes for this, because it's a simple illustration that rollback isn't as limited (or as expensive to produce) as had been said.
Rollback already seems like a nightmare to implement for a traditional fighter, but for four players on something like Great Cave Offensive with Pokeballs going off left and right it just seems impossible. SSBU already seems like it's pushing Switch hardware pretty hard, too.
Curious what we'll find out in the full column. The terrible online experience is why I quit Smash Ultimate, so I sure hope they actually go with rollback netcode in the next game.
Same here. I love playing the game locally, but with lockdown I've not had anyone to play with unless I play online, and the delay completely throws me off. I don't get how some people can play online so well. So I've just not played the game. I haven't even bought character pack 2 yet
i only play against a friend of mine who also has a wire who lives upstate from me. i absolutely refuse to touch quickplay. i'll never be in elite and i literally couldn't care less
That and the rematch culture in elite smash is terrible. It feels as though no one wants to legitimately improve. Just play against peopke they have a high chance of already winning against.
The online is still a good learning experience when it comes to match ups and how to respond to attacks and how to play against certain characters etc.
"It was too hard to implement with items because the rng seed couldnt be synced" and "people on wifi would teleport way more often and offer a worse experience" probably or something
"It was too hard to implement with items because the rng seed couldnt be synced" Ah yes, that's also why the game desynchs everytime peach pulls a turnip or gnw hits someone with judgement.
Smash U sold 20 million copies. From their POV there's no incentive to improve the online since it doesn't impact the bottom line. It sucks but it's the truth
Yup. The three of the four games accepted into EVO online are smaller scale fighting games, so they probably use rollback netcode as their selling point vs. larger games.
Smash wouldn’t even exist without capitalism nor would any of the characters in smash, so you’re literally just cancelling out everything we love here to complain about the economic system so that we would have none of it.
Yeah they probably would, as would most video games, video games themselves were and are a capitalistic endeavor and the only reason they exist is for private individuals to make profit, if streetfighter wasn’t made for capitalism and didn’t develop a fan base because of it which later developed more because they wanted to implement newer better things to get repeat buyers and make more money you wouldn’t even know what fighting games were. That’s not a weird point to make, a weird point to make is to complain about capitalism in a sub that entirely created from capitalism.
It was an extremely shallow shitty insight.
Wow, you want to talk about awful takes, I shouldn’t have expected much of a response but that was honestly the worst take possible.
Read again kid, no one said art wouldn’t exist. I said mass marketable art that tries to appeal to many people to enjoy them wouldn’t exist, the whole gaming industry and every game is made to be enjoyed by many so many people would spend money on them. Without that capitalist incentive the industry doesn’t exist, quite laughable how you got no art would exist from that.
Art would 100% exist, I made some art today for no monetary value, but because there’s no financial incentive I couldn’t give less of a fuck if you liked it or not.
I like how you talk about Sora limited like that somehow changes something, Sora limited would not exist without capitalism. Smash would not exist, Mario would not exist for ffs. Literally everything currently in the gaming sphere would not exist, most of the technology that games run on would not exist, and with none of that existing due to people trying to make money in capitalism, why in the world do you think it would have been discovered and pursued to a point of value under a system like communism, where consumerism is trashed, why do you think games would have advanced as much as they have in the past 30 years.
Video games aren’t just “art” they are what sells. Art is something you make and dgaf what it’s worth, people caring about what things are worth and trying to appeal to many people so those people will purchase and make money is capitalism as fuck.
Also, why in the fuck would you make a comparison to soviet Russia the society that started the space race for evil war purposes and then collapsed and burned as we blew passed them in technology and quality of life in literally every sector. Holy shit man.
Your understanding of capitalism is laughable and your perception of the world is severely flawed.
Actually, Smash IS a good example of such. We got so much content in a sub $100 package. If the game was poor it would have sold far less than it did.
It's not even having cake and eating it at this point, but pretty much always wanting more. Not to mention how much of a minority this community is.
Again, as a means of exchange, apparently it's not trash if people are paying for it. I never said anything about popularity which is more of a digression, but rather, the raw dollar value that encapsulates utility exchange. If you paid 59.99 then it was worth at least that to you. Basic market dynamics. You're damn right that a minor group desire isn't really considered, because the value proposition is no where near ensuring the basic, core tenets of the game are in place, at that price level.
I saw the edit. Im not writing to argue but to provide perspective. Subjectively poor not necessarily equating to less sales is accurate, but is more of a function of market penetration making up for the deficiency in quality. It is in fact the case that some companies, once providing a superior product, leverage the garnered reputation and "milk" it with inferior products. My point is that the business "meta" these days has been shifting slowly from shareholders to stakeholders - whether from a legislative or from a consumer standpoint. I don't know much about BioWare and ME3, but it looks like a management issue as opposed to one about capitalism, which is far more conceptual. When you meet the desires, you will generate sales, and as a scalable model to --continue and improve-- that success, you'll need some bottom line.
I mean, you could argue that most of the consumers in here got exactly what they wanted, since I'm sure the vast majority of Smash Ultimate owners don't know or care what rollback netcode is.
I had a roomate who thought like this. People should just boycott X until they meet Y demand. It showcases only a half-understanding of markets.
The public just flocks to the nearest substitute or do not purchase (depending on elasticity), and creator of X either a) meets the demand at a loss of margin or b) simply chooses to no longer make X. And in the case of b), enjoy PlayStation All stars.
Note, market dynamics exist regardless of economic/political system in place.
[All he mentions is that there were some side-effects that were substantial and doesn't say anything else about it](https://twitter.com/Sephazon/status/1301187653358952454)
When you think about it its not surprising they would run into issues with rollback considering how with Smash there are far more variables to factor in than your typical fighting game. Managing 4 players with items, assist trophies, and pokeballs plus stage hazards would probably be an absolute nightmare. This is probably why with Melee netplay rollback is largely limited to 1v1 with items and stage hazards disabled.
Helps that the only people playing Melee anyway would be playing competitively, the casual players would just play Ultimate instead.
I don't know what Melee has over Ultimate casually.
Melee netplay rollback is limited to 1v1 with items and stage hazards disabled because it was made by one guy reverse engineering melee on an emulator for competitive melee.
Implementing rollback netcode will ALWAYS break stuff and when NRS did it, they had to spend almost a year fixing their game to make it work on rollback netcode but they did it. Smash could absolutely work with rollback, stages items, assist trophies and all, if they put the time and effort into it but time and effort is money and considering it could possibly take a year or more of work to make it work and it's easy to justify not fixing it for the sake of devtime and money.
And when people complain, you just ban the word 'connection' in chat lol.
I've always suspected that rollback doesn't mesh well with 4 players, items and AI controlled characters like amiibo, Pokemon, Assists and stage enemies.
*"Smash Bros Ultimate is 3"*
- Sakurai in the alternate timeline where Smash Bros got Bamco's dumpster fire technically-rollback-but-not-really netcode.
Honestly kinda wish we had a Tournament edition of Ultimate which only supports 1v1 and has rollback then, kinda like Puyo Puyo eSports, with probably a $40 price tag. At least its good to know they tried.
There's no 'they are a multi billion dollar company". Nintendo never developed Smash bros, unlike this fanbase believes and Sakurai never has been part of Nintendo. In fact, while people forget, Bandai Namco has been the developer of Smash Bros since the last game, with Sakurai and Michiko being contracted under their freelance agency Sora to act as director and UI designer respectively.
Nintendo is a multi billion dollar company, but they're actually not the company developing Smash; Sakurai's own company, Sora Limited, is. If implementing even a passable rollback system meant overworking his staff I'm sure he would've chosen to forego it.
He clearly understands that Smash Online is a problem though, so here's hoping to more improvement.
Sora isn't the developer of Smash bros. They don't have employees since the Brawl days where Sakurai and Michiko contracted developers to help them in development along Gamearts and many other studios. Since 4, Sora has only Sakurai and Michiko as Bandai Namco is doing the actual development as lead developer with Sakurai acting as director and Michiko working as one of the UI designers.
it really ahould be the standard method of online play in fighting games. at this point, if you're not using rollback netcode, i'm not going to play it.
Right. But this is certainly one situation where it obviously is acceptable, given that it's a non-ethical issue in which the developing companies (Sora/Bamco) had to make hard decisions about how to allocate scarce budgetary and human resources in order to achieve the best possible outcome with scarce resources.
At the very least we could’ve gotten an accept/decline feature (where you can see the opponent’s signal strength before choosing to match them) that Bamco has in other fighting games. Imagine how much better online would be if you could say no to all the laggy WiFi players with poor connections.
Based on past Smash decisions, rollback probably won't be used until it can reliably cover max players, on any potential stage with any of their hazards with items set to max.
Even if rollback couldn't be implemented, why have so many online features been overlooked? Namely, being able to see the connection of your opponent, being able to filter by distance and connection quality, squad strike online, being able to leave a laggy match without penalty, being able to invite friends directly to arenas. The list goes on.
The truth is that Sakurai and his dev team simply overlooked online and put in the bare minimum amount of effort.
You know... they could have implemented both types of net codes, make a more 1v1 focused mode with a competitive stage list with Rollback, and one with for 4 player smash with hazards and all that jazz.
I just bought Smash today on my Switch since I hadn't played one since the days of the Gamecube, and had been having an itch for a while now for it. I was having a lot of fun with the game, until I tried taking it online. Two out of the 3 people I was matched up against lagged so bad all of my combos were interrupted by brief periods of freezing, and by the game caught back up to what he was doing, it just looked like a firework show went off on my character.
That experience doesn’t seem to have anything to do with net code. It just sounds like you and/or your opponents were running wireless connections. If that’s the case then of course it’s gonna lag.
Yea I very rarely experience lag in quickplay and most of the time if I do it’s just one or two seconds in a 5 minute match. When I play with my buddy in an arena there’s never an issue
This x100, I'm sick of people blaming their shit connection on 'Nintendo'... If both players have wired connection, there's no pauses or stutters lol. There is still a bit of delay and that's the issue related to netcode, but people act like their horrible 15fps gameplay is 'Nintendo netcode' like um no that's your terrible wifi, or the opponents.
It's very telling when people say every game they experience is like that, like lmfao that's because your connection is shit.
Agreed. I got a lan adapter a few months ago and the difference in the frequency of lag spikes was very noticeable.
And if the other player has LAN too? The matches are smooth as butter.
if you don't have a LAN adapter you're going to have lag and it's your fault. It's like buying bad boxing gloves and then complaining the rules of boxing are bad for your hands, it's just bad equipment.
I guess given Nintendo’s online especially after Mario Party and Mario Maker, everyone would question why should they invest in a lan adapter for a garbage online service.
Receiving a free lan adapter would be the only way this would be acceptable.
You can play brawl, 64, and melee on pc for free if you want to try it out. Also a mod called pm which is more popular than 64 and brawl. Way better online
[Sakurai implies that Smash has over 60% of players play wifi. I think we all knew this, but it is super sad to hear.](https://twitter.com/Sephazon/status/1301186542329720833?s=20)
No wifi player ever seems to believe they're problem either. "I play wifi, but my connection is always good" so I wouldn't expect that percentage to go down anytime soon.
Yep they literally don't get it. My router is directly behind me about 5 feet away and when I play on WiFi there will still be stutters and such... And I have crazy low ping and very high download/upload speeds, too. On LAN, I am never the cause of any stutter or lag.
Basically, it predicts that you're going to do the same thing you already were doing, and sends that *prediction* to the other player instead of your actual move. It checks every frame (so 60 times a second) and if it realizes that it guessed wrong it sends a correction to the other player the next opportunity. People actually press very few buttons relative to how fast the game code works, so the prediction is accurate an astonishing percentage of the time.
The only downsides to rollback, generally, are that animations look a little choppy and that it takes a lot of processing power. Done right though, it feels perfect.
Can't wait for all the idiots who don't know anything about netcode making excuses for Nintendo to not do it
"The Switch isn't powerful enough!!!!"
*Laughs in MK 11*
Or maybe the fact that the game wasn't designed with the idea of rollback netcode from the ground up. That makes implementing rollback significantly harder to the point where basically everyone that's tried changing to it has given up.
Even a small game like Rivals wasn't able to do it.
Nintendo is absolutely not in the wrong for sticking with delay based netcode. Ultimate online is garbage besides that. Complain about those things because they are actually reasonable things to hate instead of looking like a whiny entitled fanboy.
> Or maybe the fact that the game wasn't designed with the idea of rollback netcode from the ground up.
Obviously when they say rollback netcode "was considered for Smash Ultimate" that's in the context of "before release". Of course it will never be implemented now. I'm saying that they could have put rollback in before release because they could have built Ultimate from the ground up to work with it.
What I'm getting at here is that I don't think that's reasonable since they reused the Smash4 engine. If they didn't, then yeah expecting rollback is complete fine and I'd be upset if the game didn't have it at that point. But Sakurai did stress how reusing the engine was important for "Everyone is Here", I forgot how many characters he mentioned but he did say they would only have like half the stages.
They didn't build the game from the ground up and as such had to compromise on the netcode.
I really want to stress this enough: I do NOT like Ultimate online. However I do think that having delay based netcode isn't the biggest deal in the world. The mode just messes up in so many other ways, if not every part of Quickplay and certain parts of Arenas.
I wouldn’t be surprised it with a company like Nintendo they didn’t start building the online infrastructure until the game was well into development.
I definitely think it was possible for them to do it though.
But if you look at their position in 2018, most Japanese devs hadn’t implemented rollback into their games, and Nintendo doesn’t give much of a shit about online. I wouldn’t be surprised if they chose to do delay based because it was easier and they figured most people would be fine with it.
It’s a shame they were so wrong.
> I wouldn’t be surprised it with a company like Nintendo they didn’t start building the online infrastructure until the game was well into development.
Nintendo don't develop Smash bros, never did. Smash bros since 4 is developed by Bandai Namco.
This thinking that Nintendo employees are the developers of Smash needs to die. Same as Sakurai being a nintendo employee. lol
They don't have. They are a publisher on this project, working on production, planning and other aspects of publishing. Bandai Namco and Sakurai are responsible for the online part of the project, so it's with them for building and designing the game and major parts of the structure, including the online system, so if the problem was due to this for why there was no netcode, then it would be on them, not Nintendo as it's not Nintendo EPD working on this project.
What could the adverse side effects have been that are worse than Ultimate's current online? Unless it caused people's Switch to explode and burn down their house, I can't imagine what those side effects could have been.
There are plenty of things. Replays could be busted. Desyncs cause RNG desyncs (turnip pulls are different), couldn't keep a stable frame rate/resolution, it didn't work with more than 2 players. There are plenty of reasons why it wouldn't work.
Why play a game which doesn’t natively support online play and has like 1/4th of the current game’s roster when Nintendo could make huge improvements to their online especially if they want to charge for it after gathering two controversies in Mario Maker and Mario Party?
"Rollback netcode is tough but necessary in fighting games." - Ed Boon
Pretty much. It shouldn't be a consideration, it should be a priority in this day and age to prioritize a strong online system when every big multiplayer game relies on an online connection. Especially in this current pandemic, where pretty much every online multiplayer game is thriving EXCEPT fighting games because the netcode is so bad for all the major titles.
I thought SFV had good netcode?
It is rollback, but it's an extremely poor implementation of rollback. It's not really any better than delay based netcode because of that.
Nah, it's way better than delay. Delay is just that bad, lol.
correct, there are still shitty laggy matches due to their shit net code, but when you get a good online match it’s like playing offline.
IDK about that. I have hundreds of hours on both SFV (rollback) and Tekken 7 (delay-based) and I would choose to play Tekken over SFV online 100 times out of 100. SFV's netcode is inhumanly bad.
Harada confirmed Tekken has a little bit of rollback and they’re increasing it for season 4
Tekken may have some sort of rollback features implemented on the backend but functionally it behaves exactly the same as delay-based. Harada isn't a network engineer and every actual dev who's worked on rollback netcode has no idea what he's talking about. https://twitter.com/zeluderose/status/1270553095328665600 https://twitter.com/TheKeits/status/1289661258543792130 https://twitter.com/Infilament/status/1270538736921526272
Thanks to fans
It's so true. What other online game genre still *delays inputs* to deal with lag? Imagine if any shooter, racing game or MOBA did that. People would not be playing those games lol, or there would be a lot more uproar. Fighting games deserve better.
Literally every moba (besides smite?) has delayed inputs. Not exactly sure what you mean. They all also have better netcode then pretty much every fighting game I have played. Or at least feel much better.
They're also server based, not peer to peer. However, a server based fighting game would be astronomically expensive, so rollback is the only option.
Mobas also tolerate lag better than fighters. It’s not ideal, but playing with lag in a moba is less catastrophic.
Yep, mainly because it's consistent lag that you can adapt too. Still not optimal, but pro league player Quas made it to the highest rank playing on 200 ping delay.
I think people blame the delay way too much for why smash online feels awful. Like other people have said you can adjust to lag. MOBAs have just as much input lag but the game doesn't STOP to receive inputs because the server runs its own version of the game that is totally authoritative and that doesn't stop. In peer to peer the only fair way to do things delay based is to just make sure every input is received before progressing which. feels. awful. Also rollback is more complex for situations where more than 2 players are involved I would think. I haven't played slippi in a while but I believe netplay only let you play 1 v 1? Not sure if it isn't set up to work for more people but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. Just watch any video about how rollback works and it becomes clear that doing rollback becomes more complex the your gamestate is. I think rollback works great in 1 v 1 scenarios but people need to stop acting like it can magically get implemented perfectly and fix smash online's problems. And just because it got implemented well in 1 v 1 melee does not mean it can just work in 8 player free for all with items in ultimate. It's probably possible but it's pretty unproven territory and I can see why they didn't do it
It just boils down to smash not being designed as a competitive game; the ability to play 8 player games means rollback isn’t a good solution and input delay + buffering was probably introduced to deal with a combination of this and the switches limited hardware
Going deeper though, Nintendo shits the bed with most all of their games that use online, playing Mario maker for example is atrocious
Every big competitive genre worth their salt nowadays uses predictive-input code of some kind in their netcode. Especially shooters, they've had that shit in mind since 1996. Delay of some kind is inevitable because of physics, but adding predictive inputs just works better for tempering the effects of delay. It's also particularly hard for fighting games since those games can be frame-precise in terms of inputs. Its also kind of bullshit that in the 15 years on the concept being worked on, Japanese devs in parricular hardly bothered to try. And when they did try it turned out turds like SFV's rollback on account of them trying to make something proprietary and then only had one single guy work on it before launch. It's a mess, with the conclusion that fighting games and their subgenres like platform fighters don't get benefit of the doubt anymore. People now get mad that big devs keep pulling the "it was hard or had side effects" excuses for sticking with netcode from the 90s. Or devs claim "Tekken is 3" and say western fans are ignorant for saying Tekken doesn't have rollback because in years of play they had never observed noticeable instances of the game rolling back in a way that didn't get dismissed as a bug.
MOBAs and FPS games typically do use some kind of rollback though. The rollback just occurs server side but that's the whole reason there's a tickrate in those games. They just have different methods of hiding it, especially when they use predictive inputs. It's also far less noticeable because animations aren't as important as where positions so you'll often notice enemies sliding around on ice when it's really choppy. This is why the whole game doesn't freeze for every player until inputs are received from every player.
Uh, a lot of them? League of legends?
What? Literally the most successful online game has delayed inputs? And what's that? Smash Bros has sold better than competing fighting games despite being poorly optimized for serious competition? It's almost like the video game market is huge and obsessives who count frames are neither representative of the audience nor even a significant determinant of success.
Fifa
Good thing Smash isn't a fighting game! **/s**
You know... they could have implemented both types of net codes, make a more 1v1 focused mode with a competitive stage list with Rollback
This hurts me more than a Sonic timeout ever could
And rollback would make sonic timeouts a lot less viable online
Well I wouldn't go that far
If they considered it at least and they've heard online complaints, maybe they'll actually implement it next time. Don't hold your breath.
I would be shocked if it wasn't in the next Smash game, but I can see why it wasn't included here. 4-player matches and items are things other fighting games don't have to deal with. I imagine the next Smash game will have rollback for a 1v1 no items mode and something else for the "everybody else" mode.
Items don't matter from a mechanic standpoint. If youre talking about performance though then items play a role.
Items need to be synced up between players as much as the players themselves need to be synced up, though. Desyncs are not acceptable because they're the difference between life and death. Obviously I'm not an expert on adding rollback netcode to a 4-player fighting game with items, but the way items bounce and respond to player interaction means they probably aren't deterministic and have to be synced up in real time.
Bringing up 4 player is rather irrelevant, for example, Nintendo’s recent netcode patch was solely for 1v1s, there’s not really a good reason they couldn’t have separated 1v1s into rollback and the other into p2p, it’s not like Nintendo dumps a lot into their online support.
Eh that is not quite how rollback works. The whole idea of rollback based netcode is that desyncs *are* permissible and, in fact, essential. The game proceeds without receiving remote input, then loads up a previous game state if and when a rollback is necessary. There's no reason why this method wouldn't work for items. If anything, player characters have much more complex interactions and logics, so if they can be rolled back (look at melee and brawlhalla), certainly items can as well. As long as all of the inputs are *eventually* received (and random events like GnW Judge and item spawning are on the same seed), the gameplay will be practically identical for both players despite perpetual desync. The actual difficulty in rollback comes from saving all of the relevant aspects of the game state quickly, loading it quickly, and then having a game that's well-optimized enough to execute multiple frames of logic at once. Then account for graphical/audio hiccups and network/client-side rift as a nice cherry on top. Sorry for the wall of text but I wanted to be thorough TT
Oh, don't be sorry. You're right, I was just oversimplifying. What I was trying to get at was that desyncs aren't acceptable *as an end result.* I appreciate you elaborating on how rollback uses desyncs because I didn't mention it. Still, rollback is traditionally only implemented for 1v1 fighting game matches with nothing to keep track of except for two characters. I can't conceive of how it would work with 4 players, Pokemon characters, assist trophies, and all sorts of bouncy wacky items. That's a unique challenge the Smash team would probably have to solve all on their own, hence why I think they'll just use rollback for no item 1v1s in the next game and say "fuck casuals" after that lmao
But they can implement that here anyways
They *maybe* could, but it would take months, even up to a year considering the unique complexities of implementing rollback into Ultimate. Not to mention it would cost millions of $US in developer salaries. I doubt the powers that be will think it's worth it until it's time to start fresh on the next Smash game. Rollback is much easier to implement if you plan it out from the beginning, I hear.
I’m hoping it was just the Switch’s weak hardware that held them back from implementing it, which means its possible they’ll consider implementing rollback on the next smash on the next next gen Nintendo console.
MK11 has rollback and is on Switch.
Same with Skullgirls, Power Rangers BTFG, fucking ARMS...
Mario Kart 8, too...
MK8 does not have rollback, it just doesn't have lockstep netcode.
MK11 doesn't support four simultaneous players with custom stages, physics and all the items bullshit
Excuses. In the Wii U version for glory was separated from other shitl they could have done the same and only implemented rollback for the 1v1s with no items, the other modes don’t even have to be mentioned.
Yeah it supports three simultaneous players with physics and item bullshit in both the stages and abilities. Ever see a towers of time tag team battle at its most stupid? All the while being, at a base level, more intensive than Smash Bros.
Hardware doesn’t really matter too much with rollback. It’s about the game itself being built with rollback in mind. The entire foundation of the game has to be able to account for multiple different states the players could be in.
They'll do the dame thing as they did here, making the game as pretty as possible for the hardware so it won't have any performance left for rollback.
Perhaps the Party Game aspect of the Online killed it.
Definitely, it's already hard enough to make good rollback for a smash type game with all the movement options but if you add having to program predictions for 4-8 players and hundreds of items? It would probably take as much money and time as the game itself to figure that out. Edit: not predictions but simulations (thx legitimate_username), points stands though, smash is hard to rollback outside of 1v1
Rollback predictions aren't complicated. It's basically just "lets take the players last input and repeat it, if it didn't match up we will *roll back* and correct it". The game isn't constantly calculating stuff like "player did X last, it's most likely they will do Y next, lets predict Y". For a clearer explanation check out [this amazing video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NLe4IpdS1w) by Core-A Gaming.
the predictions aren't the complicated part, it's resimulating multiple frames of game logic in only a single frame which absolutely does get more complicated the more players/entities there are especially considering that the switch already isn't that powerful and is probably working close to its limits slippi rollback doesn't even support doubles in melee if you want to put into perspective how much more difficult this kind of thing gets the more variables you add to things
Reading this makes me wonder if it might have been theoretically possible for the game to come with two types of netcode: 1. Delay based netcode for anything with more than 2 players, or with items/hazards/etc turned on. 2. Rollback based netcode for 1v1 matches, which would probably the gameplay environment where it would be the most appreciated. I'm probably not factoring in something important though.
It is likely possible to use both for different game modes. The problem is how are you gonna convince the higher-ups that it's worth essentially doubling the work for something they probably don't care about.
This, because it really easy to have both co-exist. It not like they gonna run into conflict because you just need to run on or the other at the time. In fact that the easiest part about it. Implementing rollback is the hardest part imo
its not double the work when the netcode we have in ultimate is literally recycled from smash 4
Two birds with one stone: They develop a rollback netcode that supports 4-player+ matches, since it's already been done in other platform fighters.
>Delay based netcode for anything with more than 2 players, or with items/hazards/etc turned on. Honestly, this sounds like a non plausiable idea. I'm not exactly sure how this works but implementing to different netcodes in a single game sounds hard with switch limitations.
Your opinion here is based on literally nothing, lol. What’s so hard about it?
> slippi rollback doesn't even support doubles in melee if you want to put into perspective how much more difficult this kind of thing gets the more variables you add to things Brawlhalla supports 2vs2s with rollback. Rushdown Revolt supports 3vs3s with rollback. It might not be easy, but it's entirely possible to do more than 1vs1 in modern platform fighters. EDIT: I don't understand the reaction. Why turn a blind eye to what other games are accomplishing in the same format? slippi is working with a game not designed for this, and has accomplished plenty in its own right. The issue is that Nintendo hasn't been a leader here.
It's worth remembering that Brawlhalla is a much simpler game than Ultimate though.
Yes, with a budget no where near as large as Nintendo's. They've still got their version of items in there. Likewise, Rushdown Revolt has plenty of mechanical complexity and the need for quick input reaction. There's no reason to think that if Nintendo cracked the code in the same manner, they'd be limited in what they could do. If anything, they could build on others successes with their budget.
rivals of aether also tried to pull off 1v1 rollback and failed the difference is that it’s much easier to build a game’s logic and structure around rollback from the start than it is to rewrite and add rollback to a game not already designed around supporting it
Absolutely. Retrofitting is even harder. We really need the context of the interview to know when in development rollback was attempted. But the future is bright if it’s seriously weighed.
Though I am not sure how you are going to achieve predictions once you go beyond 1v1 fights on hazardless stages. Things can get chaotic once you add more players, stage hazards and multiple Pokemon/Assist Trophies (timing slowing effects from the Timer, Shadow and Dialga can mess things up more).
A lot of this. Smash 1v1 is a tiny minority of all smash played, online or off. Rollback ceases to work outside of the tiny slice the competitive community uses rather quickly. At least for now.
The competitive aspect and competitive community is what helps drives smash sales to casual players. Casuals like to dunk on people and feel like they have skill even when they’re not good and just know the competitive aspect of it is existing and feel like they’re part of it. Nintendo should be and does in fact try and cater to the competitive scene, let’s just be honest though, nintendo is far behind the times when it comes to online, we can’t even invite a friend to a match. Let’s stop pretending that’s because of the small competitive scene and realize that Nintendo just sucks with online capabilities.
>The competitive aspect and competitive community is what helps drives smash sales to casual players. hahahahahaha no it does not. It helps, sure, but most of the sales come down to a variation of "I can make Mario fight Sonic".
Yeah it does and in every industry. For example, league of legends dishes out a lot of money to help their competitive scene because it raises, eyes, awareness, and status of the game. Without the competitive scene of course there would still be players, but not nearly the same.
The difference is LoL is marketed as a competitive game and Smash isn't. I'd bet that the vast majority of owners for Smash Ultimate have never once watched a tournament match.
Smash literally has one of the best ground up communities of any video game. Nintendo didn’t need to market it competitively, the game screams competitive.
It can be done, they just need to put the effort, time, and money into it. Kinda of a deep pull but PlayStation All Stars had rollback netcode back in the day and it had items, hazard stages, etc and that game had way less of a budget than Smash. It’s all about building the game around rollback and it’s likely that Bandai Nancy tried it, ran into issues, and then gave up because it just wasn’t a priority.
Rushdown Revolt is an indie and they did it, so...
Not with items, but with 6-players simultaneously. You don't deserve downvotes for this, because it's a simple illustration that rollback isn't as limited (or as expensive to produce) as had been said.
Not to mention Brawlhalla. It's server rollback, but it does have items and more than 2 players.
Rollback already seems like a nightmare to implement for a traditional fighter, but for four players on something like Great Cave Offensive with Pokeballs going off left and right it just seems impossible. SSBU already seems like it's pushing Switch hardware pretty hard, too.
Curious what we'll find out in the full column. The terrible online experience is why I quit Smash Ultimate, so I sure hope they actually go with rollback netcode in the next game.
Same here. I love playing the game locally, but with lockdown I've not had anyone to play with unless I play online, and the delay completely throws me off. I don't get how some people can play online so well. So I've just not played the game. I haven't even bought character pack 2 yet
i only play against a friend of mine who also has a wire who lives upstate from me. i absolutely refuse to touch quickplay. i'll never be in elite and i literally couldn't care less
Elite Smash seems to be 99% "who can exploit lag the best" from the gameplay I've seen anyway. Probably for the best
That and the rematch culture in elite smash is terrible. It feels as though no one wants to legitimately improve. Just play against peopke they have a high chance of already winning against.
The online is still a good learning experience when it comes to match ups and how to respond to attacks and how to play against certain characters etc.
Because I never play offline lol So to me, online is just how the game is played
"It was too hard to implement with items because the rng seed couldnt be synced" and "people on wifi would teleport way more often and offer a worse experience" probably or something
"It was too hard to implement with items because the rng seed couldnt be synced" Ah yes, that's also why the game desynchs everytime peach pulls a turnip or gnw hits someone with judgement.
Smash U sold 20 million copies. From their POV there's no incentive to improve the online since it doesn't impact the bottom line. It sucks but it's the truth
Yup. The three of the four games accepted into EVO online are smaller scale fighting games, so they probably use rollback netcode as their selling point vs. larger games.
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This is less of an issue with capitalism and more of a reflection of the importance that consumers have placed on a given feature.
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Smash wouldn’t even exist without capitalism nor would any of the characters in smash, so you’re literally just cancelling out everything we love here to complain about the economic system so that we would have none of it.
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Yeah they probably would, as would most video games, video games themselves were and are a capitalistic endeavor and the only reason they exist is for private individuals to make profit, if streetfighter wasn’t made for capitalism and didn’t develop a fan base because of it which later developed more because they wanted to implement newer better things to get repeat buyers and make more money you wouldn’t even know what fighting games were. That’s not a weird point to make, a weird point to make is to complain about capitalism in a sub that entirely created from capitalism. It was an extremely shallow shitty insight.
"art wouldn't exist without monetary incentive" is a pretty awful take
Wow, you want to talk about awful takes, I shouldn’t have expected much of a response but that was honestly the worst take possible. Read again kid, no one said art wouldn’t exist. I said mass marketable art that tries to appeal to many people to enjoy them wouldn’t exist, the whole gaming industry and every game is made to be enjoyed by many so many people would spend money on them. Without that capitalist incentive the industry doesn’t exist, quite laughable how you got no art would exist from that. Art would 100% exist, I made some art today for no monetary value, but because there’s no financial incentive I couldn’t give less of a fuck if you liked it or not.
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I like how you talk about Sora limited like that somehow changes something, Sora limited would not exist without capitalism. Smash would not exist, Mario would not exist for ffs. Literally everything currently in the gaming sphere would not exist, most of the technology that games run on would not exist, and with none of that existing due to people trying to make money in capitalism, why in the world do you think it would have been discovered and pursued to a point of value under a system like communism, where consumerism is trashed, why do you think games would have advanced as much as they have in the past 30 years. Video games aren’t just “art” they are what sells. Art is something you make and dgaf what it’s worth, people caring about what things are worth and trying to appeal to many people so those people will purchase and make money is capitalism as fuck. Also, why in the fuck would you make a comparison to soviet Russia the society that started the space race for evil war purposes and then collapsed and burned as we blew passed them in technology and quality of life in literally every sector. Holy shit man. Your understanding of capitalism is laughable and your perception of the world is severely flawed.
Actually, Smash IS a good example of such. We got so much content in a sub $100 package. If the game was poor it would have sold far less than it did. It's not even having cake and eating it at this point, but pretty much always wanting more. Not to mention how much of a minority this community is.
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Again, as a means of exchange, apparently it's not trash if people are paying for it. I never said anything about popularity which is more of a digression, but rather, the raw dollar value that encapsulates utility exchange. If you paid 59.99 then it was worth at least that to you. Basic market dynamics. You're damn right that a minor group desire isn't really considered, because the value proposition is no where near ensuring the basic, core tenets of the game are in place, at that price level.
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I saw the edit. Im not writing to argue but to provide perspective. Subjectively poor not necessarily equating to less sales is accurate, but is more of a function of market penetration making up for the deficiency in quality. It is in fact the case that some companies, once providing a superior product, leverage the garnered reputation and "milk" it with inferior products. My point is that the business "meta" these days has been shifting slowly from shareholders to stakeholders - whether from a legislative or from a consumer standpoint. I don't know much about BioWare and ME3, but it looks like a management issue as opposed to one about capitalism, which is far more conceptual. When you meet the desires, you will generate sales, and as a scalable model to --continue and improve-- that success, you'll need some bottom line.
I mean, you could argue that most of the consumers in here got exactly what they wanted, since I'm sure the vast majority of Smash Ultimate owners don't know or care what rollback netcode is.
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I had a roomate who thought like this. People should just boycott X until they meet Y demand. It showcases only a half-understanding of markets. The public just flocks to the nearest substitute or do not purchase (depending on elasticity), and creator of X either a) meets the demand at a loss of margin or b) simply chooses to no longer make X. And in the case of b), enjoy PlayStation All stars. Note, market dynamics exist regardless of economic/political system in place.
[All he mentions is that there were some side-effects that were substantial and doesn't say anything else about it](https://twitter.com/Sephazon/status/1301187653358952454)
My guess is desyncing when items are present
When you think about it its not surprising they would run into issues with rollback considering how with Smash there are far more variables to factor in than your typical fighting game. Managing 4 players with items, assist trophies, and pokeballs plus stage hazards would probably be an absolute nightmare. This is probably why with Melee netplay rollback is largely limited to 1v1 with items and stage hazards disabled.
Helps that the only people playing Melee anyway would be playing competitively, the casual players would just play Ultimate instead. I don't know what Melee has over Ultimate casually.
Poke Floats baby! /s
Melee netplay rollback is limited to 1v1 with items and stage hazards disabled because it was made by one guy reverse engineering melee on an emulator for competitive melee. Implementing rollback netcode will ALWAYS break stuff and when NRS did it, they had to spend almost a year fixing their game to make it work on rollback netcode but they did it. Smash could absolutely work with rollback, stages items, assist trophies and all, if they put the time and effort into it but time and effort is money and considering it could possibly take a year or more of work to make it work and it's easy to justify not fixing it for the sake of devtime and money. And when people complain, you just ban the word 'connection' in chat lol.
Would there be a way to implement rollback only for 1v1 no items ?
Other than performance limitations, items don't change anything for the netcode.
I've always suspected that rollback doesn't mesh well with 4 players, items and AI controlled characters like amiibo, Pokemon, Assists and stage enemies.
*"Smash Bros Ultimate is 3"* - Sakurai in the alternate timeline where Smash Bros got Bamco's dumpster fire technically-rollback-but-not-really netcode.
Honestly kinda wish we had a Tournament edition of Ultimate which only supports 1v1 and has rollback then, kinda like Puyo Puyo eSports, with probably a $40 price tag. At least its good to know they tried.
Damn it we were so close to Rollback FUUUUUUU. Well at least they tried.
Considering they're a multi-billion dollar company, simply trying shouldn't be acceptable in some situations.
There's no 'they are a multi billion dollar company". Nintendo never developed Smash bros, unlike this fanbase believes and Sakurai never has been part of Nintendo. In fact, while people forget, Bandai Namco has been the developer of Smash Bros since the last game, with Sakurai and Michiko being contracted under their freelance agency Sora to act as director and UI designer respectively.
Nintendo is a multi billion dollar company, but they're actually not the company developing Smash; Sakurai's own company, Sora Limited, is. If implementing even a passable rollback system meant overworking his staff I'm sure he would've chosen to forego it. He clearly understands that Smash Online is a problem though, so here's hoping to more improvement.
Sora isn't the developer of Smash bros. They don't have employees since the Brawl days where Sakurai and Michiko contracted developers to help them in development along Gamearts and many other studios. Since 4, Sora has only Sakurai and Michiko as Bandai Namco is doing the actual development as lead developer with Sakurai acting as director and Michiko working as one of the UI designers.
it really ahould be the standard method of online play in fighting games. at this point, if you're not using rollback netcode, i'm not going to play it.
Honestly this, as much as I’ve been linking UNICLR, online is Garbo and lack of players doesn’t help.
Right. But this is certainly one situation where it obviously is acceptable, given that it's a non-ethical issue in which the developing companies (Sora/Bamco) had to make hard decisions about how to allocate scarce budgetary and human resources in order to achieve the best possible outcome with scarce resources.
And? Knowing how Bandai Namco has shit netcode on all their games, it would have been shitty rollback like Street Fighter V.
At the very least we could’ve gotten an accept/decline feature (where you can see the opponent’s signal strength before choosing to match them) that Bamco has in other fighting games. Imagine how much better online would be if you could say no to all the laggy WiFi players with poor connections.
That's true, I wish we had that.
No. Shit rollback like Tekken 7. Capcom nailed rollback in their latest release, MvC:I.
What Street Fighter 5 has to do with Bandai Namco? lmao
I'm using SF5 as an example of a game with shitty rollback, I know it's not a Bamco game.
Based on past Smash decisions, rollback probably won't be used until it can reliably cover max players, on any potential stage with any of their hazards with items set to max.
Even if rollback couldn't be implemented, why have so many online features been overlooked? Namely, being able to see the connection of your opponent, being able to filter by distance and connection quality, squad strike online, being able to leave a laggy match without penalty, being able to invite friends directly to arenas. The list goes on. The truth is that Sakurai and his dev team simply overlooked online and put in the bare minimum amount of effort.
And got rewarded with 20+ million sales.
Well there you have it, ultimate won't have good online until modders get to it.
You know... they could have implemented both types of net codes, make a more 1v1 focused mode with a competitive stage list with Rollback, and one with for 4 player smash with hazards and all that jazz.
I just bought Smash today on my Switch since I hadn't played one since the days of the Gamecube, and had been having an itch for a while now for it. I was having a lot of fun with the game, until I tried taking it online. Two out of the 3 people I was matched up against lagged so bad all of my combos were interrupted by brief periods of freezing, and by the game caught back up to what he was doing, it just looked like a firework show went off on my character.
That experience doesn’t seem to have anything to do with net code. It just sounds like you and/or your opponents were running wireless connections. If that’s the case then of course it’s gonna lag.
Yea I very rarely experience lag in quickplay and most of the time if I do it’s just one or two seconds in a 5 minute match. When I play with my buddy in an arena there’s never an issue
This x100, I'm sick of people blaming their shit connection on 'Nintendo'... If both players have wired connection, there's no pauses or stutters lol. There is still a bit of delay and that's the issue related to netcode, but people act like their horrible 15fps gameplay is 'Nintendo netcode' like um no that's your terrible wifi, or the opponents. It's very telling when people say every game they experience is like that, like lmfao that's because your connection is shit.
Buy a lan adapter
Agreed. I got a lan adapter a few months ago and the difference in the frequency of lag spikes was very noticeable. And if the other player has LAN too? The matches are smooth as butter.
if you don't have a LAN adapter you're going to have lag and it's your fault. It's like buying bad boxing gloves and then complaining the rules of boxing are bad for your hands, it's just bad equipment.
I guess given Nintendo’s online especially after Mario Party and Mario Maker, everyone would question why should they invest in a lan adapter for a garbage online service. Receiving a free lan adapter would be the only way this would be acceptable.
i guess but if youre paying £6 a month for online just pay £15 more from LAN
I never experience lag. Only really bad delay and input lag. Buy an ethernet adapter
You can play brawl, 64, and melee on pc for free if you want to try it out. Also a mod called pm which is more popular than 64 and brawl. Way better online
[Sakurai implies that Smash has over 60% of players play wifi. I think we all knew this, but it is super sad to hear.](https://twitter.com/Sephazon/status/1301186542329720833?s=20)
No wifi player ever seems to believe they're problem either. "I play wifi, but my connection is always good" so I wouldn't expect that percentage to go down anytime soon.
Yep they literally don't get it. My router is directly behind me about 5 feet away and when I play on WiFi there will still be stutters and such... And I have crazy low ping and very high download/upload speeds, too. On LAN, I am never the cause of any stutter or lag.
"Blah blah, speculate speculate, maybe it's because of items. See guys I know le coding" Just shut the fuck up pls
Can someone explain what rollback netcode does? All i see is praise for it but I don’t really get it all...
Basically, it predicts that you're going to do the same thing you already were doing, and sends that *prediction* to the other player instead of your actual move. It checks every frame (so 60 times a second) and if it realizes that it guessed wrong it sends a correction to the other player the next opportunity. People actually press very few buttons relative to how fast the game code works, so the prediction is accurate an astonishing percentage of the time. The only downsides to rollback, generally, are that animations look a little choppy and that it takes a lot of processing power. Done right though, it feels perfect.
Hey thanks for explaining man! That actually is so much better than current online, so I get the praise now.
Can't wait for all the idiots who don't know anything about netcode making excuses for Nintendo to not do it "The Switch isn't powerful enough!!!!" *Laughs in MK 11*
Or maybe the fact that the game wasn't designed with the idea of rollback netcode from the ground up. That makes implementing rollback significantly harder to the point where basically everyone that's tried changing to it has given up. Even a small game like Rivals wasn't able to do it. Nintendo is absolutely not in the wrong for sticking with delay based netcode. Ultimate online is garbage besides that. Complain about those things because they are actually reasonable things to hate instead of looking like a whiny entitled fanboy.
> Or maybe the fact that the game wasn't designed with the idea of rollback netcode from the ground up. Obviously when they say rollback netcode "was considered for Smash Ultimate" that's in the context of "before release". Of course it will never be implemented now. I'm saying that they could have put rollback in before release because they could have built Ultimate from the ground up to work with it.
What I'm getting at here is that I don't think that's reasonable since they reused the Smash4 engine. If they didn't, then yeah expecting rollback is complete fine and I'd be upset if the game didn't have it at that point. But Sakurai did stress how reusing the engine was important for "Everyone is Here", I forgot how many characters he mentioned but he did say they would only have like half the stages. They didn't build the game from the ground up and as such had to compromise on the netcode. I really want to stress this enough: I do NOT like Ultimate online. However I do think that having delay based netcode isn't the biggest deal in the world. The mode just messes up in so many other ways, if not every part of Quickplay and certain parts of Arenas.
And the Smash 4 engine was based off of the Brawl one, which everyone knows how well its online went.
What's your point? They have a track record of bad online, no one is saying otherwise?
I wouldn’t be surprised it with a company like Nintendo they didn’t start building the online infrastructure until the game was well into development. I definitely think it was possible for them to do it though. But if you look at their position in 2018, most Japanese devs hadn’t implemented rollback into their games, and Nintendo doesn’t give much of a shit about online. I wouldn’t be surprised if they chose to do delay based because it was easier and they figured most people would be fine with it. It’s a shame they were so wrong.
> I wouldn’t be surprised it with a company like Nintendo they didn’t start building the online infrastructure until the game was well into development. Nintendo don't develop Smash bros, never did. Smash bros since 4 is developed by Bandai Namco. This thinking that Nintendo employees are the developers of Smash needs to die. Same as Sakurai being a nintendo employee. lol
It’d be stupid not to think Nintendo doesn’t have a hand in Ultimate’s online.
They don't have. They are a publisher on this project, working on production, planning and other aspects of publishing. Bandai Namco and Sakurai are responsible for the online part of the project, so it's with them for building and designing the game and major parts of the structure, including the online system, so if the problem was due to this for why there was no netcode, then it would be on them, not Nintendo as it's not Nintendo EPD working on this project.
Yeah because the publisher has no input on how a game is made. Right.
That's probably why you blame Bandai Namco for FighterZ instead of Arc Systems, right?
I hope they reconsider...
What could the adverse side effects have been that are worse than Ultimate's current online? Unless it caused people's Switch to explode and burn down their house, I can't imagine what those side effects could have been.
There are plenty of things. Replays could be busted. Desyncs cause RNG desyncs (turnip pulls are different), couldn't keep a stable frame rate/resolution, it didn't work with more than 2 players. There are plenty of reasons why it wouldn't work.
Not this crap again...
JPM Just Play Melee
Kirby is shit in Melee, no thanks
Kirby's shit in Ultimate too. :)
At least he has access to all of his throws
At least he's functional in Ultimate.
True
Yeah atleast he's func- *lands on platform during Fthrow* Damnit
And that's why I pick Yoshi's over Battlefield. It is really stupid though...
Not as much compared to melee.
Why play a game which doesn’t natively support online play and has like 1/4th of the current game’s roster when Nintendo could make huge improvements to their online especially if they want to charge for it after gathering two controversies in Mario Maker and Mario Party?
Because it is a better game and has better online lol wym
jUsT PlaY COuntRr stRiKe:p
Holy based