In 2018 Bandai Namco hit the fighting game community nearly out of nowhere with Dragon Ball FighterZ, a massive hit that fit perfectly into the newly-vacant Versus space the Marvel vs. Capcom franchise had held for some two decades prior. The game wasn’t without its warts, but the core experience was so strong that a fanbase would faithfully wait for issues to be resolved, the most prominent of which now is the game’s use of delay-based netcode instead of rollback.
It took over 4 years until Bandai Namco announced DBFZ would finally be receiving rollback netcode at Evo 2022, (on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam) and here some 18 months later has the rollback update finally hit consoles. Early reactions are starting to circulate on X, many of which express further frustration and show off new buggy visual glitches.
Prominent DBFZ community figure and commentator Damasus had this to say early Thursday morning:
I woke up to tweets this morning saying DBFZ rollback is literally the same as the beta please tell me yall are lying this was supposed to be a good day
— Damascus (@zDamascus) February 29, 2024
There was actually a beta test for this new netcode back in December of 2023, and while it felt like it was a step in the right direction said beta did feel like it had a little ways to go before it would satisfy expectations.
It seems developers may not have found ample solutions yet, and that new ones have emerged to pile on. Player FourSwordsLink lists the issues that’ve been reported thus far:
570 days for DBFZ rollback to officially release and….
– visual bugs on the with character icons flashing from beta
– Xbox version upgrade broken
– LC21 DLC not correctly being shown as purchased if already bought
– Can’t use official PS4 sticks on PS5 ver@BandaiNamcoUS pic.twitter.com/wB7jvD2dz7— FSLink (@FourSwordsLink) February 29, 2024
Already we’ve seen multiple reports of character models duplicating and freezing at various locations on the screen during online battles. Here we see an example of it happening in real time on WhatDanielDo’s stream:
bandai please fix this game #dbfz @BandaiNamcoUS pic.twitter.com/Abv6JDySsV
— Daniel (@WhatDanielDo) February 29, 2024
But it gets worse, much worse, as another prominent community member and commentator, Tyrant, has posted a few images of the clone duplication glitch getting much further out of hand:
Click images for larger versions
One last video example from WhatDanielDo reveals an absolutely massive, T-posing Super Baby 2 Vegeta Great Ape in the background:
THERES NO WAY LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO pic.twitter.com/jr7Mud3EbR
— Daniel (@WhatDanielDo) February 29, 2024
The Spirit Bomb of communal good will has been sufficient enough to keep the DBFZ dream alive and a notable portion of the community patiently waiting for the game to reach its promised state, but it seems the wait will have to continue for at least a little while longer.
As of the writing of this article Bandai Namco has not yet addressed these issues on social media.