Despite its hardware limitations, the Nintendo Switch has built itself a pretty strong fighting game catalogue over the past seven and a half years… but almost always with some drawbacks.
After getting strangely leaked, Arc System Works announced that Guilty Gear Strive is next in line to join in on the Switch fun, but there were still questions about how the fighter was going to function / which features it would have to leave out.
Following the reveal, ArcSys Producer Ken Miyauchi took to social media to provide some more information about the hybrid console’s release for their best-selling title
The big things on everyone’s minds were ‘is it going to have rollback netcode?’ and ‘will it include crossplay?’, which we have answers to both now.
“FYI, Guilty Gear Strive Nintendo Switch Edition has no crossplay, but runs on rollback netcode,” wrote Miyauchi on X/Twitter.
While the exclusion of cross-platform online isn’t very surprising and probably good for the game’s entire ecosystem, it is interesting to see rollback make it in.
The past few ArcSys-developed fighters on the Switch were not so lucky.
Dragon Ball FighterZ was updated to put rollback into the game, but only for the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, which presented its own set of problems.
DNF Duel launched with rollback on PlayStation and PC, and while the Switch port came almost a full year later, it still ran on delay-based netcode on Switch instead.
FYI, GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- Nintendo Switch Edition has no crossplay, but runs on rollback netcode.
Also, I captured all footage in the trailer on Switch. Please check out how it looks! https://t.co/fWrdnSun3Z
— Ken Miyauchi (@KenM_ASW) August 30, 2024
This could be explained due to ArcSys publishing Guilty Gear themselves and are therefore able to more freely allocate resources to getting rollback up and running on the Switch, while Nexon and Bandai Namco may not have made such concessions for the developer.
Strive obviously isn’t the first modern fighting game to have rollback on Switch either of course as we’ve seen it in Mortal Kombat 1, Mortal Kombat 11, and the Capcom Fighting Collection while Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid and Them’s Fightin’ Herds went so far as to include crossplay too.
From what we can tell, Strive on Switch will be feature-complete compared to its other counterparts aside from the lack of crossplay.
On top of that, buyers will also apparently receive all DLC characters up to the end of Season 3 with Slayer, providing 28 fighters to choose from out the gate.
Dizzy should be out by that point to kick off Season 4, but it looks like you’ll have to get that separately.
From what bits of gameplay we’ve seen thus far, it appears they’ve had to unsurprisingly tone down the resolution on Strive’s graphics and visual effects while trying to adjust with that using a filter of sorts.
The in-game UI like health bars and Tension meter also looks to be enlarged for the handheld as well.
Guilty Gear Strive is scheduled to release on January 23,2025 on Nintendo Switch and is of course already available on PlayStation, Xbox and PC.