Dragon Ball FighterZ first released nearly six years ago in the midst of the wider change over to rollback netcode across fighting games, but it was stuck with the old-school delay based system that many players have found issues with.
Now, over a year since it was first announced, rollback netcode is finally playable in DBFZ thanks to the currently ongoing open beta test on PC, but is it worth the wait and hype?
After getting to spend a few hours with the Steam beta and playing a couple of dozen matches, I’d say that answer is mostly a resounding yes — though it doesn’t feel entirely perfect just yet.
With a few exceptions, I’m coming here fairly impressed with what Arc System Works and Bandai Namco have cooked up in getting GGPO finally working in FighterZ that we’ve all been waiting for.
Basically, all of the matches I’ve gotten to play thus far have been completely playable and without any really noticeable visual rollbacks — though I have witnessed some online where the game says a character is Down except they aren’t and keep fighting back.
The most I’ve seen happen personally is some stuttering that makes the fighters jump around slightly on the screen, which can be a bit annoying in such a fast-paced game such as DBFZ, but I’ll gladly take that over 4+ frames of input delay any day.
And those stutters only really became apparent when in matches that were above 250 ms in ping and 6 or 7 rollback frames, which is basically a one-bar connection.
Full five-bar connections felt just as good as offline like I’ve hoped for all these years and has shown me just how rusty I am at the game having not played hardly at all the past few years.
I can no longer blame the lag for dropping combos. That’s all on me now.
The only real issue I’ve come across is that around 1/3 of my matches have been against opponents with 200+ ms ping (or some spikes past 600 ms briefly) in my same region though that could just be because I accepted any connection for the purposes of this test.
I also sometimes noticed some slight slow down after a character had been KO’d, which isn’t a big deal, and one instance where the camera glitched out when my Downed character had been blown off screen — and then promptly fixed itself.
Even when I was getting my butt handed to me, however, I felt the rush again of what makes Dragon Ball FighterZ special in the first place and wanting to rematch again and again.
I was extremely curious to see how that rollback holds up once you introduce six players into a single round in the Party Match modes, but I’ve unfortunately been unable to find enough people to do that with so far.
ArcSys and the people they have assisting them are continuing to show that they know what they’re doing in getting some of the best and most consistent rollback in the business.
It’s probably not going to be quite as stable as say Guilty Gear Strive and DNF Duel that were developed with rollback while FighterZ was retrofitted with it, but it’s still pretty darn good either way.
We hope to see some more tweaks and improvements before the final product releases sometime next year on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, and this beta is giving a really powerful impression.
Rollback should solidify Dragon Ball FighterZ’s status as a forever fighting game in the FGC that’ll continue to be played for years and years beyond the end of its updates (or until a sequel arrives).
