At least in beta form
It’s been over a year now since Bandai Namco first announced that Dragon Ball FighterZ would be receiving rollback netcode at Evo 2022, but that still hasn’t happened.
Some fans, however, came across some behind-the-scenes changes going on with DBFZ right now on PC that is raising hopes that we could be getting our hands on rollback sometime soon.
According to SteamDB, FighterZ has received a new branch in the database for something called “pbt-release” that can’t be publicly accessed and has some interesting implications.
This branch doesn’t appear in the records before today, October 24, but it is likely tied to the “pbt-debug” branch that was added to the database in October 2022 after the rollback announcement and received a handful of changes / updates since.
We don’t know exactly what pbt means, but there’s a strong chance it equates to public beta test, private branch / build test or something similar.
This doesn’t necessarily prove that a rollback beta is right around the corner since Arc System Works hasn’t used this phrasing in the other fighting games they’ve changed the netcode for like Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 and BlazBlue: Central Fiction.
It does, however, show that work is still progressing this nearly six-year-old title, which is a good sign at least.
At the same time, FighterZ players similarly had their hopes raised back in May of this year when a seemingly random update dropped for the game on Steam that led to nothing.
Bamco had initially promised a rollback beta test on PC in Spring 2023, but that was indefinitely delayed with no further timeline put in place.
Earlier this month, FighterZ Producer Tomoko Hiroki apologized for how long this implementation is taking the development team and asked that fans be patient just a little while longer.
Our best bet at this point is we get the rollback beta this Winter with a full release date for the requested feature as well as for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of DBFZ that’ll run it coming at the Dragon Ball Games Battle Hour 2024 in January.
It’s coming, and this most recent change hopefully means much sooner rather than later for everyone that’s been waiting a long time for this to finally happen.
Sent in by ashen_dios.