Game:

Soulcalibur VI (2018)

Duration: 1:03:16

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1

This is actually the last one. For real. Really, really! (For now.)

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Bandai Namco is the undisputed "champion" of... the theory that delay-based netcode is "good enough"... ... ... which... is, naturally, a whole load of malarkey from a technical standpoint. However, I can at least understand that a lot of backwards-leaning positions are at least rationalized from other points of view than those backed by proper fact and reason. Essentially, it's a sidestep... coupled with a complete inability to read the room. Even as the room grumbles in dissatisfaction to hear it.

Fighting games naturally began as arcade machines where both sides were standing in close proximity, feeding the game money for each play. There's absolutely zero networking involved, you just make your game to play and then await further challengers and their sweet, sweet pocket contents.

When fighting games made their jump to home console hardware, very little changed. Except the money was paid up front by one of the players, and the machine operating the game no longer asked for money once it was running properly within a private residence. Still no networking required, because your opponent is right there with you.

This presumption of proximity would carry on for an uncomfortable duration of time, mostly because networking technology itself wasn't very mature, and certainly hadn't reached the level of sophistication required to connect users remotely without a lot of technical know-how and some hardware features and functions that were a real non-starter for pre-fab game boxes that are primarily just meant to put developer's work onto people's television sets under strict license from the hardware manufacturer.

The additional challenge of trying to make it seem logical and transparent rather than technical and abstract for players to specify and connect to some other user out there that the hardware and software has no idea how to find except by arbitrary numerical nonsense and await a response signal of similarly dubious merit... was presumably just as big, if not bigger, of a design hurdle. I mean, why bother putting such functions into our game boxes at all if there exists no unified method by which to ensure player interaction at all? It's the chicken and the egg... although in reality, it's not liquid, but gamma radiation!

End result, we've advanced to the point where we all take the features of online connectivity for granted... but the whole process at every single level is far from particularly mature. (I mean, have you HEARD what some of these kids say with their always-on voice chat features?!) But we're getting there! (...the actual playerbase notwithstanding...)

Suffice to say that big megacorporations with their comfy projections and thirsty bottom lines aren't keen to rock the boat. If it ain't broke, why fix it? If it "works"... why would we ever want to sink a bunch of development time, cost, testing, and risk monumental failures and losses when what's out there already is demonstrably "good enough"?

Couple that insular thinking with an even more literally and physically insular geography where the tech-savvy people testing such things are only doing so in high-tech facilities in areas replete with top-of-the-line infrastructure... it's easy to see how such an isolated environment might breed an excess of self-fulfilling feedback and reaffirmations in this veritable echo chamber.

And, you know what? If anyone can get away with this spectacular delusion, fabricated across actual decades, backed by old money making even more money... it's this precise cocktail of factors. Good job, guys. Pat yourselves on the back a bit, why not?

Because here's the real kicker. The kinds of games that benefit most strongly from better netcode are the pixel-picky, stop-on-a-dime, every-frame-counts two-dimensional fighters. Even backed with THREE DEES and looking super fantastic, all the fighting (and not!) games we've tested thus far have been of a mold. They all desperately crave communication fidelity to make their action really snap. (And snap-back!)

But, having long since crushed that pesky polygon ceiling and entered the proper era of "modern gaming (tm)," the fighting games made and commissioned by Bandai Namco are by and large nearly always predicated on cutting-edge (or... not) three-dimensional characters doing three-dimensional things in three-dimensional environments. They swing a sword or an arm or a leg in wide, interpolated arcs, and let the mathematical simulations take over and decide what happens in the meantime. No time for childish pixel games, these are serious SIMULATIONS!

And therein lies the rub. Input fidelity matters significantly less overall as the buffer catches those presses and sneaks them into the simulation.

Unless it's a 2-frame Electric Wind God Fist. What about your Just inputs?! Oh no...