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Capcom Says Online Play Is the Future of Fighting Games
Capcom's Yoshinori Ono spoke with Videogamer recently about the upcoming Street Fighter IV title. He discussed several features of the game, including the lag during online play being a "huge problem," and the decision to remove parrying from this offering. He also mentioned that once better infrastructure is in place, online play "will definitely be the future of the fighting game."
Of course online play is the future. But as the summery pointed out, there is just too much lag right now. Take lag and add in some spots here in the US that simply can't get broadband at the moment (just about anywhere outside of a small town only has dial-up or satellite as options) and even broadband connections lag sometimes.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm playing a lot Day Of Defeat: Source these days, on a DSL connection with 2Mbit/s, and lag is not a problem as long as I stick to European servers (I'm living in Germany).
It is different for US servers, when the data have to travel to the US and back the lag becomes a noticable disadvantage. But that is unavoidable due to the distance, even ideal routers cannot get around the limited speed of light.
Conclusions:
-Broadband, even with modest specs (2Mbit/s is the entry offer in Germany these days, unless you have a bad connection), will do nicely.
-A games company that does not put up separate servers for each continent will have lag problems and deserves them for incompetence
C - the footgun of programming languages
Yeah.. like increasing the speed of light. Good luck with that.
From the article, it looks like they're also confused between bandwidth and latency. Slightly simplified, it's the latency that makes it impossible to do real-time melee games well.
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In FPSs you can hide the lag by calculating the hits client side and displaying the results immediately, then confirming them on the server later. This works well because it's rare for players to act simultaneously, and when they do it's rare for one attack to interrupt another. Mastering the map layout and being able to predict your opponent's movement while remaining unpredictable yourself is more important than reaction time.
This prediction game ("yomi" in fighting game slang, from the Japanese for "reading", as in reading your opponent) is also critical to fighting games, but reaction time is much more important than in FPSs because you're always watching your opponent (no FPS style ambushes or surprise attacks), and attacks are often interrupted by other attacks.
Casual players might not notice the lag, but for high level play with traditional fast paced fighting games it's going to be unacceptable. Modifying the gameplay is the only solution, and a lot of hardcore players are going to be unhappy about that.
Tell me about it. This new lead designer just pisses me off more and more as I read new interviews from him.
VideoGamer.com: Why did you make the decision to remove parrying for Street Fighter IV?
YO: ...Basically we used the rule book from Street Fighter II because that was the most popular.
VideoGamer.com: Some critics have said the game is too similar to Street Fighter II. That is doesn't move the series forward. What do you say to those criticisms?
YO: ...ultimately we wanted to create a sequel to Street Fighter II, so if someone says this looks just like Street Fighter II with glorified graphics, then that's music to our ears!
VideoGamer.com: What were the influences behind the new character designs? C. Viper almost looks like a SNK character?
YO ...But we were impressed that SNK was one step before us, they had already done it. So that's what happened.
I don't even think he likes the series. He is straight out saying that he has no intention of doing anything interesting or new with the series and plans on doing the bare minimum while in the process insulting the last, oh, 6 iterations of the game. As a long time street fighter fan I am actually very much not looking forward to this games release because i am pretty sure it is going to turn one of my favorite series into crap.