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."

Comments

Better infrastructure..

[Scott Kevill]

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.

Re:Lag? Not much on broadband and nearby servers

[Mprx]

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.