Arc System Works had a surprise for Guilty Gear fans over the weekend at the 2022 CEOtaku fighting game event. It announced that rollback will come to the PC edition of Guilty Gear Xrd REV2, and by extension, Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator-. Tests of the netcode are also planned for October 2022.
Check out the announcement trailer below.
Guilty Gear Xrd REV2 is the updated edition of Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator-. Revelator was released in 2015 and ’16, and was the direct sequel to 2014’s Guilty Gear Xrd -Sign-. In its announcement, Arc System Works mentioned that Xrd REV2 is still very popular, justifying the decision to add it to the PC edition. It did not mention whether it planned to update the PS4 edition of the game, though.
Rollback netcode is a strategy for facilitating communication between two players over the internet. Fighting games are particularly sensitive to network conditions and need to ensure that players can “sync up”. Otherwise, the game experience is affected, and fights over the internet will feel “laggy”, especially when players are separated by large distances. Recently fighting game developers have embraced implementing rollback to ensure that their titles feel better to play online. Even older games like Persona 4 Arena Ultimax, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and now Guilty Gear Xrd REV2 received rollback. Newer titles, like Guilty Gear Strive, have had it implemented from launch.
Guilty Gear Xrd REV2 is available on PS4, and on PC via Steam. A public test for the rollback implementation is scheduled for sometime in October 2022. More details will be announced via the official Twitter account.