SEGA has revitalized the Virtua Fighter series with the launch of Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. on Steam. This marks the title’s debut on the platform, and one of its highlights is the addition of rollback netcode.
However, integrating rollback was not straightforward – Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. was developed using Ver. 2.0 of Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, meaning that the developers worked with a 13-year-old base. AUTOMATON talked to Seiji Aoki, the producer of the “Legacy Virtua Fighter Project,” who gave insight into the daunting process.
With fighting games transitioning from offline arcade battles to online play on PC and consoles, rollback netcode has become an essential feature, Aoki acknowledges. He explains that while rollback may not be critical for matchmaking in Japan, where players are geographically close, it’s indispensable for larger regions like North America. “The farther apart the players are, the more lag becomes an issue.”
The team realized that without rollback, Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. couldn’t thrive in a global market – and rekindling the Virtua Fighter franchise on a global scale was high on their list of priorities.
However, implementing rollback into a 13-year-old game was not an easy task. “The legacy source code was a huge obstacle,” developer Aoki admits. “On PS4, the technical difficulties made us almost give up. But with the shift to PC, we thought we could overcome some of these technical points, and we realized it wasn’t just an option – we had to make it happen.” According to Aoki, the team felt that if they couldn’t succeed in implementing rollback, they might as well not make the game at all.
But even with the switch from PS4 to PC “it was quite difficult to add rollback to the legacy source code,” Aoki notes. Fortunately, as the team continued to try things out, they realized it was doable. They took this as a seal of approval to get officially started on the project.
The fact that Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. is a 3D fighter also brought its own unique challenges, such as the sync issues some players noticed during the beta. “It’s pretty difficult to implement rollback in a 3D fighting game. (…) We are aware of the issues, and if we had designed the game to include rollback from the beginning, I think they would have been less likely to occur. I think the fact that it was added after more than a decade raised the hurdle a lot,” Aoki comments.
To mitigate some of the issues, the team introduced “Quality” and “Performance” settings, allowing players to customize their experience based on their needs and setups. Aoki acknowledges that some “difficult points” still remain, but that the team is always considering solutions.
Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. is available now on PC (Steam), with a 20% launch discount running for a limited time.
