Fancy a little Fighting Game?

Why do you say that? I’d love to believe you rather than the people saying the PC community will be DOA because of the lack of cross-play. I was thinking this might be a chance to get in at the beginning of a game, and generally prefer PC, but haven’t had a great experience with online PC fighting games last year when trying several of them.

SC6 and MK11 I tried on both PC and Xbox, and in both cases the PC version took way longer to find opponents and when they did they were usually much further outside my skill ranking and with a laggier connection to me – I assume both effects were down to a sparse player base. And Granblue Fantasy seemed to be all but dead, often waiting a half-hour for a match. This was a couple months after launch, and I didn’t have a chance to try the PS4 version but people claimed it still had a player base.

Rollback netcode heavily decreases the playerbase you need for viability, and top players tend to use PC more than console these days due to fewer wi-fi users, and in the case of last-gen consoles, PC performed so much better than the crappy consoles. (PS5 looks much better here)

COVID shifted a lot of folks to PC, I don’t see them going back to console. Even the Japanese players are shifting to PC now.

What?

I think @Alstein is being overly optimistic. For Guilty Gear specifically, you should probably expect PS4/PS5 to be the biggest playerbase by far. If you’re a n00b, you want to be on PlayStation for sheer numbers.

I just don’t understand what covid would have to do with shifting players to PC from consoles? Interested to know.

Even then, you generally shouldn’t expect whatever auto-matched “Ranked” type mode they have to work. Their games have limited audience to start with and those players prefer to play in lobbies most of the time.

I’d normally agree but I played in the beta and it seemed to be working as intended with plenty of opponents. Their casual mode is doing some ranking too.

Oh, I’m not saying the PS4 playerbase will be the largest. (PS4+PS5 have crossplay , PC/PS crossplay isn’t going to be at launch, might be never)

What I am saying is that PC will be viable if you want to go that route, competitively as well.

I also might be looking from a more competitive perspective, and my main game is healthier on PC because the console ports sucked.

As for why COVID shifted things, online tournies tended to prefer PC due to better netplay. Much of this was due to PS4’s poor online capability. For SC6 at least, most top players are on PC outside of Japan. It also helped that the French were pro-PC to begin with.

Guilty Gear Strive delayed to June 11th.

Gonna guess a lot of that time spent on the lobby just went in the bin.

Game is still gonna be dead. No netcode (folks play this on Parsec mostly), and no Steam = folks stopped caring.

Also, in Japan they sabotaged the folks actually playing this according to my friends who run a good part of the community over there.

Also, Skullgirls of all games is getting new content now. They are selling a season pass.

Samurai Shodown has been full price its whole time on Epic Store.

What? No netcode? Sounds like it would be a bit of a hard sell on Steam anyway then outside of a hardcore community of fans thanks to that.

As mentioned in the PS5 thread, Sony is partnering with Endeavor’s new eSports company to buy EVO.

No exclusivity for now.

It’s really, really bad netcode. Like worse than anything else by a good bit.
People use Parsec instead to play.

As for the EVO stuff, it’s EVO online this year (local events are starting to come back, but I don’t think offline majors do until 2022, anything in 2021 will be a glorified local), and new management after that.

A lot of fighting game folks are thirsty as hell to see everyone again.

Some news today:

A new Melty Blood is in the works. Same developer as the excellent Undernight In-Birth series.

Game is supposed to have some quality of life features, and rollback netcode!

Wooooo, I like that. UNICLR is fantastic.

First real offline event in a year going on now.

Invitational in Ukraine.

Some sad news: