Lack of multiplayer in VF5: here’s the reason…

Virtua Fighter 5: Crotch-punching action! - Image 1 

Ars Technica’s Opposable Thumbs goes into a lengthy musing into why Sega‘s Virtua Fighter 5 doesn’t have an online multiplayer. In fact their musing goes on to almost defend the stance that Virtua Fighter 5 shouldn’t have an online multiplayer mode.

Why you ask? Well it all boils down to the struggle between lag and playability in light of the nature of the Virtua Fighter combat system. Frank Caron explains:

Virtua Fighter 5, on the other hand, is popular because it is a highly technical fighter that requires precision and reflex far beyond the typical fighting game: frame-specific blocks, miniscule dead-zones, and meticulous balance are all contributing factors to why the series is so highly regarded by die-hard fighting game fans. Most of these pluses, though, require pinpoint accuracy in the hit calculations and timing.

Any small degree of lag would upset the careful and meticulous balance that makes the game so appealing to hardcore fighting fans in the first place; a 10ms lag could be the difference between a round-ending KO and a tide-turning counter. The aforementioned window in DOA4 is non-existent in games like Tekken and VF, where counters and blocks are calculated on a frame-by-frame basis rather than simply if hit within a given window of time.

But there are more problems. Say that the programmers decide to go ahead and push the knowingly subpar mode into their game. Having experience as a network programmer, I can tell you that a team never works on the assumption of the “best case.” Thus, knowing that the connection would be less-than-ideal in the average and worst cases, I would be programming for the worst case while accommodating and not hindering the best case. This would require some kind of compensation for the inherent lag in an online game.

We’ve seen this type of compensation before. Counter-Strike, for example, was previously programmed to anticipate where a player was moving and translate the hit-boxes of that player forward by a degree of the latency for each user. This meant that hitting the player would actually mean aiming slightly in front of him. In technical fighting games, though, no such simple solution exists.

It seems that to true VF fans – those who prefer to live and die depending on their reaction times and combat wit – any latency issue is just plain unacceptable. Ah, technical precision, the bread and butter of the Virtua Fighter series. As Frank Caron noted, “To take that away would be taking away the very thing that makes the game worth playing to begin with, and the only people who would really want to do that are the people who don’t understand or don’t appreciate what the VF series is all about. “

To read the rest of Caron’s musings into the nature of Virtua Fighter and online multiplayer in fighting games, feel free to click on our “read” link below.

Virtua Fighter 5: Crotch-punching action! - Image 1 

Ars Technica’s Opposable Thumbs goes into a lengthy musing into why Sega‘s Virtua Fighter 5 doesn’t have an online multiplayer. In fact their musing goes on to almost defend the stance that Virtua Fighter 5 shouldn’t have an online multiplayer mode.

Why you ask? Well it all boils down to the struggle between lag and playability in light of the nature of the Virtua Fighter combat system. Frank Caron explains:

Virtua Fighter 5, on the other hand, is popular because it is a highly technical fighter that requires precision and reflex far beyond the typical fighting game: frame-specific blocks, miniscule dead-zones, and meticulous balance are all contributing factors to why the series is so highly regarded by die-hard fighting game fans. Most of these pluses, though, require pinpoint accuracy in the hit calculations and timing.

Any small degree of lag would upset the careful and meticulous balance that makes the game so appealing to hardcore fighting fans in the first place; a 10ms lag could be the difference between a round-ending KO and a tide-turning counter. The aforementioned window in DOA4 is non-existent in games like Tekken and VF, where counters and blocks are calculated on a frame-by-frame basis rather than simply if hit within a given window of time.

But there are more problems. Say that the programmers decide to go ahead and push the knowingly subpar mode into their game. Having experience as a network programmer, I can tell you that a team never works on the assumption of the “best case.” Thus, knowing that the connection would be less-than-ideal in the average and worst cases, I would be programming for the worst case while accommodating and not hindering the best case. This would require some kind of compensation for the inherent lag in an online game.

We’ve seen this type of compensation before. Counter-Strike, for example, was previously programmed to anticipate where a player was moving and translate the hit-boxes of that player forward by a degree of the latency for each user. This meant that hitting the player would actually mean aiming slightly in front of him. In technical fighting games, though, no such simple solution exists.

It seems that to true VF fans – those who prefer to live and die depending on their reaction times and combat wit – any latency issue is just plain unacceptable. Ah, technical precision, the bread and butter of the Virtua Fighter series. As Frank Caron noted, “To take that away would be taking away the very thing that makes the game worth playing to begin with, and the only people who would really want to do that are the people who don’t understand or don’t appreciate what the VF series is all about. “

To read the rest of Caron’s musings into the nature of Virtua Fighter and online multiplayer in fighting games, feel free to click on our “read” link below.

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