It’s been a pretty good year for fighting games, and really games in general. We had the release of Street Fighter 6 & GBVS: Rising, betas for SamSho, UNI2 and DBFZ rollback, a beta for Tekken 8, some cool DNF Duel & KOF XV character releases, and a bunch of cool events.

The Quality of Releases Now

SF6 did a lot of good things in its release. It’s got a godlike training mode, a decent single player mode that lets people learn more about their favorite fighters, some sc-inspired character customization, the works. That’s not even mentioning the good netcode and the crossplay.

That being said, Granblue had an even better rerelease. A free version, a good training mode, a dopey ass Fall Guys mode, in-game skins for weapons and characters, etc.

These are two very good releases that I hope set the standard for games getting made now. Good lobbies, Good netcode + crossplay between PC versions and console, Training modes with plenty of options and preferably frame data/display of some kind.

I would say fg releases are mostly in a good state right now. Most recent fg games have standard fare in regards to single-player content, but just about every game that’s come out since the pandemic took place has had a good training mode, rollback netcode, and a functional PC port. Now, some games had to work some things out. Type Lumina had to work out the rollback a bit after launch, for example, but that’s understandable since it was their first game with rollback. DNF Duel’s PC port is perfectly fine. UNi 2 and Rising are both updates to games that already had decent ports; I also didn’t hear anything negative about how Rising ran on Steam during its beta window.

Old Guard

Honestly, more than any actual brand-new release, people are happy about rollback netcode coming to damn near every 2d fighting game at this point. Legit, almost the entire ps3-ps4 generation of fighting games has rollback now. And for some that haven’t had rollback added, their is a new version on the way.

I’m serious. Let’s make a list.

Games that have rollback/are getting a sequel/update with rollback

  • Guilty Gear Xrd
  • Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R
  • Samurai Shodown 2019
  • Under Night
  • Blazblue Centralfiction
  • Blazblue Cross Tag Battle
  • Fighting EX Layer*
  • King of Fighters 2002 UM
  • King of Fighters 98 UM
  • King of Fighters XIII
  • Chaos Code

That’s not even counting games like Melty Blood & Skullgirls that had rollback pre-pandemic. Unfortunately, genre staple Marvel 3 is still stuck in delay-based hell, and basically every modern 3D fighting game is in the trenches. We have fightcade to play older ones like DOA2 and VF3, but games like DOA5, DOA6, Tekken 7, and Soulcalibur VI are all in sad boi realm. Still, all in all, if you like 2d fighting games and older 3d titles, fgs almost couldn’t be better. So many options.

You may notice an Asterisk next to FEXL in that list, and that’s because I like to be honest and admit that Arika’s rollback solution for FEXL, while something that undoubtedly benefitted the community, is noticable worse than the other offerings on that list. I haven’t tried the SamSho or KOF XIII betas, but I can say with confidence that every other title I listed has noticably better netcode than FEXL. This doesn’t mean the shit’s terrible or anything like that, but this is my blog and I’m gonna be honest. It’s usable, it’s good, but a real step down from other games. I’ll still go to bat for FEXL and recommend it. That is a fun ass game that is worthy of your time and will give you hours of fun right back.

The Community

Now, as a disclaimer, I ain’t in the wider FGC like that. I’m on twitter, but I am purposefully disconnected from whatever shit y’all be talking about on there. I just RT tiddies, tell the people that draw said tiddies they did a good job, and occasionally say some silly shit in response to friends’ tweets. That’s it. I’m in discords, but I am a lurker. I play fighting games, but I am not closely connected to the online scenes atm. I just hop online and play people. Maybe I’ll be more active in the future. Maybe not.

Still, the overall playerbase of fighting games has grown. Bare minimum, A new Street Fighter game + a new Mortal Kombat game + the announcement of a new Tekken game means that there are a lot of newer players coming in along with some people coming back. This isn’t even counting the potential players that games like DNF, Type Lumina, and GBVS brought in. There are definitely more people playing now. These games have more ads now; Influencers make their low-quality videos about games now, VTubers have sponsored streams where they play them for their audiences, etc. The reach is overal wider.

This would be the part where I give my impression of communities via social media, but that’s kinda unfair since Twitter is just biased towards showing me the negative stuff in the first place. For all the stupid shit I’ve seen over the past couple years, there’s probably an equal if not greater amount of good shit that i just didn’t bear witness to because social media sucks like that. And as I said, I lurk in these discords; I’m not a particularly strong reference for their conduct in those places. Still, I will say that there’s plenty of cool people playing fighting games, and it’s not even that hard to find em. People have made websites for their locals. We got the SuperCombo forums. And there are some nice people in these discords, man. I met a good chunk of the dudes I play now via discord. It’s not all bad. Obviously, it can vary by community sometimes, but if you wanna throw down in a fighting game and learn it, people will be there to play with you.

I will take this moment to say that fighting games casting a wider net did bring some more negative elements. I’m ainly talking about people’s expectations & relationships with games and their content releases. DNF Duel got a lot of flack for releasing and not having a bunch of DLC. Now, that game’s marketing is complete dogwater. I am not defending that whatsoever. However, that can exist alongside the point I’m trying to make: we have more people that have been spoiled by live service games that can’t fathom the idea of just playing a game because it’s fun and not because it is currently being updated. Honestly, seeing the reaction to that part of DNF Duel made me feel like the weird one for a bit, but I am someone who just enjoys things. A lot of my hobbies throughout the years, especially basketball, have been static; I took part in them because they were fun, not because they promised a bunch of change.

I also want to just take this moment to say that asking for games in discord is not hard or anywhere near as bad as people try to make it out to be. Honestly, it’s pretty respectful of your time. You ping the role for games, give it a good 5-20 mins depending on the time of day, and if nobody was around, ya try again another time. It’s really not that bad. The thing people have to understand is that when you’re not playing one of the big mainstream games is that people got shit to do. Take KOF for example. The Average KOF player is like 18+ rn, I’m pretty sure. During the day, they’re either in class or at work. So you can’t be surprised that your 3:30 ping for games went unanswered. I experienced this with DOA6. Were there people playing? Yes. But most of em had jobs, and I’d have to wait for a certain period at night, somewhere around like 8-9 pm, when they’d be off from work and back from getting food/going to the gym. All you really have to do is accept that playing smaller games means that you hve to actually acnowledge that people have lives just like you do. Would it be better if every game had 3 million players and we never had to ask for games on discord? Yes. But it’s not like asking for games is that bad of a thing in the first place.

The Point of This, Kinda Sorta

That does bring me to one of the points that made me wanna type this thing up, though. I feel like fighting game releases need to slow down just a bit. We have a lot more people playing fighting games right now. However, there’s not so many playing that when you’re not playing specifically SF/Tekken/MK that you don’t feel the impact of a new fighting game release. There are so many people playing those 3 mainstream games(and I can probably throw DBFZ in that list once it gets rollback, honestly.) they just don’t care when another game comes out. Their numbers gotta be in the several thousands; they don’t care if 2-3 hundred leave. But just about every other game in the genre cares. I’m not saying I don’t want new titles; I just wanna rock with what fighting games have right now. There are so many games and so many communities. And I wouldn’t feel this way if so many older games didn’t get rollback. If all those games got left in the dust and only the current gen had rollback, this would be a different conversation altogether. You could say I’m caring too much, but I want to see all these games get love, and I’m sure they will regardless of what new games come out, but I’d like the environment to just settle a bit. There are so many older titles that can be explored/enjoyed, and the current gen that can be grinded. I’m just one to vote that we go a year or two without brand-new releases to let communities settle.

Point is, I wanna see all these games eat, plain and simple. I wanna see all these games get played and enjoyed. And every new challenger that steps into the ring means less for all the other games because, really, only so many people play the non-mainstream fighting games. Now, people that ride for these games are gonna ride, new games be damned, and they’re wonderful for that. I just want their lives to be a little easier. There are just so many options out there if you really fuck with fighting games. Shit, man, I wanna play Bloody Roar. I wanna play more Xrd. I wanna lab some KOF. There’s too many games, man. I don’t just look at fighting games in terms of new releases. I look at them as a whole. All these games are viable investments of free time. That’s wild.

Just wanted to get that out of my system, really.

Fighting games, overall, are doing great. ROllback has become the standard, and crossplay looks to be joining it. New games have good training modes and decent lobby systems, and older games are getting fresh coats of paint. It’s a good time if you like 2d fighting games.