For Guilty Gear fans, the primary focus is no doubt on the upcoming Guilty Gear Strive, the newest entry in the series due for release in April 2021. That's still a ways off, though, so players may find themselves going back to the older games to kill the time. In fact, they already have and in a big way.
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, the updated 2012 re-release of the original Guilty Gear XX from 2002, recently received a new patch to test out rollback netcode for online play. For those not in the know, studio Arc System Works has usually used delay-based netcode for its games, which is quite unpopular within certain communities as it more often than not makes online matches incredibly laggy.
Rollback netcode, on the other hand, is able to predict player inputs and correct errors as they happen, making it a far more popular alternative, especially for fighting game fans. And with it being tested on Guilty Gear XX, specifically the Steam version of the game, a massive amount of players have reportedly returned to it just because of the presence of rollback netcode.
The patch only dropped on October 28th, three days ago at the time of writing, and one look at the player statistics on Steam Charts shows a radical jump in the amount of people playing the game. On October 30th, 2330 people were playing, making this the new all-time peak, which was originally only 438 when it first launched on Steam back in 2015.
These numbers undeniably demonstrate how important online play is to the fighting game community, especially at the moment with fighting game tournaments needing to be held online due to the coronavirus pandemic, with players' desire to see more rollback netcode implementation only getting stronger.
Arc System Works definitely seems to be taking the hint, as it's including rollback netcode to Guilty Gear Strive when it releases for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC, alongside a free next gen upgrade for anyone who buys it for PS4 and cross-play between the PS4 and PS5 versions (but not the PC one).
Players were able to take part in a beta for Strive earlier this year, which quickly won fans over with its striking visuals and music, but there were still complaints regarding its lobby system, minimalist presentation, and originally having delay-based netcode.
Arc System Works also got in trouble recently for making a Twitter post poking fun at the Cyberpunk 2077 delay, which it deleted for being inappropriate.
Source: Kotaku, Steam Charts