Blazblue Cross Tag Battle and Central Fiction To Get Rollback Netcode

Arc System Works has announced that Blazblue Cross Tag Battle and Blazblue Central Fiction will both be getting rollback netcode. The was announced at the CEO fighting game tournament.

A rollback public best test for Blazblue Central Fiction will begin on the 6h of December 2021. Rollback netcode for the Steam version of Blazblue Central Fiction will be launched in February of 2022.

Rollback netcode for the PS4 and Steam version of BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle will be launched sometime in 2022. This update will apparently not be coming to the PS4 version of BlazBlue Central Fiction or either of the Switch versions of the games.

To coincide with the beta test, both games will also be going on sale on Steam for a week. Central Fiction by 50%, Cross Tag Battle’s basic edition by 75%, and Special Edition by 50%.

For those that don’t know, rollback netcode is a unique type of netcode that fighting games can implement to reduce lag time between inputting a move on a controller and the character in the game performing the move during online matches. This lag may only be a second or less but in a fighting game that timing is incredibly important and could determine the results of a match.

Rollback netcode predicts what the user’s next move will be in advance. If it’s right, those frames are performed smoothly because they have already been processed in advance. If it’s wrong, it will quickly adjust to the right move. These adjustments can be very quickly, to the point that they are pretty much unnoticeable. This makes the game feel more responsive when playing online and can mean that the game plays smoothly for you even if the opposing player is having lag problems due to bad wifi.

As such having rollback netcode on more fighting games, escpailly one’s as popular as the Blazblue series is highly desirable.

Blazblue Central Fiction and Blazblue Cross Tag Battle are available on PS4, Switch, and PC.