I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.
Hmm… I don’t see how that hurts, yes. Problem with fighting games is you cannot release new characters without balance patches otherwise you break the game for half your roster if not more. And people absolutely want new characters.
But locking games at specific points maybe is worth exploring, yes.
Edition Select like in USF4 would be rad. But I think I’d just like to see a universal way for platforms to let you roll back to any version of any game. Wouldn’t even require any extra work on developers’ part, platform holders would just maintain an archive of patches.
Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.
Don’t know about other platforms, but it’s worth noting that Steam already does keep old versions and there’s some command line method that can force download an older depot. Valve could offer UI to officially support this.
Something that you may not be considering is that a big part of live service updates is stopping cheaters. Whether the game is balanced or not doesn’t matter at all if other players are flying through the map and insta-killing everybody else.
Allowing the use of old versions of your game will consequentially allow cheaters to continue having access to known, exploitable files. Even if those files are no longer in use in the “live” version of the game, giving cheaters a sandbox to experiment in inevitably allows for further exploits to be discovered in the live version.
Normally games shouldn’t allow players on different versions to connect to each other. Version checks may be something devs need to explicitly implement, but surely most games should already have them or else I have questions for the developers.
Also, in the context of fighting games specifically, this is largely a nonissue. Fighting game netcode works by sending button inputs only, and the other client will play back those inputs to independently verify the outcome. There’s very little cheaters can try to do that won’t just result in a desync. To my knowledge there’s only ever been one cheating scandal in the FGC, and the accused turned out to be innocent in the end.
I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.
Hmm… I don’t see how that hurts, yes. Problem with fighting games is you cannot release new characters without balance patches otherwise you break the game for half your roster if not more. And people absolutely want new characters.
But locking games at specific points maybe is worth exploring, yes.
Edition Select like in USF4 would be rad. But I think I’d just like to see a universal way for platforms to let you roll back to any version of any game. Wouldn’t even require any extra work on developers’ part, platform holders would just maintain an archive of patches.
Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.
Don’t know about other platforms, but it’s worth noting that Steam already does keep old versions and there’s some command line method that can force download an older depot. Valve could offer UI to officially support this.
Something that you may not be considering is that a big part of live service updates is stopping cheaters. Whether the game is balanced or not doesn’t matter at all if other players are flying through the map and insta-killing everybody else.
Allowing the use of old versions of your game will consequentially allow cheaters to continue having access to known, exploitable files. Even if those files are no longer in use in the “live” version of the game, giving cheaters a sandbox to experiment in inevitably allows for further exploits to be discovered in the live version.
Normally games shouldn’t allow players on different versions to connect to each other. Version checks may be something devs need to explicitly implement, but surely most games should already have them or else I have questions for the developers.
Also, in the context of fighting games specifically, this is largely a nonissue. Fighting game netcode works by sending button inputs only, and the other client will play back those inputs to independently verify the outcome. There’s very little cheaters can try to do that won’t just result in a desync. To my knowledge there’s only ever been one cheating scandal in the FGC, and the accused turned out to be innocent in the end.