Soul Calibur IV online
While the game journalists were all clamoring because Virtua Fighter 5 didn't have online, I was saying that a game where you can jab your opponent in 1/10 of a second wouldn't work online.
Soul Calibur IV has online play, and it's dodgy at best. If you think about it, with talk time (ping) between clients being at least 40 milliseconds, and often higher, fast moves are already half-way to hitting you before you even see they're coming. When the ping is higher, it's unplayable.
One of my opponents saw the game was lagging, and so would get as far from me as possible, then start to run at me. After tackling me, they'd do it again. Starting a move to hit a running target while accounting for an unspecified lag-time before your move will start is difficult at best. So while their strategy would never, ever work in a local match, it was very difficult to beat online with lag.
Today, I noticed my opponent seemed to be starting the round before me. So I watched very carefully, and sure enough: he was able to start a move at the beginning of the round at least a half-second before I could. If both players deal with identical lag, then at least the situation affects both players equally. In this case, it was very unfair to me.
This is a case of the general public demanding a bad feature be put into a game largely because they're unaware of the technical constraints of online gaming. Games like Soul Calibur and Tekken are heavily dependent on split-second timing, and are therefore very intolerant of lag problems.
Many game types work just fine online; in the case of racing games, your opponent's positions can be extrapolated from last-known positions since a car is unable to change its momentum that much from frame to frame.
But we all know that if Tekken 6 doesn't have online play, and DOA 5 does, that DOA 5 would have a significant sales advantage. So Namco has to put online play into Tekken 6, even though they are probably aware that Tekken just isn't Tekken when played online.
Maybe I'm all wrong, and it's just that Namco has implemented SCIV's online mode poorly. But I sincerely doubt it.
Soul Calibur IV has online play, and it's dodgy at best. If you think about it, with talk time (ping) between clients being at least 40 milliseconds, and often higher, fast moves are already half-way to hitting you before you even see they're coming. When the ping is higher, it's unplayable.
One of my opponents saw the game was lagging, and so would get as far from me as possible, then start to run at me. After tackling me, they'd do it again. Starting a move to hit a running target while accounting for an unspecified lag-time before your move will start is difficult at best. So while their strategy would never, ever work in a local match, it was very difficult to beat online with lag.
Today, I noticed my opponent seemed to be starting the round before me. So I watched very carefully, and sure enough: he was able to start a move at the beginning of the round at least a half-second before I could. If both players deal with identical lag, then at least the situation affects both players equally. In this case, it was very unfair to me.
This is a case of the general public demanding a bad feature be put into a game largely because they're unaware of the technical constraints of online gaming. Games like Soul Calibur and Tekken are heavily dependent on split-second timing, and are therefore very intolerant of lag problems.
Many game types work just fine online; in the case of racing games, your opponent's positions can be extrapolated from last-known positions since a car is unable to change its momentum that much from frame to frame.
But we all know that if Tekken 6 doesn't have online play, and DOA 5 does, that DOA 5 would have a significant sales advantage. So Namco has to put online play into Tekken 6, even though they are probably aware that Tekken just isn't Tekken when played online.
Maybe I'm all wrong, and it's just that Namco has implemented SCIV's online mode poorly. But I sincerely doubt it.
posted by Almo at 4:16 PM
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