3D Rollback Is Not Harder Than 2D

If you've never been frustrated with Tekken's netcode, you probably haven't ever played Tekken. Everyone wants rollback, and we supposedly had in Tekken 7 despite the netcode being indistinguishable from any delay-based fighting game.

The excuse for poor netplay almost always revolved around how difficult it would be to implement rollback in a 3D game, but is it really?

Not according to Adam Heart, that you might also know as Keits. To briefly remind people of his credentials, this man worked on one of the first games to feature pristine, buttery smooth implementation of rollback – Killer Instinct. He also worked on Dive Kick and worked on Rumbleverse, a third person action battle royale game that was taken from us way too soon.

Suffice to say, he knows what he's talking about. In fact, he's one of the major reasons why anyone in this community even has any idea about how rollback works exactly.

Moving on to the point, following the coverage of Tekken 8, netcode received mixed responses. Some found it smooth, others ran into lots of issues and artifacts. Obviously not something to be happy about, a good netcode should be consistently good.

Following that, people started making a preemptive excuse for the product that they paid money for, saying that it's just too difficult to implement rollback in an incredibly complex 3D game, something that Harada somewhat suggested in one of his older Harada's Bar videos.

Keits fired back on that, explaining that the amount of work involved is basically the same. Naturally, this resulted in a fair amount of netcode experts who likely never worked on netcode or a video game to pop out and correct him that no, actually is difficult, because they have said so.

He further elaborates in replies while also correcting people's misconceptions, but also referred to another man who is extremely knowledgeable on the topic – Infilament.

If you haven't read it, he made an extensive article explaining how rollback works, with simple explanations and visual aid to help visualize the examples. If you recall, it also cites For Honor as one of the 3D titles using rollback netcode, a game that has no issues with smooth gameplay despite it's complexity and physics.

The latter comes up especially often in any discussion about Tekken. The specifics can be tough to figure out, but it's simply something that developers have to account for when developing the game. There's no doubt that Tekken players would prefer smooth and responsive online over more elaborate cape physics.