DBFZ Rollback, New Dragon Ball Game, and More in the New Interview

The official Dragon Ball website has just published a new interview with the producers of Dragon Ball FighterZ and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, Tomoko Hiroki and Masayuki Hirano respectively.

If you're wondering why there's suddenly a new Dragon Ball interview out of nowhere, it's actually all in celebration of both games achieving impressive 10 million sales, ensuring that we'll see more from them in the future, but more on that later.

Part 1 of the interview elaborates on the character selection process, and what makes the games successful in the first place. For Xenoverse, Hirano notes that making the player a key part of the story instead of a generic player avatar made it feel a lot more personal and engaging. Meanwhile, Hiroki states that they put a lot of effort into making a fighting game that would be competitive without sacrificing on the unique aspects of Dragon Ball, and faithful representation is definitely one of the things that everyone noted when the game was first showed off.

They also go over the more specific challenges that arise during development of such games. From capturing the art style and feel of Dragon Ball, to selecting which characters should make it onto the roster. Most interestingly, both Hiroki and Hirano note that when choosing new characters, they always wanted to pick ones that would add something new or fun to the game, rather than basing their decisions just on stats and popularity.

Moving onto Part 2, things get a bit more personal, with producers naming their favorite characters and sharing a healthy amount of mutual respect for the work they've done on their respective games.

For us fighting game players, the most interesting part is largely within the end of the interview, where they shared their plans for the future. Hiroki mentioned that they are still working on the implementation of rollback netcode, while also acknowledging and apologizing for the significant delay. However, it's all for the sake of making sure that it works as well as fans expect.

Before concluding, they also hint that there is another Dragon Ball project in the works. We don't know what kind of game it will be, but we'll likely hear a lot more about it in 2024!