Soul Calibur Goes Online

Julian Gnam September 29, 2008

I’m going to go right out and say it: by far the most significant feature of Soul Calibur 4 is its online play. This has been a long time in coming, as fighting game developers have dragged their feet on this feature for years, unwilling to make any major innovations or steps forward until they’ve milked all the money they possibly can out of their respective franchises just doing the same old.

The tectonic plates of online play in the fighting game world first started their imperceptibly slow crawl with the advent of the Sega Dreamcast and its built-in modem and online service. Despite the system’s low sales and eventual death, it was a hotbed for hardcore fighting gamers, with Namco debuting the original Soul Calibur to great acclaim, Tecmo’s Dead or Alive 2 garnering considerable hype, and Capcom releasing one arcade-perfect smashing fighter after another, including the first home versions of Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK, and Street Fighter 3: Third Strike.

Unfortunately, at least in the US, none of these titles ever featured online play. From the start, with ports of PC shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake 3, to later Dreamcast exclusives like Phantasy Star Online and Bomberman Online, all taking advantage of the modem, it was clear that internet was the future of multiplayer gaming, and there was an expectation that developers like Namco and Capcom would be including online play in their titles as soon as possible. In Japan, they got some rudimentary online mode roughly about the time of Marvel vs Capcom 2, but even if you installed a mod chip and imported the Japanese version, you still needed a Japanese phone number to get online (because it was on dialup, HA!) Airy promises and rumors of online play surrounded the oncoming of each successive fighter, and each time gamers such as this author arrived home with their reserved copies on opening day to find that they still weren’t going to get to play online and that Capcom had postponed the debut of internet in fighters for another day.

Finally when Microsoft, who had just had the audacity to break from the PC software business and enter console hardware with the XBox (which looked like a rejected Nerf gun design from 1993,) suddenly had the crazy idea to start this new “Live” paid online service, they managed to nag Capcom into releasing an online-capable port of Capcom vs SNK 2 to support its launch. Unfortunately, at this point hardcore fighting gamers were mostly still broke from shelling out money for a PS2 in order to play the first version of the game, and the system’s reputation for being heavy on dumb western shooters, and low on tried-and-true substantial Japanese franchises, didn’t help. To add insult to injury, the Xbox port of CvS2 was produced in such low numbers that copies of the game were almost impossible to find a year or two later, and it was followed up with a port of Marvel vs Capcom 2 which bore no online play, nor any new features of any kind.

Later on, the Xbox ports of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and Guilty Gear X2 #Reload made it somewhat worthwhile for fighting fans to pick up a used Xbox for cheap, but then they were introduced to the follies of poorly thought out online implementation…the most notorious oversight being that if one player yanked his ethernet cord out in the middle of play the match counted as a loss for both players involved, which meant in Xbox Live’s rank/record obsessed environment that every other match was interrupted by players bailing out when things didn’t go their way. Meanwhile, on the PS2, despite the hype over online-capable shooters such as the Socom: Navy Seals series, Killzone, and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, online play did not appear in Soul Calibur 2, Tekken 4, Virtua Fighter 4, Soul Calibur 3, Tekken 5, or any of Capcom’s many ports of old Street Fighter titles. Even the PS3 version of Virtua Fighter 5 would come and go with no online play. Dead or Alive 4, launching with the Xbox 360 at the end of 2005, did have online play, but then the series was always known for its silicone physics and not its deep combat system, and this was of course pre-Gears of War and pre-Halo 3, so there weren’t a lot of people around with 360’s to play the darn thing.

Finally in the past year the gears have begun to turn with online fighting games that aren’t just half-assed ports of decade-old Capcom games. Despite previous protests that “the game required too much precision to work online” Sega finally cracked and provided online play with the Xbox 360 version of Virtua Fighter 5 and Nintendo has brought Super Smash Brothers Brawl to Wii. Namco has been the last to jump on the bandwagon, but now that they’ve got Soul Calibur 4 on shelves now, and an online-capable Tekken 6 on the horizon, it truly signals the end of the wait for the fighting genre to get with the times. It’s finally looking like the wait for online play in fighters to hit in a significant and mainstream way is finally over.

My greatest fear going into Soul Calibur 4 was that the “group play” aspect of local matches would be completely lost in translation to Xbox Live. In college, games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and the first three Soul Calibur games were quite popular among my circle of friends, and a good deal of fun was not just the 1-on-1 match at hand, but all the conversation and antics which ensued around the game even among the players not directly playing at the moment. However, in most online fighters, connectivity is rigidly confined to only the two people presently fighting, eliminating the feeling of actually gathering with other players as in an arcade or dorm room setting. Fortunately, Soul Calibur 4 has taken a significant step to address this. When creating private matches through “Player Match” on Xbox Live, one can invite up to three additional players to join in, for a total of four players in the session. Two of the players put themselves in the “player 1” and “player 2” positions to participate in the next match, and the rest are free to watch and chat while waiting their turn to play. This simulates the experience of gathering with a few friends to play in person about as closely as you could reasonably expect from an online fighting game. Sure, you can fit a lot more people in a room in real life, but in my experience, 4 was a the average number involved in an every-day play session, and realistically speaking, allowing more online users to spectate would probably start to lag the match.

Other than that, Soul Calibur 4‘s online implementation is quite simple and straight-forward. Outside of private game sessions, the “public” portion consists merely of a command to join any existing public session, choose one to join, or create your own. Generally the join option has only a 30% chance of success, as everyone else is just trying to join a session as well instead of creating their own. The easy way around this is just to always create your own session to avoid stumbling through numerous “no session available” messages, and this generally gets you in a match within seconds, as the number of people mindlessly mashing the “join session” command until they eventually get in to one is plentiful. But what if everyone catches on to this method, and the situation is reversed because everyone is trying to create their own session instead of joining an existing one? So far it’s not a real problem, but one wonders why Namco didn’t simply use a single “optimatch” command to pool all players trying to play publicly into a single queue and let the Xbox systems and Live network manage the supply and demand of servers and clients automatically. This is how some other games have done it, and it seems to be a little smoother.

Soul Calibur 4’s performance in terms of latency is difficult to judge. For starters, it’s hard to predict how the match will run because the person who creates a session is not always the network host of the match (although generally the host seems to always get the left side position, while the client gets the right side position). In any case, since one of the two players is always the host while the other is client, logically that should mean that the host is always lag-free while the client should experience at least some lag even if its un-noticeable. Generally, my experience in play supports this theory, though I swear I’ve experienced spasms of lag even when I thought I was the host… at times both myself and my opponent have simultaneously chimed in “wooooaaaah, laaag!” as an exchange of blows suddenly slowed to a slide-show frame rate. In any case, performance does vary quite a lot; often I’ve had match after match with either no noticeable lag or only a tiny bit and it’s great. Other times, just about every other match seems to have heavy lag, and it’s one of the most frustrating experiences in gaming to suffer a horribly one-sided match where all you can do is watch helplessly as all your commands register seconds too late to defend yourself against the opponent’s merciless, un-lagged onslaught.

Lag is a necessary evil in online gaming, at least until something far better than cable becomes the universal standard for home internet connections, so expecting a piece of software like a game to magically make lag disappear would be unreasonable. Where I do fault Namco when it comes to the latency issue is their neglect to provide real time information about it. In PC gaming, it’s been standard to display each player’s ping rating next to their score for over a decade. In console gaming, developers have continually avoided providing any ping rating, as if neglecting to mention latency will make us believe that it isn’t there. As it is now, if I’m the host, I never know if my victory was a product of my own skill or of the opponent being overtaken with a crippling fit of packet loss. In my opinion, a player’s current ping (numerical display or even a graphical bar would do) should be shown under their life bar at all times, and their average ping for the match should be shown on the scoreboard at the end, perhaps even affecting how the match is totaled in players’ win/loss record and ranking. With these factors in place, players would know when to take pride in a fair victory (or sorrow over a true loss) and when to arrange a rematch under more favorable network conditions.

Another issue I found with Soul Calibur 4‘s online implementation is that in public play, you can only ever play one match against any single opponent at a time. In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem, as you can always send a friend request then invite to a private game anyone who you want to play against for an extended amount of time. However, in practice it’s not that simple.

In the Xbox version of Street Fighter Anniversary Collection, once 2 players were matched up in public play, each player was given the option to either continue the current session or quit and go back to the optimatch screen. If both players agreed to continue, they could play together for an indefinite amount of time even if they weren’t “friends” on Xbox Live. This played a crucial role in the social dynamic of the game; it gave strangers a chance to get to know each other. Sometimes you would get sick of the person you were matched against after one or two games and quit. Either they were trash-talking assholes, they sucked too bad to put up a decent fight, or they were too much better than you for you to have a fair chance. However, inevitably you would find yourself playing match after match against someone you really enjoyed fighting. Sometimes, the other guy was considerably better than you, but you had just enough of a chance to think that you could get the better of him if you just played one more match. Sometimes the other guy wasn’t as good, but he was decent enough that you could have fun without having to go back to optimatch and chance getting paired with a total scrub. In the best of situations, you ended up against someone so equal to yourself in skill, that you were playing your hardest constantly and yet every match was a toss up as to who would win; every round was a thrill. Once you played several of these awesome matches, you would friend the player over XBL and whenever he was online you could join up for some more grudge matches. Eventually, you had so many of such friends that you never had to chance getting paired with someone lame over optimatch, and there was always some awesome player online when you switched on the Xbox. This is how online gaming should be.

Unfortunately, Soul Calibur 4‘s public play is really nothing like this. The single-match limitation places so much emphasis on the results of that single match, that the entire focus of play is forced on blindly spamming the cheapest moves with the greatest possible chance of catching an inexperienced opponent off guard and knocking them out before they can react. Sure, if you played more than one match against anyone, one player or the other would catch on to the cheap patterns, adapt with counter patterns, and then both players would be forced into a real fight. But since you only get one match, and you sure as hell don’t want to lose to one of those level 1 scrubs, both players just use their simplistic n00b-crushing routine every time. Eventually you may get paired up against the same person you played earlier, remember some of their pattern, and plan accordingly•but all in all, the learning process of opposing strategies is slowed to far too much of a trickle when at most you’re only going to come against the same player once every several matches. One might argue this is how it works in the arcades when the loser bows out for the next player in line, but the truth is that when you’re waiting in line in the arcade, you can still watch and learn the other players’ tactics.

This is where the missing link in the Xbox Live social process really hurts the game. One match is not really enough to get a good feel for the player’s real skills – particularly when circumstances dictate that everyone use their simplistic scrub-hunter dance every round. Sure, if you have an ok match against the same player a few times, you can friend them and go for a private match later, but it may turn out they just got lucky those few matches, and once put in an environment where their moves can be studied and planned against, they don’t really put up a good fight. The situation may also happen in reverse, you may friend someone who seems to be at your skill level, only to find that they had a bad run the few times you met, and once you get in a private session, you find that you don’t really have a chance at all. The friending/private match system is much more of a crap shoot with only one match with which to judge players, and without private matches against friends, all you’ve got is a series of one-offs against random people you don’t know, the results of which are rarely very satisfying.

Overall, Soul Calibur 4′s online implementation is a mixed bag. On one hand it improves over the current standard for online fighters by allowing more than two players in a session. On the other hand, by limiting public play to a single match per opponent, it disadvantages itself where other online fighters have succeeded. I also can’t help but think that if developers got more ambitious, the online capabilities of fighting games could be taken much further. For starters, they need to come clean and stop trying to hide the facts of lag, because a game can’t be played with any degree of seriousness competitively if one player or the other can be brutally disadvantaged at random by an intentionally-hidden and unpredictable extenuating circumstance. Beyond that, there are many more ways that players could be pitted against each other, from larger group play sessions, to leagues and tournament ladders managed automatically by players’ consoles and Xbox Live. There are a lot of possibilities here that no developer is bothering to take advantage of, so the truth is that while online capability has been available for ages and it’s finally caught on to the degree that every major fighting game will now have online play, the feature is still universally at a very rudimentary stage in the genre… We are still in for another long haul while developers figure out how to actually implement online play in fighters in a considered, developed, and full-featured manner comparable to the complex netcodes and myriads of modes seen in genres like FPS, RTS, and MMORPG’s, which have been at it virtually since the invention of the internet.