Things games should have, but don't

[Omegajak]

It doesn't matter how many people are in the game-- the netcode doesn't change. The netcode has to be a lot more solid and has to be able to react to 2 people fighting each other, compared to 16 people shooting each other in a huge room.

In shooters-- you can pass a netcode where players may or may not occasionally teleport into areas or not be hit by attacks. This is not the same for a fighting game, because if this kind of input problem were to happen in online play, the game would be broken completely.

There is a lot more trial and error in a game as technical as a fighting game-- there isn't in shooters. Shooters have to deal with a lot of shit going on at once, but it doesn't have to be perfect-- fighting games need netcode that doesn't allow any form of lag teleporting, moves "not" landing, and hundreds of other factors that wouldn't fly in online play for a fighter. The players always have to be facing each other, which determines their animations, which determines their inputs, which determines hundreds of other factors in the game. In fighting games, your player is also STOPPED completely when they are hit by an attack. This doesn't happen in shooters, except Lost Planet 2.



tl;dr Fighting games require netcode as deep as the gameplay engine itself.

You're confusing complexity with scale, most of the complex physics interaction and realtime effects in large multiplayer games are handled client-side, because you're all running the same engine with the same variables, the same thing will happen, it doesn't need to sync with the server or other players. (although this sometimes causes bugs where things glitch out, as probably all of us have seen at least a dozen times)

You also have to bare in mind that an engine for an FPS and an engine for a fighter are actually totally different.

Most FPS engines or other arena shooter-type games are effectively hardcoded for multiplayer, often the singleplayer campaign is actually a modification of the multiplayer, and not the other way around, they pull lots of tricks to fake things, like predicting where people are heading or filling in the gaps if there's packet-loss, this is why you see less people teleporting around these days.
But with fighting games there are no multiplayer-centric engines around, and because they rely heavily on latency and instant input there's no way to cover-up any lag or delay, especially if you're going right from single player to multi, the effect with be very obvious, in such fast-paced games even a phenomenal ping for an FPS will give you noteworthy delay in a fighter.

So you see, it's not that the game engines are more complex or less complex, they're actually not comparable because they work in totally different ways.

I think you both just explained why Card Saga Wars is taking so long. A 2-4 man team creating individual backgrounds, remixing themes, creating hitboxes, what should, and should not connect in terms of attacks and all the multi-player coding behind it? Kinda makes the wait seem more justified now.

Also, I want Hideo Kojima make more good high-speed action robot games. I don't know what the people over at Armored Core are thinking anymore, giant robots are already a technology that can't possibly exist. Why do I have to have realizing when I just want giant robots fighting in a stylish way? A new Virtual On game would also be key SEGA.