Dragon Ball FighterZ's Rollback Netcode Beta Starts This Week
Dragon Ball FighterZ Gohan
Dragon Ball FighterZ is one of the best anime games on the market, and frankly one of the best fighting games too. All the way back in 2022, publisher Bandai Namco announced that rollback netcode would be coming to the game – a huge addition for competitive play – but since then, details have been sparse. Now, Bandai Namco is set to hold a beta for the new feature.
Bandai Namco and developer Arc System Works announced on YouTube and via social media that a rollback netcode beta will take place worldwide starting on November 29 and running for about 10 days, ending on December 10. The beta will allow players on Steam to test out the new netcode system and provide feedback ahead of its wider release.
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The good news is that it’s an open beta, and anybody who owns Dragon Ball FighterZ on Steam will be able to participate. Bandai Namco published a comprehensive guide for how to participate in the beta on its Steam community page, but the gist of it is as follows:
Open up your Steam library, find the game, right click on it and click properties
Navigate to the betas tab in the game, then select “public-beta-test - pbt” from the dropdown list
Wait for the game to update, and you’re in
The public beta will only be available on Steam, as the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions aren’t out yet — they’re waiting for rollback to be done before releasing. The PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch versions of Dragon Ball FighterZ won’t be able to participate, as they sadly won’t be getting rollback netcode at all.
So what’s all the fuss about rollback netcode? Basically, there are two types of netcode – the code that handles how two players’ games interact and manage inputs across the internet – in regular use: delay-based netcode, and rollback netcode.
Delay-based netcode essentially has the game wait until all the inputs have been received, then continues to play out the game, which can cause the game to freeze or stutter, and in cases of extreme latency, drop inputs altogether. Rollback netcode is smarter, running simulations of every possible input in a given frame, predicting the most likely, and smartly correcting itself if the actual inputs are different.
Delay-based netcode gets the job done in the vast majority of games, but for one-on-one multiplayer games in which lightning-fast reflexes are needed, rollback netcode is the gold standard. Because of that, fighting game fans are pretty adamant that nothing less than rollback netcode will do, and everyone in the fighting game community is pretty excited that FighterZ is getting it.
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Dragon Ball FighterZ’s PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions haven’t been dated yet, but given Arc System Works is seemingly nearing the end of its work on rollback netcode, a release date is likely just around the corner.
