Street Fighter 6 cross-play and rollback net code confirmed

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Street Fighter 6 cross-play is confirmed – courtesy of a tweet from community figure Maximilian, who says that the much-anticipated feature is “confirmed from the devs directly” to be part of the new fighting game. In addition, GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain, who is also at the event, says that SFVI will use the popular rollback net code functionality.

Lots of gameplay footage of Street Fighter VI has been coming out of the Summer Game Fest event, with plenty of community figures getting their hands on series veterans Ryu and Chun-Li, alongside returning fighter Luke from Street Fighter V and newcomer Jamie. The news of cross-play will be very welcome to fans, who will be able to get into scraps with friends regardless of what system they’re on. It should also help to ensure that the fighting game manages to maintain a healthy competitive online community.

Confirmation of the game’s rollback net code also comes as good news. For those not in the know on their fighting game technology, rollback net code anticipates what a player is doing during any micro-drops in connection (caused by the likes of packet loss, lag spikes, and so on). Due to the nature of fighting games, these assumptions are usually correct – but if they aren’t, the game corrects things in a single frame by ‘rolling back’ to the correct version of events.

Rollback netcode was included in Street Fighter V, but its implementation was a little shaky at first, which left some fans frustrated. However, Capcom did eventually improve things – both Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite and the reworked Street Fighter V Champion Edition feature much more solid rollback net code that has proven generally popular among the player base.

That’s not the only Street Fighter VI news to come out of the Summer Game Fest demos. It was announced that players can cause their characters to emote at one another on the pre-fight VS screen, and fans are already enjoying some of these – seemingly including Chun-Li’s iconic puffy-cheeked pout. Other fans have drawn parallels between the Chinese martial artist’s character select screen pose and a classic piece of artwork by series artist Kinu Nishimura.