Street Fighter 6 looks set to feature rollback netcode and cross play

It's looking like Street Fighter 6 will have cross play and rollback netcode, two highly sought out features for fighting games.

There's only two words you need to use to get a fighting game fan's blood pumping: rollback netcode. And thanks to GameSpot's Tamoor Hussain, we now know that the latest entry in the Street Fighter series will feature it. Prominent fighting game player Maximilian Dood was also able to confirm that Street Fighter 6 will have cross play, another big win for fighting game fans.

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Rollback netcode might need a bit of explaining for those outside of the FGC community. Essentially, it's a technique to circumvent lag where your input is predicted by the game while playing online, so that there's no kind of input delay. And the same applies to your opponent, both ends being treated like a computer rather than another player.

This might sound strange, but for the most part the computer very accurately predicts the move you're going to use. The purpose of this is to make it as close to playing locally as possible, because fighting games are massively about accurate inputs and readings.

Pairing up rollback netcode and cross play means that players on any platform will be able to play together without much trouble. As both are quite typically highly requested features for older fighting games that don't have them.

Thankfully, Street Fighter 6 is shaping up to be an incredibly strong followup, as our own Alex Donaldson was able to go hands-on with a very early preview. So far, it's looking like SF6 has learnt plenty of lessons from its predecessor Street Fighter 5's mistakes. As well as other lessons from other, more recent fighting games.

While what looks to be the whole roster has leaked online, Summer Games Fest did treat us to a formal reveal of Guile, one of Street Fighter's most classic characters.