Capcom may finally be issuing a netcode patch for Street Fighter 5 soon, according to director Yoshinori Ono. The divisive fighting game is on the verge of turning four years old and just released its updated Champion Edition today. When Street Fighter 5 originally came out in 2016, it was a clearly undercooked game. In an attempt to get SF5 into the hands of pro players and popularize it before the year’s major tournaments, Capcom released a fighting game with missing features and dreadful netcode (among other things).
Some of these issues have been fixed over time, but despite SF5’s prominence in the fighting game community, a number of its fundamental problems have gone unaddressed by Capcom for years. One of those problems is the game’s notoriously bad netcode, which still makes online matches range from unstable to unplayable. However, it sounds like Capcom has finally taken notice of this and plans to do something about it.
In a recent post on Twitter, Street Fighter 5 producer Yoshinori Ono promoted the release of the Champion Edition and its additional characters. He thanked the game’s dedicated players for their support, and also had some enticing news about its future: the team is “working hard” on SF5’s netcode and adjustments will be made soon. The update is set to drop next week after the game’s scheduled server maintenance. He also tweeted about the upcoming beta test for SF5’s online tournament mode, which may be the driving factor for this netcode patch.
Players have had to “adapt” to Street Fighter 5’s drawbacks for a long time, and that includes creating their own netcode patches. One Reddit user called Altimor developed and released their own unofficial fix, but it is known to cause issues with the game unless both players are running the same homebrew patch. A different user called fluffysheap released another fix that disabled the patch if the opponent wasn’t using it – but the two patches were incompatible with one another.
Even though Capcom will now be releasing an official patch, there’s no guarantee that it will completely fix the problem. As many developers have said, pre-programmed netcode is an especially difficult thing to change. Still, SF5’s online infrastructure is long overdue for some sort of attention from Capcom, given that it’s arguably the biggest issue for the community. Devoted Street Fighter 5 players deserve a better online experience, although it would be nice if Capcom could now move on to Street Fighter 6.
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Source: Twitter
