No objections here
Guilty Gear Strive’s open beta may have attracted more interest from the wider fighting game community than the series had ever really garnered in the past, and while it partially delayed the game for another few months, we might not need to be this way. long to wait. to play it.
Arc System Works recently stated during their New Game + Expo presentation that the team is considering running a second open beta to further address the problems of the first.
“We are currently investigating the possibility of a second open beta test,” said Akira Katano, Strive’s director. “Of course we could not only look at the server problems we had, but also at the possibilities to improve the lobby experience.”
This may indicate something that many in the community had guessed from the previous beta: the number of players exceeded ArcSys expectations and what their servers could handle, leading to downtime and sometimes problems connecting with other players.
Strive’s lobby system is the biggest blow to the game most players had after this year’s beta and back in 2020, but the team seems to be focusing over the next few months trying to realign their current design with two months almost not be. enough time to make substantial changes to what they were already doing.
“Of course, we’ll be looking at everything that happened during the open beta test, including data collection and everyone’s surveys, so thank you for filling out,” said Katano. “Be patient with us and we are working hard to improve the experience.”
“At the moment we are investigating the possibility of a second open beta test. There we could of course not only look at the server problems we had, but also at the possibilities to improve the lobbying experience”
Some of the details they talked about fixing a second beta / full release was the need to improve the pace of the matches, although many would probably be happy to have a quick replay button next time.
They also want to address issues in the lobbies themselves, where players wouldn’t be able to connect with certain other users or tell them when and whether or not they were.
“A [issue] the pace of matches that we understand was not quite right, for example, and that’s a combination of certain bugs in the game and the actual flow of the game itself, ”said Katano. So we are looking for ways to improve that. . “
No possible window was given for when we could see the second proposed open beta, but looking back at the timing of the latter compared to the old April date suggests that early May would be the most likely place to start things again. online.
ArcSys confirmed that the overall balance level in the open beta of Strive was a bit of a rough estimate of where they’d like the game at launch, so Katano cautions that all the crazy stuff found in the previous betas probably won’t be with the next one. will be. time we get to play the game.
Additionally, a second open beta could open the doors for everyone to try out Strive’s last two main rosters in Anji Mito and I-No, who weren’t ready enough to participate in the first.
We couldn’t even see their big Overdrive Supers in the gameplay glitches as ArcSys says they weren’t ready yet.
Guilty Gear Strive will now launch on June 11, 2021, although players can access the game a few days earlier by pre-ordering the deluxe editions with the bonus content.
At the same event, Katano also confirmed that ArcSys is in the process of figuring out whether they can add rollback netcode to more of their older fighting game titles as well.