Namco To Work With Arika To Develop Tekken Games — Will Rollback Netcode Be Included?

Rollback netcode might be coming to Bandai Namco's (Namco) popular Tekken series soon.

Namco recently announced it is officially outsourcing the development of its Tekken series, including the latest upcoming game to the series, Tekken 8, to Arika Co. Ltd.

Although Namco game producer Katsuhiro Harada mentioned that Tekken 7 does have rollback netcode, the way it was implemented makes it difficult to notice and essentially useless, per Game Rant.

Namco-Arika Partnership Details

Namco mentioned in its announcement that it reached an agreement to outsource the development of the Tekken series to Arika, a company engaged in game development.

The company's consignment of work to Arika dictates that Namco will partially let Arika work on Tekken 8 to further improve user experience. It will also entrust full development work to Arika to develop updates for Tekken 7, which includes software updates, fixing bugs, improving the operability of online battles, etc.

Meanwhile, Namco will be responsible for Tekken's game balance items.

Namco's announcement of its outsourcing to Arika came shortly alongside the character reveal trailer for Nina Williams, a long-time addition to the Tekken series since the first Tekken game, released in 1994 for arcades and the PlayStation in 1995.

Additionally, the outsourcing of Tekken 7 and Tekken 8's development to Arika is a boon for both Namco and Tekken players worldwide. Namco acknowledged Arika's specialization in game development and its know-how on online battle algorithms and game response.

The company, according to Gameranx, received praise and distinction for being a comparatively small game studio that can develop rollback netcode and implement it for their fighting game, Fighting EX Layer.

Tekken players worried about Tekken 8 being co-developed by a competitor shouldn't worry. Namco, Arika, and other fighting game developers can be said to be colleagues as they openly talk about their work with each other to improve their games and make the fighting game genre more popular.

Namco game producer Katsuhiro Harada mentioned that the Tekken series already has rollback netcode in Tekken 7 on his Twitter account, but many in the Tekken community are convinced that the game doesn't have such a netcode for online matches.

What Is Rollback Netcode?

Rollback netcode is a method of navigating latency wherein your PC or gaming console predicts what moves each person will likely execute to avoid input delay, per Games Hub. These predictions allow both players' devices to be a few steps ahead of their input, reducing the amount of perceived latency in the game.

However, should one or both players' inputs be different from the predicted ones, the computers will adjust on the go and "roll back" to the correct state in a split second. The rollback is barely noticeable, and eeventually, rollback netcode became a preferred feature in fighting games.

By contrast, a delay-based netcode, the netcode widely used in many past games, artificially delays a player's inputs by the same amount of time the opponent's inputs need for them to be sent over the network. This delay would theoretically make both inputs "arrive" at the same time and can be executed on the same frame as expected.

Unfortunately, this delay is noticeable, and as such this netcode isn't popular with gamers worldwide.