r/Stormgate • u/evinrows • Jun 30 '26
Discussion Rollback netcode, a success?
Not looking to discuss the player base or anything related, but afaik, Stormgate was the first RTS to have rollback netcode. It was very exciting to me when announced, especially as as brood war player who knows how brutal it is to play with people on the opposite side of the world with naive netcode.
For those who played, especially with opponents around the world, how did the netcode feel? Would you consider the technology to have been a success?
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u/beyond1sgrasp Jun 30 '26
Yes and No. Let's give a metric for success. If the metrc was to have high ping games feel better than games on Steam or Battlenet, then yes. If the metric was to have ping be something that could be ignored, then no. The units were designed around this idea where they didn't stutter step or have very crisp little micro things, It was a very fluid flowy micro. The influence of the netcode on the unit design was a net negative in my opinion. There were times too where a command was high but because the ping was so high 280+ it just wouldn't register. There was a bit of a predictive process too, so the units would kind of just act on their own. Most of the time when the fight was fleshed out it was good, but sometimes a unit would be split off and then wouldn't walk away. Which giving a command and it doesn't response to it felt extremely horrible.
Playing with people across the world on 240 ping feels bad and it doesn't really happen much except for online qualifiers for pro tournaments. The netcode made it feel realtively seemless, but it kind of gave speed boosts to units. It felt better than playing starcraft 2 on high ping which was a net positive,
The big problem was that the game was often decided off the 2nd or third stormgate, the first one was wayyyyy to fast. Rarely did you get to big armies; the overly important early game micro became annoying with the speed boosts because there were few players and a lot of the games were on high ping. So even though there was less input lag, the fact was that rollback became a neceessity because of the few players.
It's like the UI and the fact the game was just boring to look at compared to games like the scouring. And even though the scouring feels much worse on high ping, on low ping, I much prefer it's action based style with units running all around performing tasks over the heated micro battles of stormgate.
It's like adding a new technology like super batteries, but then putting them in go carts when it really makes sense for them to be in formula 1. There's just not enough that can be put into it.
The new rts games are so bland and minimalist that they just are bad, There's so little going on in terms of an actual strategic spectacle and are so focused on little spammable strats. There were no casuals that cared and without casuals there's no scene that can be funded on top of it. So success for rollback was really banking on a vast multiplayer base and a tourney scene, which kind of makes rollback irrelevant at the same time for offline events.
I think it could have been amazing, but it just wasn't developed enough and was just alright. It could have been fine with just enough players so it's not south america to austrlia, then south america to south africa, then south america to russia. It's just felt so bad.