Virtua Fighter: Crossroads Focuses On Its Reinvention, But The 1v1 Legacy Lives On

Revealing that a major gaming franchise is getting a sixth installment isn’t usually a surprise. But in the case of Sega’s Virtua Fighter Crossroads – revealed at Summer Game Fest last week – that reveal comes 20 years since the last game in the series, and with a completely different vision for the fighting game genre. Developer RGG Studio is best known for its Yakuza games, which comes through loud and clear in the game’s story-driven presentation. But where does that leave fans of the franchise’s competitive 1v1 fighting legacy? Producer Riichiro Yamada tells GameSpot, “If someone doesn't know anything about Virtua Fighter, from what we've shown, they might think it's not a fighting game and that it's actually a full-on action-adventure game. But in the end, [we] do want to say it is based off of a fighting game. And you can see in the one-on-one battle, [we] wanted to make sure that it is very Virtua Fighter, but still new. That urge to evolve the game came in part from the need to stand out in a competitive (heh) genre, but also to expand it beyond its niche audience. It's got to be more than just a basic fighting game because, in Japan you know, fighting games are still rather niche as a genre, Yamada said. And while that goal has deviated from where the series has been before, and the action-adventure part is really what was on display this week at Summer Game Fest, there were signs of its 1v1 pedigree remaining intact if you knew what to ask. To be clear, it's not Virtua Fighter VI. The shirts that the developers were wearing had the V and I in Virtua Fighter in a contrasting red and when asked if this obvious Roman numeral 6 indicated that they thought of this as Virtua Fighter 6, Yamada said, “Funny enough, no. Because the title, we went over this over and over and over, and we really landed on Crossroads. And the six is sort of just for the older players to be like, ‘We haven't forgotten you, we're still here, this is still Virtua Fighter.’ That said, that focus from a competitive arcade game to a console-bound action adventure game comes with other priorities. “Before [Virtua Fighter] used to be very arcade first. But with this new game we're thinking of how to make it great on [game]pad, and then we'll follow up with the other peripherals after. Virtua Fighter Crossroads should still feel familiar to players, and the game’s signature mechanics should be present. “Virtua Fighter has always been based on three buttons: punch, kick, guard... Everyone should be able to pick it up and play,” Yamada said. When Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown was released in 2021, fans criticized the absence of rollback netcode – a technical solution to the challenge of maintaining split-second inputs over an online connection. Yamada said that “the Japanese audience themselves didn’t really notice about the rollback because the connections [in Japan] are pretty good” but acknowledged that “worldwide we got a ton of backlash. They addressed that backlash in last year’s Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O., which incorporated rollback netcode. When asked if they were including that same solution in Crossroads for its 1v1 component, Yamada said, “Since we're now thinking about it base up we're really working to make a really good playable experience for everyone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBsUV1dyYFo Finally, when asked if, despite the focus on the action adventure mode, if there was a goal for the 1v1 game to be tournament worthy, Yamada answered, “Honestly, that's not something that we decide, that's really what the players do, right? What they want. And while we think ideally it'd be great—we release it, it's super popular, everyone's playing, tournaments are coming out—really it's up to them. And we, as our job, will continue to look at how the landscape grows with our game release and we'll act accordingly to that.”