Evo 2024 has come to a close, and while thousands of attendees came to experience and watch their favorite fighting games, there were long lines waiting to try out the latest, yet-to-be-released versions of fighting games. Riot Games’ upcoming fighting game 2XKO made a big appearance at the show, bringing with it new information. But one aspect remained interesting and largely untouched: the technology behind the game and why it matters.
Tony Cannon is the perfect person to talk to about this. Tony is the creator of the rollback netcode for GGPO in 2009 and a notable figure in the pursuit of better online play for fighting games. Today, he serves as technical lead for 2XKO and graciously sat down for a 10-minute chat on the Evo show floor.
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First up, the 2XKO team has been eager to share that server-based rollbacks will be a major component of 2XKO. But what does this actually mean, and how does it differ from regular rollbacks?
Tony Cannon: “The main benefit is that we’re a four-player game. When you play a two-player game, you just swap back and forth. If something goes wrong, it’s not a big deal—it’s like a glitch. But if you have four people, now those errors have to be communicated to the other three players, and the chances of things going wrong increase threefold.”
“If one player quits in a four-player game, what do the other players do? The game has to end, right? So if you put a server in the middle, then the amount of information you have to send is reduced. If three players are having fun and have a solid connection, and the fourth player has problems or quits altogether, you can actually do something about it.”
“Especially in a two-player game. If you’re the assist at one point and your assist connection is a little bit spotty, it doesn’t really affect the quality of the game, right? Because the assist isn’t putting that much effort into it. So when we have a server in the middle, we’re able to have a lot more control.”
iGamesNews: That sounds like it would be pretty expensive. Is this solution only possible with Riot’s existing server infrastructure?
Tony Cannon: “It’s certainly more expensive. But we have to do it to maintain the quality of online play that we want. We don’t want four-player games to feel a little bit janky. For us, it’s like, how does the whole live service come together, right? That’s the thing about live service games, you know it’s free, there’s a cost to the game. How do you recoup those costs? Well, it’s skins and events or whatever.”
“It’s all about finding that balance, getting that balance so that we get a net benefit and then be able to invest back into the game, and the servers are just one side of the cost equation.”
iGamesNews: Earlier today, Tom (Cannon) talked on stage about some of the benefits of server-based rollbacks, including anti-cheat solutions and disconnect detection. What other side benefits are there?
Tony Cannon: “We consider the server to be the authority on timely input. What that means is, let’s say you do a combo correctly? And they have a delay button on the controller. Or even on Windows, if you’re in windowed mode, you can grab the window and stop the game so you don’t send input for a moment. People do that to break the network so you throw off the combo because of latency.”
“But the server knows. It knows the game should be on frame 100, but it’s on frame 101 or 102. It can make an intelligent decision if it’s not getting input. It can do that because it has the authority of that moment, and it has other advantages.”
“If you think about a really intense environment, like a competitive match, you know maybe there’s a setting where the server is very strict about how long it’s waiting for input. But if you’re in a casual lobby, if you’re playing some matches with your friends on Discord, maybe there’s another setting that’s a little more relaxed, which makes the game lag a little bit more, rather than kicking players out just because you’re friends. With the servers in the middle, you have that flexibility. We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to use it right now. We need to get the game in front of players and see how they feel about it and what features they want, but it’s valuable to have that flexibility.”
Earlier in the day on the 2XKO stream, Tom Cannon pointed out that good anti-cheat is a big plus for 2XKO. This led to the question: will 2XKO use Vanguard (Riot’s own kernel-level anti-cheat software) or something else? Tony’s answer was clear and detailed.
Tony Cannon: “Yeah, we use Vanguard. A lot of the cheats we see in fighting games are things like reading input, reading game state, or injecting input. They involve modifying the game binary in some way. Vanguard is really good at that, right? It’s a kernel-level anti-cheat, so it can detect and prevent a lot of these things from happening.”
iGamesNews: Many people are concerned about kernel-level anti-cheat software such as Vanguard, and many people are concerned about their privacy. What do you think about these concerns?
Tony Cannon: “Yes, Vanguard runs in the kernel, right? But we don’t collect player information, we don’t read the title bar of applications… We don’t do anything that players would consider sensitive. We don’t collect it, we don’t send it. It’s very targeted to find cheats and prevent people from tampering with the 2XKO binary.”
“A company might install kernel-level software to do these things, and we recognize that’s a problem. Valve has its own anti-cheat software, and cheats are getting more sophisticated now, and they have to run in the kernel, right? So in order to protect every player experience, you have to work at the kernel level. So, you have to trust Riot to some extent, but we definitely don’t want to put players in harm’s way.”
Fighting games place a heavy emphasis on offline communities, and while it’s certain that 2XKO will allow offline play, it hasn’t been explicitly stated, nor has the scope of the offline mode been covered. All of Riot’s other games have such requirements – who knows! Tony couldn’t confirm much, but he could say straight out that 2XKO will be playable offline.
Tony Cannon: “One of our tenets is let’s embrace what the community does. You can’t possibly run a game that requires an online connection at an event like this. The capital investment required, you need a satellite truck in the parking lot, and even then, it breaks, right? So offline is an essential feature that we will always support the community.”
“So, for a big event like 2XKO, we need to do what TO needs to do to run a successful event. I think this starts offline, and one of the things we’re interested in is asking organizers big and small what we can do to make their lives easier. Maybe it’s a faster way for players to configure buttons.”
“Two Evos ago, before we had a booth, we had a closed-door meeting with players and TOs to ask what they wanted to do, what ideas they had! We got a lot of ideas that we hadn’t thought of before. So we will never make an online-only game unless the players ask us to do so.”
Finally, I want to talk about Riot’s approach to the fighting game community (who knows, maybe there will be another interview diving deeper into this soon.) Riot has been around for a while, and historically the company has been very focused on the competitive scene in League of Legends and other games.
Tony co-founded Evo with his brother. When people online worry that Riot is getting too involved at the grassroots level, a common rebuttal is that the brothers wouldn’t support it. So I asked Tony about Riot’s intentions in this area.
Tony Cannon: “I think if you look at what Riot does, it’s always been about, how do we make it better for players. When League of Legends and the first World Championship came out, they looked at the competitive ecosystem and they thought, the people who run the big events, we can do better. And then they came in and did it.”
“I think the fighting game community right now is the exact opposite. It’s built on the passion of the players. People come to these events—whether it’s a big tournament or a small local tournament. It’s driven by that passion. How can you do better? It seems like you can’t. So we’re just looking to expand and supplement. What is Riot doing in the competitive space that makes it better. We don’t know what that is yet—we’re focused on getting the game out right now—but different types of games require different things.”
If you want to try the game out for yourself, 2XKO will be running its first public alpha test this August, and you can sign up now.
