Earlier this month, Arc System Works announced that DNF Duel will be coming to the Nintendo Switch on April 20th. DNF Duel is already playable on PC (via Steam), the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. These versions of the game are almost identical to one another, however the Nintendo Switch is making a notable change to their version of the game. Arc Systems Works just announced via the DNF Duel website that the Nintendo Switch version of the game will be running on delay-based netcode, which is different from the other versions of the game that use the more widely accepted rollback netcode.

In order to simplify what a netcode actually is, according to Pcgamer, in a broad sense, netcodes encompass many aspects of network gaming. There are many component parts, but combined they are meant to help games run smoother when playing online. One way of putting it is, the best kinds of netcodes are the ones that you cannot notice, because that demonstrates how efficiently the game is running. If a netcode is bad, players will be able to notice significant issues in areas such as ping, lagging and an overall slower gaming experience.

To elaborate further on the differences between the two types of netcode, according to SVG, rollback essentially tries to predict a person’s inputs right before the players do them, to account for the delays that would normally happen when the input’s signal is sent to the opposing player. This leads to most games with rollback running much smoother, because these predictions tend to cut out the delay that happens from online play.

To contrast this with delay-based netcode, Qualbert explains that delay-based netcode is meant to purposely delay a user’s inputs to make online players’ inputs align more closely to each other when playing against one another. An example that Qualbert uses is for fighting games, where a low punch that would take three frames offline, will take six frames online to allow for your opponent to process those inputs on their end. What this means is, the game slows down so both players will have the same inputs at the same time online, which changes the timing and rhythms created by players.

This has been a slight cause of concern for the Nintendo Switch version of DNF Duel, since slowing down inputs is potentially very impactful for fighting games, where in many cases, inputs and combos come down to small frame windows for the actions to work as intended. However with that being said, delay-based netcode is far from unrunnable, as it was the primary netcode used before rollback was created. Only time will tell how this choice will affect DNF Duel when it comes to their release on the Switch on April 20th.