Due to the ongoing global pandemic, event cancellations have become the norm in the past few months. Everything from concerts to conventions have been on the chopping block and had their 2020 plans postponed or outright canceled. This has hit esports especially hard, with the need for players to be next to each other an obvious necessity. Last month the Evolution Championship Series, better known as “EVO”, announced that it too would join the list of events claimed by the pandemic.
However, late last night, hope was renewed. That’s when EVO announced its first-ever online event, aptly named EVO Online.
Taking the fight online
The event will take place over five weekends in July and feature special exhibitions and content from EVO’s original lineup. Namely, these include Dragon Ball FighterZ, Granblue Fantasy Versus, Samurai Shodown, Soulcalibur VI, Street Fighter V: Champion Edition, Tekken 7, and Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[cl-r].
There’s no word yet on what these exhibitions might entail. It is also important to know they provided no updates on the Tournament of Champions for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that was originally scheduled for this year.
Rollback finally gets its time in the sun
When EVO first announced an online event of some kind last month, many quickly pointed out that EVO’s original lineup featured games with notoriously unreliable and poorly implemented netcode. It seems that EVO was also aware of this. It has now also announced four open registration online tournaments for Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat 11: Aftermath, Skullgirls 2nd Encore, and the just-released Them’s Fightin’ Herds.
All of these games have been championed by their communities, and the Fighting Game Community at large, for their exceptional rollback netcode. It feels like validation that they were all chosen for this event. Noticeably absent, however, is Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, another game with exceptional, almost flawless netcode.
Hopefully, this will make developers realize the importance of putting good rollback netcode into all fighting games in the future.
EVO Online will take place July 4-5, July 11-12, July 18-19, July 25-26, and July 31-August 2. Sign-ups and additional information will come at a later date. You can check out the official site for more info.
