Guilty Gear Strive Open Beta First Impressions

Guilty Gear Strive’s been taking the fighting game world and drawing a lot of attention to it. With long-absent characters like Anji returning and I-No finally being confirmed for Strive, the game isn’t going radio-silent before launch at all. That being said, we’ve come here to talk about a rather important topic.

The second Guilty Gear Strive beta is upon us, and with it, a load of new features and experiences with the game. We’ll be discussing our first impressions with the upcoming fighter from Arc System Works, and seeing how its experience is compared to the Closed Beta last April.

Notable Changes From April

The biggest changes of this beta compared to the last come in a few forms. First off, the playable roster has been expanded significantly. All of the base game characters (minus Anji and I-No) are fully playable and present in this beta. Previously playable characters such as Sol and Ky have had their movesets expanded with additional supers, as well.

Two other huge additions come in the form of the offline Training Mode and Tutorial. The tutorial teaches brand-new players how to play the game, going from basic movement to tools such as Roman Cancels and Bursts. Training Mode is pretty self-explanatory; you pick your character, another to train against, and can freely practice combos, setups, and manipulate the dummy to act in various ways.

The beta also adds an offline versus mode, so you and a friend can play the game locally. That’s nice when you have someone unsure about getting this game because you can let them try it hands-on.

Online Lobbies

Okay, let’s get this out of the way: Online Lobbies are far, far more stable than the first time around. There aren’t any full days of being down or anything, either, thankfully. You can log into the online lobbies normally, after a small online mode tutorial. The online lobbies are separated into 10 floors per region. You can start at a random floor based upon your tutorial battle performance. The starting point I was given was the 7th Floor in the U.S. East tower, for instance.

The 10-floor lobby tower is this game’s ranked mode, from the looks of it. There are also separate Plazas, where unranked matches can occur. These Plazas can hold up to 32 players, and function like Dragon Ball FighterZ’s online lobbies, where you can meet with others, challenge players, and overall just hang out.

Server Troubles

As of the time of publication (Feb. 21st), the Guilty Gear Strive Open Beta has had a major outage on the 20th, where players were unable to log in for multiple hours. Arc System Works has since responded by extending the beta until February 23rd, as compensation, so players can play longer. You can view that tweet below.

Arc seems to be on top of server issues this time around, instead of just letting it sit for multiple days on end. Does their sudden attention to beta troubles mean they’ll be addressing bugs and balance changes quickly after the retail release? Only time will tell.

That’s Some Good Rollback

Let’s get to the real meat and potatoes of the online play; the netcode. How does it perform, and how good does it hold up? Absolutely phenomenally, that’s for sure. It’s like I’m playing two entirely different games in comparison to April of 2020. The Closed Beta had Arc System Works’ traditional delay-based netcode. It performed about as well as delay-based netcode could get, but was imperfect.

Now, the game displays your ping in units of milliseconds (shown above, such as 7ms ping), and displays rollback frame delay, as well (the highest frame delay I’ve gotten was 4. Every other match was 1 or 2 frames). The online play is such a massive step up, that I’d recommend this game to people who have never touched a Guilty Gear title, just for how good it is.

When I initially covered the game receiving rollback netcode, I was worried that ASW was going to not put any effort into it. Thankfully, I’ve been proven incorrect, and the game’s netplay is a very strong aspect of it. Hopefully, the online will be even better in terms of features when the full game launches this April.

About Some Of The Characters

Guilty Gear Strive’s Open Beta is home to thirteen fully playable characters, six of which are returning from the Closed Beta. The beta adds Leo Whitefang, Nagoriyuki, Millia, Zato-1, Giovanna, Axl Low, and Ramlethal with the previous six playable characters. Each of the newer characters has their own unique flair to their kits. Let’s talk about a few of them.

For starters, Nagoriyuki, one of the new characters, is super slow, but has far-reaching attacks, and moves to teleport him forward or away. He also has a mechanic called Blood Rage. When he uses special moves and certain normals, the gauge fills. When maxed out, he loses access to all of his specials and gains an immense damage increase. He also gains a unique super that reaches fullscreen, as compensation.

Ramlethal’s unique character gimmicks involve the two giant swords she carries. By inputting a quarter-circle forward and Slash or Heavy Slash, Ramlethal fires a sword projectile that changes based on where it hits onstage. When it hits a corner of the screen, it explodes, dealing additional damage. Ramlethal’s attack ranges also shorten with each sword she uses, meaning she’ll have to retrieve her swords to return to being a spacer.

Leo Whitefang is probably one of the most altered characters from a previous series entry. He loses most of his stance transitions, as they’re replaced with newer ones. His stand Slash and Heavy Slash buttons can be held to transition into guard animations. Leo also loses his grounded rekkas that can side-switch, but gains a command grab in his alternate stance. For what his rushdown used to be, it’s been repurposed into something more befitting of this game’s style.

Overall Thoughts

To be frank, if what the Guilty Gear Strive Open Beta offered is indicative of what the upcoming full release entails, it only serves to be quite an exciting title on release. With the combat feeling more fleshed-out, the additional characters being very fun to play, and the lobbies not breaking at the faintest instance of being near-capacity, Strive’s improved a LOT over the past ten months.

If I could want anything more from Guilty Gear Strive going into its upcoming release, I’d want the game to have private lobbies, like its precursor Guilty Gear Xrd did. Who knows, it might already be in development and we wouldn’t know at the moment. That being said, unless we get it on launch, I definitely hope that it comes later. Another thing that I’d hope is that, in the case of the PlayStation 5 release, I hope that PS4 controllers and arcade sticks will be natively compatible.

Guilty Gear Strive will be releasing April 9th, 2021, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam. You can view the game’s website here.

What did you think about the Guilty Gear Strive Open Beta? Did you like the game’s improvements over the original beta? Are you excited for the game’s upcoming April release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

If you liked this article and want to compare our coverage of the two betas, you can read our coverage on the closed beta here.