European Switch player here. It's the first time I get to experience a so-called "ghost town" in a video game I play. That phenomena where you're one of the four people in the world playing that game at that moment. What I didn't expect is that it would happen with a game that is barely a week old : Blazblue Cross Tag Battle.
The game is pretty fun to play, I beat most of the solo content and figured I might as well try some ranked battle online. No chance here : nobody (literally nobody, as in 0 players) is in one of the ranked lobbies. Let's go for a casual match then : out of the five lobbies available (for a maximum of 64 players each), only one had people playing, and they were only 18. 18 players in the entire Europe were playing the game on Switch. I found it astonishing, so I asked a friend who played the game on PS4 for his report on the situation : it was barely better on PS4.
The solo content of the game is mediocre : a grindy story mode that you can beat in 2h30 (3h30 for the 100%), a textbook survival mode and that's pretty much it. Reminescent of Street Fighter V at launch. But the catch here is that despite the netcode being as good as it could be, almost nobody is playing the game. And the Switch version is pretty good, there's no bad work done here. As I said, the game itself is pretty good to play, and very accessible. The issue is that the game doesn't let you play with people outside of Europe: servers aren't worldwide. Crossplay could have helped here, but as always Sony is making that impossible.
Steam charts shows that as of 30 minutes ago, 445 people (in the WORLD, so EU+US+JP combined) were playing the game. I assume that the servers are worldwide here, so you'll probably find people for now. I didn't pay for the game so I don't feel ripped off, and I can always play occasionally with a friend, but I felt like I should warn people in my situation against what could be their worst purchase in a while.
EDIT : Okay so you actually can change the region of the servers (to either EU, Japan or NA), the option is hidden so I didn't see it at first but you need to press X (or the top button of whatever you're using) after being connected and before joining a lobby.
The game is pretty fun to play, I beat most of the solo content and figured I might as well try some ranked battle online. No chance here : nobody (literally nobody, as in 0 players) is in one of the ranked lobbies. Let's go for a casual match then : out of the five lobbies available (for a maximum of 64 players each), only one had people playing, and they were only 18. 18 players in the entire Europe were playing the game on Switch. I found it astonishing, so I asked a friend who played the game on PS4 for his report on the situation : it was barely better on PS4.
The solo content of the game is mediocre : a grindy story mode that you can beat in 2h30 (3h30 for the 100%), a textbook survival mode and that's pretty much it. Reminescent of Street Fighter V at launch. But the catch here is that despite the netcode being as good as it could be, almost nobody is playing the game. And the Switch version is pretty good, there's no bad work done here. As I said, the game itself is pretty good to play, and very accessible. The issue is that the game doesn't let you play with people outside of Europe: servers aren't worldwide. Crossplay could have helped here, but as always Sony is making that impossible.
Steam charts shows that as of 30 minutes ago, 445 people (in the WORLD, so EU+US+JP combined) were playing the game. I assume that the servers are worldwide here, so you'll probably find people for now. I didn't pay for the game so I don't feel ripped off, and I can always play occasionally with a friend, but I felt like I should warn people in my situation against what could be their worst purchase in a while.
EDIT : Okay so you actually can change the region of the servers (to either EU, Japan or NA), the option is hidden so I didn't see it at first but you need to press X (or the top button of whatever you're using) after being connected and before joining a lobby.
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