Street Fighter III: Third Strike OE final update due after Darkstalkers Resurrection

Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition is due for a title update, but developer Iron Galaxy has decided to delay it until after Darkstalkers Resurrection ships - and to abandon some issues altogether.

The patch is near complete, but won't be sent for certification just yet. In a new blog post, Iron Galaxy explained that because Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition shares a code base with Marvel vs Capcom Online and Darkstalkers Resurrection, working on any of the three games can benefit the others.

As the next patch for Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition is "almost certainly the last one", by delaying it, Iron Galaxy has a better chance of signing off on the game in its best possible state.

That said, the team has chosen to give up on a couple of issues, including speed problems.

"The summary is the Arcade version of 3S doesn’t really run at a reliable frame rate. It can fluctuate on a stage-to-stage and character-to-character basis that we’re not confident we can properly reproduce, given that this is a port and not straight CPS3 Emulation," the post explained.

"On top of that, if we did decide to hardcode some of these speed differences versus the Arcade cabinet, it would be extremely difficult to test as we’d need to look at every combination of character on every stage and make sure we didn’t make things worse for some of those combinations in our quest to alleviate the speed issue. Given that we’re measuring differences in fractions of frames in some instances, we’re not confident we can catch every little timing variation between the two games. Because of this we’ve elected to leave it as it’s been since launch."

The so-called "dropped EX" issue has been abandoned, too; Iron Galaxy has been unable to replicate it, but promises to do so if anyone can find a reliable method of triggering the bug.

Darkstalkers Resurrection is due early next year, so it shouldn't be too long of a wait for the new update.

Thanks, Shoryuken.