Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 was released in late 2016, quickly succeeding its predecessor and garnering a large player base as a result. Its fast-paced and strategic combat, as well as its many gameplay customization options, have kept its audience invested in the title to this day. The reviews may be so-so, but the fact of the matter is that Xenoverse 2 is a very successful product that continues to be supported. Oddly enough, however, this 3D fighting game has never been popular on the more competitive side of the gaming industry, despite its ranked mode and plenty of complexity within its many mechanics. Its casual scene is bustling, but Xenoverse 2’s myriad of intricacies never spawned any serious tournaments or competitions in the game’s community, much less beyond that group. That sheds light on many elements of gaming’s competitive sphere as a whole, whether that be real sports or esports. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 makes one thing clear through its lack of professional players and notable events: competitive gaming stretches far beyond gameplay.

What Makes a Game Competitive at the Highest Level?

At its most fundamental level, a competitive game is simply a game in which players compete against other players, but there is a reason that chess is considered a sport but Monopoly isn’t. Many games are competitive, but there are few that are actually considered a sport of some kind and played at the highest level (leagues, tournaments, etc.). When it comes to gameplay, the reason for that lies in a couple concepts: skill ceilings, practicing potency, and controlled variety. Seeing how Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 interacts with these concepts is step one to understanding its plight as a purely casual game.

Skill Ceilings

A skill ceiling is the level of skill required to maximize the tools a player has in a specific game, and this concept is something that any esport’s or actual sport’s creator considered in the earliest stages of their creation. A low skill ceiling would mean not much proficiency is required to play optimally, while a high skill ceiling would naturally mean the opposite. A sport of any kind tends to have a high skill ceiling, with many different parts of them needing to be understood and mastered for players to become really good at playing them. At its core, that is the main factor that makes any game played professionally capable of drawing in viewers to earn revenue; people have historically wanted to watch the best of the best play against each other (that’s a lot of the appeal of the Olympics, NBA, NFL, World Cup, etc.). Having an ocean of difference in the skill of the best in the world and the average player just makes proficiency more apparent, which thus makes it more noticeable and more impressive when an audience watches the play of the former.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 actually has an extremely high skill ceiling. With its many different moves and character movesets, players have to understand a lot about each character to play them effectively. Things like Ki Stunning, Burst Dash, Step-Vanishing, and more give the game a lightning-fast pace that demands quick reaction time, not to mention how complex all of those things are individually. There is a lot that separates an alright Xenoverse 2 player from the #1-ranked player in their region or the world, which does a lot for the title. Theoretically, that should put the game in a great place to spawn some sort of competitive or esports community, but many more elements prevent that from happening.

Practicing Potency

Practicing potency is just as it sounds; it’s the potency of a player using the practicing features a game possesses to improve their performance. While a skill ceiling is more important for the audience when it comes to competitive gaming because of its link to potential revenue, practicing potency is exclusively valuable to players who are on the other side of the competitive equation. The proficiency of professional players is vital to a game succeeding competitively for two big reasons. As previously stated, the audience wants to see the best compete against each other; that is the foundation of most sports leagues’ entertainment factors. In addition to that, players themselves enjoy being challenged and pushed by their opponents, meaning that generally, high proficiency leads to better player retention. Because of those two truths, players need a way to become proficient, which is where practice comes in. A title with low-potency practice options (such as Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links simplistic tutorials) makes it infinitely harder for the average player to prepare themselves for a game’s more competitive scene, as having a lack of features to help them get better naturally makes it harder to get better. Contrarily, high-potency practice options (such as playing out scenarios in chess) make it much easier for players to pick apart their mistakes, experiment, and improve their overall performance. The less practicing potency a game has, the harder it is to get into it competitively, which consequently lowers the number of professional players that game will generate over time.

No sport or esport can survive without its competitive community, and practicing potency is the key to building up the players in that community, so the absence of it can seriously harm a title hoping to become a sport. This, unfortunately, is the start of Xenoverse 2’s plight. Its dedicated practice mode does allow for combo experimentation and the learning of attack strings quite well, but for a 3D fighting game, just those two things don’t give the player anywhere near all the information they’d want. Frame data, which is arguably the most important thing for a player to know in a fighting game, is completely absent from training mode, meaning that players have to personally analyze the footage of a move to get that information. Even the strongest level of AI couldn’t challenge the average online player, and more specific gameplay scenarios are nigh impossible to simulate. It cannot be understated how much harder that makes it for players to get better, with their most potent form of practice being in real Player vs. Player battles, which are far too fast-paced to be learned from much in the moment. Players of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 would have to go out of their way to learn all they’d need to know from online matches because of its lackluster practice mode, and the truth is that most of them will never want to put forth that much effort. Having descriptive in-game methods to help one improve makes transitioning from casual to competitive play very fun and natural, but Xenoverse 2 shows the polar opposite of that. Terrible practice potency ruins that enjoyable transition of play, making it less likely to happen in the first place and thus making the building of a sizable competitive community a pipe dream for the title.

Controlled Variety

Finally, controlled variety refers to the array of possible gameplay situations a game can generate that are controlled mostly or entirely by player input. As opposed to sheer randomness, controlled variety gives the player lots of agency in Player vs. Player modes and games, and the concept usually takes the form of character customization or some form of strategic tactics. This is good for both the audience and the players, as both get to enjoy a fair test of skill, with players specifically still being able to express themselves and think critically with their freedom of play. The same thing not happening over and over again also increases a game’s overall entertainment factor, improving general appeal and thus drawing in more potential competitive players. In sum, controlled variety is very valuable, and Xenoverse 2 just so happens to specialize in using the concept. Its in-depth character customization gives players plenty of room to play with interesting strategies and combinations, experimenting with the possibilities and creating variety in the gameplay as a result. Because of that, no match of Xenoverse 2 feels the same for players or viewers; there’s always something new going on because of the vast customization options the game possesses. This is the title’s biggest boon by a mile and is one of the main reasons the Player vs. Player modes are played.

A beautifully high skill ceiling and superbly implemented controlled variety marred by bad practicing potency—that is the state of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 in relation to key competitive gaming concepts. At a glance, it seems like these traits would make for an alright competitive game, featuring great gameplay for tournament play but being rather hard to get into because of poor practice options. This is actually just about the same situation Fortnite was in when its competitive scene started to develop, but that community thrived, while Xenoverse 2’s competitive community is non-existent. What’s the differentiator? It actually has nothing to do with the gameplay of either title themselves; the thing that separates Xenoverse 2 from something like Fortnite competitively lies far past a controller.

Online Play

In most esports games, some sort of online Player vs. Player mode exists that allows players to compete against one another both competitively and casually. This tool is vital for professional players of those games to test out things they’ve been experimenting with in real time, and very few notable competitive games lack the feature. Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 is no anomaly in that regard, as it contains online play in both a casual and ranked mode. This should be a great tool for players to practice and develop skills in real fights, but there is something preventing that from happening effectively. Lag, which is when a game momentarily has slow response time because of poor internet connection or other problems, is an issue every online game faces, but the lag in Xenoverse 2 is particularly bad. Attacks that visually don’t make contact often land, opponents are liable to fall out of combos, and severe delay sometimes causes players to seemingly teleport around the screen. These events happening at all hurt the accessibility of the title’s competitive scene, so their occurring rather frequently in Xenoverse 2’s online play is nearly a death sentence for its competitive potential. Its lag also makes it almost impossible to host online tournaments, which are usually smaller events that serve as the introduction to competitive play for most players. The small cash prizes they tend to offer, along with a game’s general quality, serve as great incentives for a casual player to try their hand at some professional play in their favorite game, but these contests are predicated on fairness. Lag hinders how fair play can be, and as such, nobody is willing to run a Xenoverse 2 tournament and give up their own funds to see low-quality, laggy entertainment. No notable patch has been released to notably improve the online lag problem, so the game’s online landscape has remained fun but ultimately hard to properly experience for years. It’s a shame, but this issue single-handedly dries up much of the possible pool of competitive players and watchers, heavily contributing to Xenoverse 2’s lack of presence in competitive gaming.

Balance and Competitive Health

The last big issue holding Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 from being a successful competitive game is its balance and competitive health. These two concepts exist in any type of competitive game, and they serve as parts of the foundation for a great viewing and playing experience. Without at least one of these two things, making a game into some sort of sport is nigh impossible, and Xenoverse 2 is a perfect example of why.

Balance

Balance (in the context of gaming) refers to the strength of a particular aspect of a game in relation to other mechanics. Many competitive titles have some balance issues, both in esports and real sports, but when a league or the developers are constantly trying to fix them, those problems don’t kill a game’s competitive scene. That said, the goal of those various changes isn’t just to keep a competitive landscape alive; it’s actually just to get a game to a well-balanced state. Games are considered well-balanced when most aspects of them are powerful or useful in certain scenarios and nothing directly overshadows anything else, while poorly-balanced games are the opposite of that. The former is exemplified in something like Rocket League, where almost nothing but a player’s proficiency determines their success, and nothing is overturned as every mechanic is universal. The latter, unfortunately, is personified by Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. The characters in the title vary wildly in power, ranging from extremely weak to ridiculously powerful. Some members of the cast have the strongest type of attacks (Ultimate Attacks) reskinned into easier-to-access moves (Super Attacks), while others have those same attacks but have much more difficulty using them for various reasons. Stat distribution among characters renders some objectively worse than others, and these issues combine to make a game plagued with overcentralization. In gaming, overcentralization typically refers to when certain items, moves, or characters are so powerful compared to others that the players are at an inherent disadvantage by not using them. For the most part, Xenoverse 2’s ranked game modes are filled with players of the characters Hit, Ultra Instinct Goku, Jiren, Created Characters, etc. The sheer size of the cast allows for the controlled variety mentioned previously to exist, but if a player wants to succeed at the highest level, they’d likely have to opt for those options over some of the members of the cast they enjoy playing most. This is a serious detriment to the entertainment factor of Xenoverse 2 and yet another reason it doesn’t have a competitive scene.

Competitive Health

There are certain things that any game’s player base considers “not good for competitive,” and they are referring to competitive health when they say that. Competitive health essentially refers to a given competition’s ratio of important controlled variables to uncontrolled variables. Controlled variables are things that players can control in a competition, such as gameplans in a basketball game, while uncontrolled variables are things in a competition that players can’t control, namely luck-based things like drawing in Uno. Titles with good competitive health tend to have a low amount of uncontrolled variables, such as chess, while games with poor competitive health have a high amount, such as Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2. Lag, for one, technically falls into the category of an uncontrolled variable, so that already hurts the competitive health of Xenoverse 2. In addition to that, janky hit boxes (Super God Fist, Time Skip Back Breaker, etc.) and a camera that sometimes makes fighters invisible make playing around an opponent difficult, oftentimes for reasons that have nothing to do with that player’s superior skill and more to do with design flaws the average player wouldn’t ever consider in the middle of a match. Unvanishable combos are another detrimental uncontrolled variable, mainly because of how stage-dependent pulling one off is. Four notable uncontrolled variables for players to contend with may not sound like a lot, but annoying features like them cause potential competitive players to lose interest in playing Xenoverse professionally and are simply unpleasant for the general player base. These issues hurt every aspect of the title and double as the nail in the coffin that lays the competitive hopes of Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 to rest.

Core Gameplay is at the heart of every title, but if there’s one thing Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 exemplifies, it’s that it isn’t everything. The separation between a casual and competitive game stretches beyond gameplay, with things like balance, competitive health, and quality of online play being bigger determinants of a game’s potential than the foundation of that game’s entertainment factor. Those aforementioned things draw in players and viewers, allowing for tournaments and the like to exist, which is why many sports and esports focus on them. Xenoverse 2 has excellent gameplay, but its plight as a purely casual game highlights the fact that that alone will never be enough for a competitive community to emerge.