FNRD4: Five things you need to know (ESPN Article) - PRGUY85's Blog

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FNRD4: Five things you need to know (ESPN Article)

Posted on March 11, 2009 at 02:40 PM.

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Great article over at IGN interviewing Brian Hayes, FNRD4 producer:

http://sports.espn.go.com/videogames...ory?id=3968745

FNR4: Five things you need to know
By Jon Robinson

Imagine Buster Douglas never happened. No face tattoo. No jail. No ear biting. Just Mike being Mike, the baddest man on the planet.
That's the Mike Tyson in Fight Night Round 4. The ferocious fighter who stalks his opponents with intensity, focus and a knack for making a minute-long fight the most exciting sixty seconds in sports.
The blood and spit flying. The facial deformity with every uppercut.
That's the legend of the young champ. The legend that made him the most iconic heavyweight since Ali.

But seeing this image of Mike walk to the ring with his trademark towel, that's the image I remember seeing as a kid of the boxer who made the sweet science must-see TV.
It's the image I've missed for years. An image I almost feel like was stolen from me. But it's something the creators of EA Sports have captured with so much authenticity, I almost feel like Michael Spinks should fall down the second he turns on his 360.
Seeing that image also makes me realize that this isn't just Fight Night 3 �. This is Fight Night 4, and with it comes a more physical, more realistic replication of the sport than previous versions.
Forget seeing Burger King dancing around the ring, this year it's about Tyson and Ali and capturing their likenesses, from Ali's robe down to the last punch.
The dream fight boxing fans always debated can now finally be settled in video game form.
Ali or Tyson? A fight like this used to be decided by the quickest hands. I guess the answer now depends on who has the quickest thumbs.
ESPN recently got an exclusive sneak peek at Fight Night Round 4 and had the chance to pick the brain of the game's producer Brian Hayes. Here are five things you should know about the next champ before it hits stores for the PS3 and 360 June 30.

When it comes to gameplay changes being implemented in Round 4, the Fight Night producers concentrated on what they call the four S's: speed, strength, strategy and style.
And when it comes to what you need to know about Fight Night, producer Brian Hayes begins his presentation talking speed.
"Fight Night Round 3 is a tremendously fun game that people loved to play, so we didn't want to change our direction away from the fun," says Hayes. "What we tried to do was bring a little more variety, authenticity and strategy to the game. We want people to have as much fun as they did with Round 3, we just want Round 4 to be more of an authentic simulation of the sport.

And when you break it down, speed is tremendously important to the sport of boxing. The faster you can throw your punches, the faster you can move your feet, the faster you can move your head, the better off you're going to be. So one of our focuses for gameplay was to make sure we deliver on that sense of speed. These boxers we have in the game and the boxers people end up creating for themselves, these guys are supposed to be simulations of elite, championship-level athletes. We need to make sure they feel like the elite athletes you think of. You don't want to get into the ring and feel like you're controlling a guy like me in the ring, you want to be controlling a guy like Shane Mosley who has lightning-fast hands, lightning-fast reflexes, and can move around on his feet very well. Delivering that sense of speed, that sense of fluidity you see when you're watching a fight, we want you to have that same sensation when you're controlling our boxers in the ring.

"This also applies to our new corner game between rounds. In previous iterations, our between-round games were kind of tedious. They were interesting the first time you see them because you had a big close-up of a high-resolution face model, but they force you to sit there and rub a guy's face for 30 seconds with repetitive, simple controls. For the most part, we found that took away from what people really want to be doing, and that's punching each other in the face. So we put our focus into making a corner game that still had a lot of strategy for the user to do, and in Round 4, both users are actually doing it at the same time.

"We developed a system where based on your fighter's performance in the previous round, they earn a certain number of points that their trainer can then use towards either regenerating some of their health, regenerating some of their stamina or healing physical damage like cuts or swelling to the face. And all three of those things are very important to your performance in the next round.
"If you're tired, then you want to recover stamina because stamina helps keep you powerful and resist damage from your opponent's punches. If you're low on health, that means you're pretty close to falling down, so you want to get your health back so you can withstand a few more punches from your opponent without hitting the canvas. And obviously, if you have a huge knot over your eyebrow or a massive gash on your cheekbone and the ref is thinking of stopping the fight, you need to pay attention to that and make sure you can go out and keep working subsequent rounds so you can go and try to pick up the victory.
"There are a lot of strategic decisions to be made based on what's the status of your fighter, what round the fight is in and who your opponent is, but these are decisions you can make very, very quick and both users can make them at the same time on a menu-based interface that is really easy to navigate. You can get in and out of the corner game and back to the action very quickly.
"Obviously, if you want to stay there between rounds and watch scenes of your trainer motivating you and putting ice bags on your head and see the ring girls, all of that is there and it's lovingly recreated and looks amazing. But if you're like a lot of people who, like I said, just want to get back to punching each other in the face, you can jump right back into the game."

People play boxing games to watch the blood fly, the knees buckle and their opponents crumble to the mat. And with Fight Night's new physics engine, EA Sports boasts that it will change the way gamers throw and land punches, not to mention the reactions of the poor polygons on the receiving end.

"We have a new physics-based gameplay engine, and with that, we have a tremendous collision detection system," explains Hayes.

"These are two full-bodied athletes fighting in the ring and they're not clipping into each other as they fight. Arms aren't passing through each other, hands aren't disappearing into the other guy's torso. They just look much more corporeal. And with the physics-based animation system and gameplay engine, we're not relying on video-gamey mechanics to deliver punch strength. In Fight Night Round 3, to throw a harder punch, you wound back the stick more. In Fight Round 4, we're actually utilizing the physics engine to analyze the direction, the force and the level of contact for each punch, and we're using that to determine the impact the punch is going to have.

"So it's no longer about how far you wind up the stick. Now it's about how it hits the target. It's about how cleanly it lands and what current level of stamina you have and all of that stuff. So you'll see a much more varied number of interactions because of the collision detection and because of the physics system, because punches are not always going to land clean. Some will slide off of the side of the head or skate over the top of the head and not have a lot of affect, but when they land clean, that's when you'll see the big impacts. It's much more realistic if you're used to watching real fights. You see forearms bouncing into shoulders and punches just missing off the side of the head as opposed to it always being either a punch that hits or a punch that misses. So the variety of punch impacts that you see in Fight Night Round 4 is much more realistic and it's a much more varied experience. It looks like a much more fluid fight playing out before your eyes.

"And we talked about the strength of the punch heading toward the target, but there's also the target itself. The big change there is that opposed to the head and body just being a simple two-sided punching bag where if you hit it, it means ten points of damage, we're now recreating more physiologically-accurate hot spots on both the head and body. So if you take the point of the chin -- which is a very bad spot to get hit because it slightly dislocates your jaw, then your jaw snaps back into place and it shakes your brain -- we're able to place a hot spot on the chin or on your temples, whereas places like the flat of your forehead might not be a great place to get hit, but at the end of the day if you have a choice to get hit on your forehead or your chin, the forehead is better. Again, this adds to the varied collision detection system because your head has hot spots and weak spots that withstand damage differently.

"Same thing goes for the body. Boxers throw thousands of punches a day, so their abdominals are usually well-conditioned and trained to take those impacts. But there are certain areas like the ribs or shots to the liver that can be very, very painful no matter how many sit-ups you've done. So we were able to add those spots in there to add to a wider variety of punch impacts and the results of these punch impacts when you're playing the game.

"Not every punch is going to mean the same thing when it lands. It depends where it lands and how it lands."

In past boxing games, the height and reach of fighters never really came into play like it does in real life. How else can you explain Little Mac knocking out Tyson in Punch Out? But in Fight Night Round 4, the height and reach of fighters was one of the main things the producers worked on getting right, and it opened up a whole new level of gameplay strategy.

"If there is a boxer who is 6-5 with an 80-inch reach, then in our game he's going to look like he's 6-5 with an 80-inch reach. And if he's fighting a guy who is 5-11 with a shorter reach, that's going to come into play," says Hayes. "The guy who is shorter with small arms needs to get inside his opponent's punch range in order to land punches at all. But once he gets inside, he probably is going to have the advantage because having long arms and a big body makes you an easy target to hit and it's hard to get your punches off if you're a big guy in a tight space. So this inside-outside space tug-of-war, which has always been around since short people and tall people have been fighting is something we have in the game and it's something that didn't exist in Fight Night Round 3 to any significant degree.
"And since we have the inside fighting, there's also the outside fighting now. In Fight Night Round 3, you could really only fight from one distance, that's all there was. So actually having a fighter who has strengths and weaknesses depending on his physical proportions really adds variety in terms of the experiences you have based on the fighter you pick. You're looking at a situation where people decide what kind of fighter they want to be, then going out and practicing, getting good at that particular style. There are going to be people who want to be Mike Tyson and they'll want to get good at moving their head to get inside and throw those powerful hooks and uppercuts. There are going to be people who want to be Muhammad Ali and stick and move and stay on the outside and pop the jab and drop the big right hand on the guy. This level of strategy has never really existed beforehand in Fight Night.

"Besides that, there are just a lot of things that you can do in Fight Night Round 4 that you couldn't in Round 3. There are also some things you could do in Round 3 that you can't do in Round 4. One of the most noticeable ones is slapping a guy's hand out of the air and freezing him for three seconds. While parrying is an authentic element in boxing, one of the things that was missing in Round 3 is that you never really had to time it. If I was just holding my hand up by the side of my head, as long as you threw a punch there, I was going to slap it. But in real life, parrying punches takes really good timing. You need to see it coming and you need to actually knock it out of the air. It requires timing, it requires reflexes, it requires reading your opponent. So that's a much different experience from Fight Night Round 3 to Fight Night Round 4. Timing your blocks, timing your head movement is something that has changed dramatically.

"If you played Fight Night Round 3, you know that if you ducked in front of your opponent and he threw a punch to your head, you knew that it always just sailed over your head. Ducking straight forward prevented you from being hit in the head by all head punches. In Round 4, punches retarget the way you would expect them to in real life. If I'm ducking in front of you, it's not hard for you to see where my head is and you can still hit my head, but if I'm timing my head movements and dodge out of the way of one of your punches, that's going to create an opportunity for me because I made you miss a punch you were expecting to land. I make you miss and then I make you pay."

The visual style of Fight Night Round 3 was one of the game's biggest strengths, but the Round 4 team is taking style even more seriously, from the way the blood flies during a knockout, to the actual styles of the fighters themselves.

"In terms of boxer style, we have no control over how the users control the boxers, but we can control the way the CPU boxers act. Using the different body types, the tall boxers, the shorter boxers, we created a set of boxer styles the CPU can use against the user," explains Hayes. "We really focused on delivering a wider variety of CPU strategies to employ against the user.

"In Fight Night Round 3, again, since you could only fight from one distance and since the game was focused on you standing in front of one another and slapping each other's punches out of the air, the CPU really seemed the same for the most part. There were guys who were really aggressive and guys who were less aggressive, but that was pretty much it. In Fight Night Round 4, we were able to focus on guys who want to stay on the outside and keep moving and move their feet because this is a game where you can step to the side and create angles and create counter-punching opportunities. We're able to really use guys who move their heads to make you miss and counter-punch you. And then there are guys like George Foreman, who have strong blocks. Foreman wasn't the fleetest of foot or the most nimble moving his head but he had a rock-solid guard and devastating punching power

"So being able to recreate all of those styles of fighters, that wide variety of approaches to boxing and delivering that across all of the weight classes, all the different body types, we were able to deliver much more variety of boxer styles for the CPU.
"And with the way people still talk about how great Fight Night Round 3 looks, we knew we had to blow people out of the water with our visual presentation of Round 4. We want to knock people's socks off when they see this game. And as far as anything I've ever seen, it's the most realistic player models I've see anywhere. The level of realism is astounding. And what factors in to that is the texture of their bodies, the geometry of their bodies and all the stuff that makes the models look good. But in addition to that, ever boxer, every body is created with a muscle map so you actually see the muscles flex and strain when a guy is throwing a left hook or ducking out of the way of a punch. You actually see the flesh wiggle and distort when a guy takes a big punch to the body.

"Again, it's not that they just look good in a screenshot, it's not that they make a pretty picture, it's that when they're moving, when they're boxing, they look much more alive, much more realistic than anything I've seen. It looks like two human beings really fighting. I'm still astounded every day just how realistic these boxer models look.

"Then there's the stuff that's just around the boxers -- the sweat spray, the blood spray, the spit spray -- all that stuff is using the physics system to be much more visually dynamic. In Round 3 and a lot of other games, the sweat spray is a very canned effect. It's a basic starburst pattern that looks the same every time. In Round 4, because we have this physics gameplay engine, we're using the engine to drive what the sweat and the spit and the blood flying off a boxer's face looks like.

"So when a guy gets punched in the face with a left hook, there's actually an initial move to one direction, then it snaps back to the other in a whiplash. So you notice in gameplay when a guy gets punched in the head, now it's driven by physics and it looks much, much more realistic and it looks different every single time. It might sound corny, how no two snowflakes are ever the same, but in Fight Night Round 4, no two sweat sprays are the same. It's at that level. And when you add those physics driven physical effects as the results of punches to the muscle flexing and muscle jiggling, no two punches look the same. And that's our focus when it comes to visual style. You figure the punches are going to land in so many different variety of ways, the muscles flex and deform to those punches, and then you add in the blood spray, and you see what we've been working to achieve. When I say no two punches are going to look the same, that's just a microcosm to what we're really pushing for, and that's no two fights ever being the same.
"And it's because of this style, because of the level of authenticity that so many boxers want to be added to the game. In fact, Tommy Morrison got into the game this year because someone from the hardcore Fight Night community sent us a message via our YouTube channel that said he knew Morrison and wanted to see if we could add him in Round 4. This guy sent us some contact information and we managed to put a deal together.

"Of course, after that it was just a glut of all kinds of messages from people who said they knew so and so who was 4-6 and one time fought on ESPN. So we really had to start managing that stuff. But it was really cool, because if we hadn't reached out to our fans early via this YouTube channel, that guy never would've contacted us and we never would've had Morrison in the game."

Fight Night Round 4's single player Legacy mode goes beyond belts. It's about cementing your place in history. Do you have what it takes to not only win the title, but beat the best-of-the-best, make the Hall of Fame, and maybe even be named greatest of all time?

Hayes breaks down Legacy mode: "Fight Night Round 3's career mode definitely took a step back from Round 2, and the reasons for that I'm sure are complex, but that was one of our focuses for Round 4, to make sure we deliver a deep, immersive single-player experience that people would and should expect from your elite sports title.

"The premise is all about lacing them up and defining your legacy in whatever division you decide. And when I say legacy, I'm talking about everything from you never really made it to be anything bigger than a bum to being considered a club fighter, and then there's becoming a champion, becoming a hall of famer, becoming a legend of the ring, and becoming the greatest of all time. And the stuff that factors in to how you're perceived are numerous. There's your record, your quality of opposition, and then things like your popularity and your pound-for-pound status.

"Take a guy like Arturo Gatti, who is tremendously popular although not necessarily the most technically proficient or most physically gifted. The thing that got him where he was in terms of popularity was his heart, grit and will. The battles he had and the come-from-behind knockouts he had, those are also the kinds of things that will affect your popularity in Legacy mode. Then you take a guy like Roy Jones Jr. who was considered a pound-for-pound great for a long time, and things that factored into that were his technical proficiency and how accurate he was with his punches and how he made his opponents miss.

"So there are different ways we analyze your performance in Legacy mode. Obviously the game analyzes your won/loss record, but then we look at what kinds of fights you are having and how much your fights excite the fans to determine how popular you are and we look at your technical performances to give you your pound-for-pound rank. Where you rank on all of those things, we determine where your standing is in terms of legacy.
"Then what you run into down the road as your fighter gets older, you might be at a level where you're considered a hall of famer on the legacy meter, but if you win a few more fights, you might be considered a legend of the ring or greatest of all time. But if you lose a few more fights, that might tarnish your legacy and you'll drop down to just being considered a former champion. So you have to weigh those decisions and decide whether you want to quit while you're ahead or do you want to risk everything you've been fighting for against some young hot shots to try and become the greatest of all time.

"We want this to be a real challenge. The first time you play, you might only make it to be a hall of famer and then you'll see where you fell short. Then you can go in and try to start a new legacy, maybe even change weight divisions, and eliminate the mistakes you made the first time around to become greatest of all time.
"Our goal is to make Legacy mode more authentic, more immersive, and more interesting while at the same time adding some additional replay value because trying to be the greatest of all time is a challenge every fighter should aspire to work towards.
"Who wouldn't want to be greatest of all time?"

Look for Fight Night Round 4 to hit stores June 30 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3