Operation Sports recently spoke with Mike DeVault from EA Sports Tiburon. Mike is a lead developer on Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles. During our conference call, Mike discussed some of the new elements that he worked on in this year's game.

Operation Sports: How long have you been working on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series?

Mike DeVault : I’ve been at EA for about eight years now. This is my first year on the Tiger project. I worked on the NASCAR series in the past.

OS: Tell me what it was like working with Tiger during the capturing of his Tournament Challenges in the studio.

MD: We spent the entire day with him in the studio. The primary objective was to get the videos recorded for the Tournament Challenge mode. There are 20 videos for different scenarios that were recorded, and it took the whole day. He played some of the game on PS3, Xbox 360 and the Wii. Tiger is a gamer. He helps out with the course layouts and points out if a certain tree is the right spot or if a bunker is in the right location. I think he detaches himself from the sport every once and a while. His demeanor changes when he starts playing the game. He gets in his game mode (laughs).

OS: Was there any new motion capturing for Tiger’s current swing? I know he works with Hank Haney and is constantly evolving his swing.

MD: No new motion capture for Tiger this year. The golfers and the courses have new textures that we focused on. By the time Tiger was ready to go, he was just getting back into the Bay Hill tournament, so we didn’t have too much of a chance to bring him in for motion capturing after his injury.

OS: Did you bring in any other golfers to motion capture swings?

MD: We have motion capture from a few characters. No new ones this year.

OS: Can you go into detail about the precision putting?

MD: On Xbox 360 and PS3, Precision Putting is an alternative method that can be changed back to classic. The meter is slightly different from the Wii version of the Precision Putting. Essentially, you use the aiming arrow and you select the distance to the spot on the green you want to aim at. It will place a recommendation line without the slope and the conditions of the green. It’s kind of like when you are on the putting green, and you try to feel out the conditions and slopes. So you pick the spot to aim to and attempt to analyze the greens yourself. You can turn the meters on and off, and on Tour Pro the putt preview is off, so it’s fun, and it can be nerve-racking (laughs).

OS: With Live Tournaments and live weather, have you considered implementing a Live 365 DNA feature similar to the one found in NBA Live 09?

MD: Yeah I think that any time an EA Sports feature is done, we definitely consider leveraging those features in our game. It’s something that could be done in the future now that we have live tourneys and live weather.

OS: Can you save in the middle of a round in an online tourney?

MD: Nope. It was discussed in design meetings. Essentially, we decided you have to finish the round or start the round over if you quit.

OS: I know some OS fans have felt that players online were shooting too low of scores. Will you be adjusting the difficulties for these online tournaments?

MD: The new Live Tournaments will be extremely tunable, so we can clamp all attributes for tourney golfers to any setting we want. We can make every participant’s putting attribute five for example or set up the green speeds. We can control things pretty heavily with the settings we have: difficulty, power, green speed, weather, etc. We will set it up so it will be challenging.

I think the thing that will be pretty cool is that people will be responding, so the developers can make adjustments on the fly. There is a feedback button during Live Tournaments, allowing for 180 characters in a message, and they will be sent directly to the dev. team. We will know exactly what adjustments to make for the tournaments.

OS: Any improvements in career mode? What features does it have and how long is it? How closely does it emulate a real golf season?

MD: We added a new practice round feature in career mode. The Wednesday or day before the tourney starts, you have the opportunity go to practice the course and tune your clubs. Also, in years past, the player was the last player to go out. This year features the realistic start times. You can start first and finish before some other golfers, and there is a clubhouse to watch the rest of the players still going.

We also retuned club distances with an adjustment of 20-25 yards off the clubs. We took about 20 yards off the driver. The clubs will be more realistic to what you see on Tour in real life. We also try to cater the season around historic courses such as the U.S. Open, and other courses played on Tour during the season.

OS: Will you be able to transfer a Photo Game Face profile from '08 or '09 into '10? Can you play with two Game Face profiles at a time in this year's version?

MD: No, we haven’t addressed that issue.

OS: Thanks a lot for your time.