New Fight Night Round 4 Questions and Answers

[CountryBoy]

Fight Night Round 4 Q&A



Even though the popularity of the sport of boxing has had its highs and lows during the last 30 years, there has been a constant urge to replicate it in video-game form.

We begin with Atari. Boxing for the 2600 was not really like boxing at all. The top-down abomination (it’s funny that every match was “white guy vs. black guy) was a waste of time. But it was clear from the beginning that developers wanted to make sanctioned brawlers, and gamers wanted to relive Duran vs. Leonard on their crappy TV sets.

The Rocky movie series was peaking around the time that game consoles were getting big, so the push for a respectable boxing game was on once again. Coleco did one better by making a decent boxing game and nabbing Rocky licensing rights for its ColecoVision classic.

Rocky for ColecoVision was the buzz of boxing games in the early ’80s, but the arcade-game makers weren’t going down without a fight. Nintendo released the dual-screened Punch-Out in ’84, and the video-game boxing world was changed forever. Soon after, Namco put out the solid Ring King with the help of Data East, but it was merely a shadowboxer when Nintendo’s mind-blowing Punch-Out! shared the same arcade floor plan.

Boxer Styles Trailer

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Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! for the NES was big enough to carry the video-game boxing world into the 1990s. And then EA came along and made the decision to feature myriad boxing greats, instead of merely featuring a cover boy. Knockout Kings pounded its way onto the PlayStation in the late ’90s, and EA has been pulverizing its competition ever since.

The series name has changed from Knockout Kings to Fight Night, but that hasn’t altered the Electronic Arts’ passion to make its competition eat canvas. This is especially true with the up-and-coming Fight Night Round 4, since it’s the first time that EA Canada gets a crack at video boxing.

We had a chance to chat with key members of the fresh Fight Night Round 4 development team about how they are evolving the series. Brian Hayes (gameplay producer), Jeff Atienza (line producer) and Mike Mahar (legacy mode producer) played rope-a-dope with a few of our inquiries, but they were good sports overall—even when dealing with questions surrounding the enigma of the boxing world: Mike Tyson.

Here’s what the team had to say:


TeamXbox: Character style isn’t as big of a deal in team sports like FIFA or Madden, but it’s huge in one-on-one affairs such as boxing. To what degree did a boxer’s signature “style” come into play while building each character from scratch?

Fight Night Round 4 team: Style is a big component of Fight Night Round 4. We started by defining seven boxing style archetypes or strategic approaches to boxing. We’ve defined these as an inside fighter, a brawler, a slugger, a counter puncher, a boxer puncher and both conventional and unconventional fighters. Then we found boxers in real life that basically typified each of these archetypes, and the team matched everything up. We also combined some of these traits for those boxers that fight like one or more of these archetypes. Once the archetype was established, we went ahead and fine tuned each boxer for additional realism—for instance, how strong a fighter is in later rounds or how good they are at fighting after being knocked down.


TeamXbox: How did you determine the overall archetype and composition of each featured boxer?

Fight Night Round 4 team: This was achieved through file footage of the boxers in action and by looking at each fighter’s physical attributes.

[CountryBoy]

TeamXbox: Physics-based gaming has the potential to be more much more lifelike, since it’s obviously based off of the same Newtonian principles as our reality. But there have to be pitfalls to a wholly physics-based system in a boxing game. Can you comment on the more notable , physics-based hurdles during Round 4’s development?

Fight Night Round 4 team: Because we’re using physics in Round 4, and we’re monitoring the collision between the glove and the head or the glove and the body, the glove actually has to touch the body part. We’re not going to name any names [whether it be one of our games or some other boxing franchise], but as crazy as this may sound, actual contact, very often, didn’t have to happen at all in some previous games. So, in order to hurt a guy, your glove didn’t actually have to touch your opponent; there was a collision volume somewhere…and they collided “behind the scenes.” Ergo, the guy got hurt. Along those lines, there’s just more to deal with from a development standpoint; this punch was glancing, this punch was partially deflected, this punch landed cleanly and so forth.


TeamXbox: You mentioned earlier about “not naming any names,” so we might as well. TXB gave Don King Presents; Prizefighter a 5.9 out of 10. Assuming that you played it for research purposes, what would you score it in comparison to Round 4?

Fight Night Round 4 team: [everyone chuckles] This is our PR response: We’re not in the business of scoring other games. If you take the athlete approach to it, we’re not going to “talk trash” at the press conference…we’ll just let our fists do the talking in the ring. We did play [Prizefighter] though, and they did a lot of things really well.

How not to avoid brain damage.

TeamXbox: The classic lineup in Round 4 is impressive. Was there a classic fighter that you really wanted for the game, but, for whatever reason, it didn’t work out?

Fight Night Round 4 team: Yeah, there are a couple boxers. Holyfield, Mayweather, De La Hoya…and, of course, some of the old guys from Round 3, such as Marciano and Dempsey. The Photo Game face feature makes it pretty easy to create anyone though, as long as you have a high quality image for scanning.


TeamXbox: It seems as though ego would play a part in who ends up in the game. Like, one boxer refusing if he was ranked lower than one of his rivals…

Fight Night Round 4 team: Yes. It’s not always up to us who ends up being in our game. Sometimes the guys just aren’t interested. Or there’s a big push for guys wanting to be on the cover. Or their demands are generally unreasonable. It really relates well to why some match-ups never happen in real boxing.

A story related to this occurred in Las Vegas when we were talking with boxers about being in the game. We told one heavyweight contender—again, not naming any names—that we could probably hook it up and get him in. He e-mailed us back and said that he didn’t want to be in Fight Night, but wanted his own game with his name on it. [team laughs] I can only think of one athlete that has his name on an EA game, and that’s Tiger Woods. And there’s no “Tiger Woods” of boxing at this time.


TeamXbox: Given Fight Night’s track record, it’s pretty much a guarantee that the game is going to sell well. But let’s say it was a “hard sell.” What’s the one feature of Round 4 that would be its absolute hallmark?

Fight Night Round 4 team: That’s a pretty easy one. It’s the new physics system and what that brings to gameplay. And you’re right—if you put Fight Night Round 3 in a box and called it Fight Night Round 4, it would probably sell on prestige alone. But what we wanted to do is figure out how to raise the bar, and that demanded a physics-based system. The speed, the responsiveness and, simply, having it feel like a “real” boxing game is something we can really hang our hat on. The physics provide a realism that other fighting games—whether simulation or arcade—will have to go at bat against when trying to achieve that organic feel of two fighters tussling in the ring.

[CountryBoy]

TeamXbox: So where exactly do you feel that the bar needs raised in order to make the Fight Night franchise stand out?

Fight Night Round 4 team: Fight Night Round 3 had many strong points, but what it didn’t allow you to do really well is box…to use boxing fundamentals, that is. They [Round 3] had good head movement, but you couldn’t really use footwork, pump the jab, use angles and sidesteps, etc. Essentially, you can’t box effectively in Round 3 and be successful against a player that uses parries and haymakers. So, we felt that it was necessary to shift the balance to the boxing fundamentals.


TeamXbox: Okay…but what about those gamers who aren’t interested in using boxing fundamentals? You know, those guys that just want to exchange punches for two straight minutes?

Fight Night Round 4 team: We know there are those that want to relive Gatti versus Ward in every single fight they have. To a certain extent, there’s nothing we can do to prevent people from doing that. But what we wanted to make sure is that if I’m fighting somebody, and I’m a hardcore boxing fan, and my opponent is being Micky Ward—face first, brawler, throwing punches left-and-right—that I can effectively use footwork, pump the jab and win the fight strategically. As opposed to always getting sucked in to what an opponent is doing. Beating each other’s faces in has its place; we just wanted to make sure that the tools were in the toolbox to box effectively as well.

Reach vs. mobs. Advantage: Reachs.

TeamXbox: It’s always interesting to see how EA’s sims of March Madness or the Super Bowl play out. We’re curious who’s the pound-for-pound best boxer of all time according to Round 4? Like, is there a guy that all the testers use to dominate?

Fight Night Round 4 team: The obvious answer is that, because Tyson is in the game, he’s the favorite. That’s not because it’s imbalanced or because he’s easier to use. It’s just that people LOVE to use Tyson. We’ve seen it in demos with players that pick up the game for the first time. You can feel a grin come over their face when they choose Tyson. Like “Oh my god…I’m Mike Tyson!! I’m going to kill you!” [chuckles]

The highest rated boxer in the game is Sugar Ray Robinson, though. And that’s mainly because he’s universally accepted as the pound-for-pound best fighter in history. But keep in mind, style makes fights in Round 4, so pretty much anybody in the game can give Sugar Ray a good fight.


TeamXbox: Speakin’ of Tyson, do you think it was the death of his beloved trainer Custamatto or the conniving Robin Givens that fueled his downward spiral?

Fight Night Round 4 team: It was actually Barbara Walters’ interview [laughs]. But in terms of boxing, there was only one credible contender for Tyson during his heyday, and that was Holyfield. But Tyson didn’t fight Holyfield until he was used to just beating up on guys—boxers that just crumbled underneath Mike’s intimidation. The problem was, Holyfield was one of those guys that didn’t get intimidated by anything. And by the time the fight rolled around, Tyson had already developed bad habits.

[El Kabong]

Well I hope the game is half as good as it sounds...it can't get released fast enough!!!!