lectronic Arts is taking to the Xbox 360 ring next spring, and we get everything you need to know about Fight Night Round 3 from EA Chicago General Manager, and Round 3 Executive Producer Kudo Tsunoda.  But Fight Night is heading to the PlayStation 3 as well, and Kudo talks PS3!   How different is the PS3 version?  How will it work with the boomerang controller?  Will the PS3 version look different than the Xbox 360 version?  What about Revolution?  Get it all right here in our exclusive interview.

Game Informer:  In Fight Night Round 3 you’re going to be looking at the fighters and how they’re reacting to the different punches to know how they’re doing in the ring in comparison to you.  How are you working with fighters’ eyes so they don’t look like they’re rolling back into their heads?

Kudo Tsunoda:  It’s funny.  I totally understand the phenomenon you’re talking about, although in boxing, having some rolling back in the head is a good thing since that often goes on in the ring.  But, as far as the straight boxer models, we do a bunch of different things.  First of all there’s our facial motion system with the expressiveness around the eyes, which isn’t just the eyes rolling back in the head as much as getting eyes that are more lifelike and conveying more emotion and looking alert and intelligence inside the model as opposed to just a blank dummy stare. 

A lot of that comes from the facial expressions and the emotions on the boxers’ faces, but we also have AI setup specifically just to handle the boxers’ eye movements just to keep them live and tracking things going on in the ring.  If you watch boxing, when you get the close-ups on their faces, they’re looking at those punches coming in, and you can see their eyes reacting to what’s going on in the ring.  It’s even a tell-tale sign, like, we use the eyes a lot as part of the HUD-less gameplay.  When you see the boxers eyes getting really wide, you know a big punch is coming – it’s the first tip off when you see the eyes tracking to where the punch is coming from. 

Also, when you’re getting hit with the big shot, the reaction of the eyes, and what the eyes do, it’s definitely a big thing in talking to all the boxers that they keep keyed in on how much damage their punch has done.  Especially with the HUD-less gameplay we’ve got a lot more stuff you need to read the characters’ eyes for. And I think in other sports games, like if it was a baseball game, do I really need to see the pitchers eyes to be reading the pitch? Or it’s pretty far away, and that’s not really how the sport works.  In boxing, for sure, looking at the guy’s face and seeing what his eyes are doing, and how reactive their eye movements are and what their reactions are are a big part of the sport. So we put a lot more artificial intelligence into controlling the eye movements, and what the eyes are doing to pay off certain gameplay events.

GI:  So hypothetically, if you’re pounding the crap out of somebody, and their eyes are fading and they’re not really following the punches you’re throwing, you’ll know you’re really laying down some damage.

Tsunoda:  Totally.  Saying earlier about the stuff with the eyes rolling back into the head, or characters that have motionless eyes, definitely that’s something we want to get away from with the characters for most of the gameplay.  But once you’re more punch drunk, that’s the way you’ll be able to key in on how hurt the guy is, because his eyes are no longer reactive, and he has a spacey dazed look about him, and his eyes aren’t as active or tracking punches coming in and it’s a good indicator of what the boxers health is.

GI:  How have you liked working with the Xbox 360 hardware?  The controller? Xbox Live functionality?

Tsunoda:  I think it’s been awesome.  As far as the whole 360 machine, we’re just getting great stuff done on that technology and we’ve had good support from Microsoft, and man, it’s just been really fun to play around with the new console.  You can see the level of quality we’re getting with our game.  It’s not stuff we didn’t want to do in previous versions – you just had no ability to do it.  I love getting the new technology and getting new ideas into the game.  Who doesn’t love that?  It’s been really fun.

GI:  Some of the 360 EA games that are out now have been criticized for dropping features from current-gen to next-gen, and a lot of that seems to be attributed to the fact that they’re launch games.  Do you think you’ll have enough time to keep the feature set that we are accustomed to in the current-gen Fight Nights, and bring that forward to next-gen?

Tsunoda:  All of last year’s features from current gen are in the next-gen game.  We didn’t cut anything going from Fight Night Round 2 up to Fight Night Round 3, either current-gen or next-gen.  To me, again, it’s not just bringing those features forward.  One thing I think EA Chicago focuses on as a whole, especially in the Fight Night series is really bringing a high level of innovative gameplay to the franchise with every iteration. 

I think Fight Night 2004 was such a huge leap from the previous Knockout Kings that had gone on.  I think it’s easy for a development team to look at something like that and go, “Oh well, we’re just going to tune what we got from here on out. We’ve made a big leap.”  Our team is really focused on bringing the same level of innovation that we brought from Knockout Kings to 2004.  We did that from Fight Night 2004 to Round 2 with all of the new punch controls, and the EA Sports Cut Man Mini-game, and really trying to bring that same amount of innovation forward to Fight Night Round 3. 

To us, it’s not just about having last years current-gen features in the game, which to me is just a no brainer. You need to have those but its also about bringing that same level of gameplay innovation that we’ve brought in every other iteration of the franchise, and in no way accepting that just because we’ve got next-gen technology obstacles to overcome, that that means anything to people playing the game as far as, “we’ve got to deliver huge gameplay innovation features every time we go out the door.”  I think that’s the kind of thing we owe to a consumer in every version of the franchise. 

With this year’s game, our new impact punches, it mixes up the dynamic of the fighting in the ring. It adds a huge element of gameplay that’s totally different.  We’ve got a kick ass first person mini-game that allows you to take the perspective of the defender and really key in on defense-offense mini-game within the ring.  Also, our create-a-style stuff is huge.  Not only with just the kind of animation styles you can choose, but the boxing styles really adding that kind of customization like punch style and blocking style and each one of those have definite pluses and minuses as far as how you fight inside the ring and really trying to get better with the license boxers and the characters you can build on your own different gameplay mechanics based on characters customized with their style and the way they fight.

GI:  You’re adding the ESPN license to Fight Night this year.  What’s it been like working with that license and how do you plan on incorporating it?

Tsunoda:  They’ve been really awesome to work with and we’ve had a great time with ESPN.  I think there are the two elements like what you’re adding to the game as far ESPN stuff. There’s the news ticker and the online environment, Joe Tessitore who’s the voice of Wednesday and Friday Night Fights on ESPN – getting that Friday Night Fights and Pay-Per-View treatment in as part of the fights where you work through your career, where you’re fighting in the low rank gyms and you start getting to work up into ESPN Wednesday Night Fights and ESPN Friday Night Fights and then the really big ones getting to ESPN pay-per-view.

Obviously, with our adding rivalries this year, one of the biggest ESPN features is our ESPN Classics mode, where you’re able to relive all the best fights from the past as well as after you go through your career mode and have rivalries of your own. For example, our best career rivalries become instant classics that you can also play in the ESPN classics mode.  I think that’s all really good in game stuff that the ESPN brand adds a lot of authenticity to our sport, and they’re big on boxing, and it gives it more of a realist boxing feel to the game, certainly.  But I think some of the best stuff with ESPN, is the access to the fight data that we can take and use in the game.  I think with the characters and the environments, and all these different pieces of the game, we’ve been so focused on getting the environments photo real and the characters are photo real, and really pushing for that photo real graphics quality.  But also working with ESPN what’s been really helpful, as far as our audio, we’ve been able to go to all of these ESPN fights all year and mic up the crowd, and we’ve got real authentic boxing crowds, not that typical cheesy crowd roar that you hear in most sports games. 

There’s definitely individuals and personality to the crowds and they’re very reactive to what’s going on in the ring.  Or we’ve been able to mic the commentator straight.  The quality wasn’t high enough for our game usage, but just in designing our audio and getting the raw access to what all of the commentators are saying in parts of the fights and just being able to use that data as well.  It’s been twofold really – all of the great stuff we’ve been able to implement in the game, just the working relationship with ESPN has enabled us to get a lot higher quality game assets in lots of areas.

GI:  One thing we saw in the last game was people taking too much advantage of the haymaker, and this year you’re bringing back the haymaker, but you’re introducing other impact punches.  Are you still focusing on using normal punches and jabs as well to be successful in the ring?

Tsunoda:  There’s three impact punches now, which includes the haymaker, a stun punch, and a flash KO punch.  I totally agree with you.  As far as the haymaker last year, I ended up throwing like 60% - 70% haymakers over the course of the fight.  I thought that being able to control the power of the punch was an awesome feature of the game, but really what those haymakers did because they were so easy to land was take away from the skill of the other punches.  That wasn’t what I thought was a good trend in our gameplay.  As far as boxing, we tried to do with the haymaker was to give you a bigger more powerful punch, but what really makes boxing special as a sport I think, is that unlike any other sport no matter how far down you are in the fight or how late it is in a fight that really one big punch can totally win the fight you.  If you’re getting your butt kicked for 10 rounds, and you’re able to land a crushing punch in the 11th, you can take the guy out right there.  That’s what adds all the drama and emotion to boxing and what keeps fans on the edge of their seats is that any one punch can totally change the fight.

We didn’t have that feel at all with the haymaker last year. Any 257 haymakers can change the course of the fight.  With the impact punches we’ve made them much higher risk, and much higher reward.  They’re these slower more powerful punches that are really hard to land during normal gameplay.  They’re an easy control mechanic to do but because it’s a more looping powerful punch, just like in real boxing. If you’re loading up for one big power shot, those are a lot harder to land than the quicker combinations.   The way we set it up now is there is the three punches, the haymaker, the stun punch, and the flash KO punch – each starting with the haymaker which is the lowest reward, but the lowest risk.  You land a haymaker and you get a quick energy boost that you can go in and pile on some more damage. 

The stun punch actually no matter what the other guys health situation is – you can land this one big stun punch and it puts him right on the brink of getting knocked out.  So it’s like he’s hurt, his brain is totally messed up, he’s all on the defensive, and you can get two or three more punches in and it’s going to get him onto the canvas.  So it’s like, you’re way behind in the fight, you land that, you’re able to get the guy down if you can get in and land a couple more shots cause he’s really hurt.  Then the flash KO punch, if you land that it triggers the first person mini-game where the person you hit is on the defensive and then you’re able to load up and drop him with one big shot straight to the canvas.  There’s increasing reward on each of the punches, but they’re all taking longer and harder to land as you go up the scale of difficulty. 

So the way we’ve tuned the game is, you know how you can parry in our game if you get a perfect block that throws the guy off balance?  That’s the way the timing is on the punch now, that if you’re able to parry a big punch that leaves the game open enough and unable to defend against a big impact punch so you try to get one off.  It’s not hard to do on the controller, but being able to get that perfect block and then counter with a big impact punch is definitely one for the higher skill-based moves in our game.  Maybe you’re landing two or three or four of these punches over the course of a fight, but really if you’re throwing it at the guy when he’s alert and he’s got his defense all ready it’s going to be easy for him to block your punch and counter you with the same impact punch.  It’s not really good to throw during normal gameplay, but if you can get one of those opportunities where you set it up, or he’s open to get hit with this big punch, or later in the fight when he’s getting tired or his defensive reactions are slower, that’s when you can really whip out the big impact punches.  We made them a lot more risk, a lot more reward, a lot harder to land, but when you do land them, man, it’s such a satisfying, big devastating punch impact that really has a huge change in the dynamic of the fight.

GI:  Online is obviously a big focus with the 360, but we’ve noticed that with Fight Night online, you just max out your characters offline, and get them all beefed up, and then you bring him online, and everyone is all maxed out as well, and it turns into a big slugfest.  With the create-a-boxer differences that you’re bringing into Round 3, how are you changing that up for online?

Tsunoda:  That’s something I hate about online as well.  It’s like everyone’s fighting with the same guy online.  The thing that I don’t like about that the most, not that just everybody has these huge maxed-out characters and what that does to the online fighting but to me the bigger difference is I would really like to reward the people who really play the game a lot, and go through the whole career mode and really learn how to play the game and give them more advantages in the online environment, as opposed to people who just throw up a created character that out of the box and max him out for online.

So what we’ve done now is with our new create-a-style, with different punch styles and block styles and movement styles is over the course of career mode you’re able to, say you’ve won the heavyweight title from Muhammad Ali, then you get some of Muhammad Ali’s cool style animations and tactics stuff unlocked in the game to customize my character with.  If I start with a normal balanced style, I beat Ali. Now all of a sudden I’ve got that sweet Ali jab. I can do the rope-a-dope. I can move like Ali. And those are things that aren’t available without going through career mode create-a-character. 

If you go through the different weight classes and fight different licensed boxers, you’re able to unlock their different punches and fighting styles and incorporate them into your character and take them online. And those give you huge gameplay advantages.  Like you’ll be able to get Joe Frazier’s hooks. You’re going to have more devastating hooks than anyone else in the online environment. The more career modes you play, the more things you unlock, the more you’re able to customize your character with more high end tactics and styles. And you’re able to save that off on your character and take him online so you’ve got definitive advantages from going through career mode than somebody who’s just taken a character online.

GI:  Your motion capture technology, can you tell us who you’re using in the ring to capture, and can you also explain what U-Cap is?

Tsunoda: U-Cap is a way of doing the texture blending on the facial emotions, so that’s a technique specific to delivering the skin wrinkles and how the skin moves on the guys’ faces.  There’s regular mo-cap as far as doing all the body stuff that we do all the time, there’s facial mo-cap that moves the geometry of the boxers when they’re making emotions or if they’re getting hit in the face and their face distorts, and then there’s the U-Cap which is actually used to create the skin wrinkle. And the thing about the geometry is the bones under the skin.  The U-Cap is affecting how the skin moves and making the skin less plastic and more organic.

GI:  Are you capturing any professional boxers specifically or are you using regular boxers?

Tsunoda:  That’s something we went with big time this year was trying to get the actual styles of each individual boxer in the game, and mo-capping that stuff specifically.  We go and mo-cap Roy Jones’s style or Bernard Hopkins’ style specifically.  Obviously, there are some boxers we couldn’t do a mo-cap with, and we try to get everybody that we can. There are guys like Jake LaMotta, probably not going to be able to get to much good mo-cap out of him. So in pre-production we go in and we got all of the fight footage of Jake LaMotta that we could and went and trained a professional boxer to fight just like Jake LaMotta for our mo-cap.

I think the way we’ve put together our models is interesting.  I think the three big goals we had for our character models this year is one, is we want them to look like their real life counterpart.  Visually, hey you’ve got the model, you look at it, boom, it looks just like them.  Once we have the likeness done what we do is strip it down to a wire frame model with textures, and so you can’t see who the boxer is by looking at it, and then we put that boxers animations on that wire frame model in the game.  If you can’t just by looking at the wire frame and how it moves go, “Holy cow, that’s Muhammad Ali, or that’s totally Sugar Ray Leonard.” Then we went back and did the mo-cap, until just by the animation go, “Hey, that looks just like the licensed boxer.”

Once we’ve got that nailed, we take generic animations and put it on the wire frame model and then load the boxers specific AI tactics, like the way they fight, not just the way they move with animation -- their specific boxing tactics. And then look at the wire frame model with generic animations and if you can’t tell who they are, we go back and tweak the AI.  So it’s all three of those pieces together. 

GI:  It sounds awesome and disgusting at the same time when you talk about how the skeletal system is going to work.

Tsunoda:  You know what?  It’s one of the things with next-gen that’s been totally interesting to me from a game development perspective.  I feel both from what we’re trying to do in the game with the gameplay and graphics innovation to the HUD-less gameplay and all that stuff – we’re really trying to make a different type of game than what was made on previous generations.  It’s not just like we’re trying to make a game with fancier graphics.  We’re really trying to change the gameplay from a fundamental experience from controlling some small graphical thing on the screen to “boom” I’m in the ring and feeling the same visceral experiences and emotions that the boxers would feel in the ring.  We’re so focused on getting the person off of the sofa and into the ring as part of the fight.  Looking at that as the goal as a game developer really changed how we did production and put more emphasis on research and pre-production you have to do beforehand as far as knowing exactly how each fighter fights, with tactics and the way they look. 

For our venues this year we used this pictureography technique, which allows us to actually get panoramic, real hi-res digital photos of environments and then use those in the game as the textures.  Every generation of consoles that comes out , everybody’s like, “Oh it’s going to be photo real.”  This generation, the techniques that we’re using to make our game – it actually is photo real.  I don’t just say that it looks photo real, but we’re using real photos as the textures.  It is photo real.  All the kind of work that had to go into the game this year, like before you could start development, it’s just a huge development change.

GI:  Speaking of venues, can you explain what they’re going to look like.  Are you going to have 3-D crowds?  What are the girls going to look like?

Tsunoda:  Through your career mode, there are different tiers of venues.  There’s the empty warehouse, where you start off in your career.  Once you move up, you get to those mid-level venues, it’s not just like a low level club fight, but it’s not the Madison Square Garden venue either.  You’ve got the state palace theater which is a famous home of boxing, the Aragon Ballroom which we used, where you’re starting to get bigger crowds.  The warehouse and Windy City gym, you probably have 30-40 people milling around. It’s not so much of a big attraction fight, as much as it’s like, “Hey, we’re having this fight here. There are people milling around checking it out.”

Then you go to the State Palace or Aragon Ballroom venue and you’ll start to get three to four hundred people depending on the magnitude of the fight.  It’s definitely an event and people are buying tickets and paying money to check it out.  Again, it’s not like the huge Staples Center type arenas.  Then, when you move up more in the top 10, and the  championship fights, that’s when you’re in the Madison Square Garden, Staples Center – big arena types.

GI:  Will there be actual 3-D crowds?

Tsunoda:  Oh yeah, totally.

GI:  Are there any cut man mini-games between rounds?

Tsunoda: Between rounds we still have the cut man games, we’ve updated that and added some new polished features to that.

GI:  How are the rivals going to work in the single player mode and online?

Tsunoda:  One of the things that I didn’t like about our career mode last year, and I think in the Fight Night franchise historically, that we’ve always been really awesome with the in the ring combat, and at anytime when you’re in the ring – the fighting is really sweet.  In our career mode what I wasn’t really happy with was, when you start off ranked at the bottom in your career, you’re trying to get to a title belt, and really that’s the only milestone you have in your career.  You’re constantly pushing for a belt.  You go through 50 fights to get it, and once you get it, it’s like, “What the hell am I still in career mode for?  I got my title belt, what else is going on?”

As far as our overall goal of really putting the person in the ring, and giving them an emotional vested interest in getting into the fight, we really wanted to build these rivalries as a way of putting a purpose behind each of the fights, and putting a purpose behind each punch in the fight. So you really have an emotional vested interest and you really want to kick that guy’s ass.  It’s not just like, I’m really just trying to be him so I can get another title.  It’s you specifically – I want to beat you.  I hate you and I want to punch you and I’m emotionally charged about the fight. 

We build these rivalries, and we space them out within the career mode. So if you think about a rankings ladder, and you’ve got 50 rankings, we’re really trying to give you every kind of 8-10 ranking spots a different rival weaving in and starting to interact during the course of your career mode.  You have the chance to build up rivalries every step of your career.  They get built through either, like, before a fight with people taunting you, trying to get fights going with you.  If, when you’re going through your career, you’re doing well there are going to be guys who specifically want to fight you.  Or your first loss in your career, sometimes the rivalries build out of situation. We take that drone that beat you, accelerate their career through the rankings so they get up to a title belt much faster than you and you’re getting updates on this person’s career, of like, “Oh look, that guy kicked my ass, and I’m struggling down here lower on my career, and his is accelerated. I just want to get caught up so I can fight that guy again.” 

GI: At E3 , the big PlayStation 3 demo of you playing Fight Night on screen blew everyone away.  Obviously Sony says they’re shooting for a Spring launch for the PlayStation 3, which a lot of people aren’t buying.  With the PlayStation 3 probably hitting next holiday season, how are you going to make Round 3 cool eight months after the 360 version ships?

Tsunoda:  I think that’s the same kind of approach we take in every version of the game.  Where it’s like, one thing we always want to offer is new control mechanics that really change up the way the fight is done.

We try to bring that same kind of innovation, we bring new control mechanics that really change the in the ring gameplay and we’re bringing different elements into career mode that expand the depth outside the ring.  Also, bringing a lot more customizability to our characters.  Fight Night 2004 had a very basic create-a-character. In Fight Night Round 2 we had the really sweet body morphing technology. In Fight Night Round 3 you’re able to customize your own style.  I think in every gameplay area, the in the ring control mechanics, outside the ring career mode, mini-games that we do, the create-a-character and customization of your character – in each of those areas we innovated enormously every single version of the game.  It’s just that same approach that we take, where these are the things that we really want to blow out in the game, and making sure we do a good job with designing those up front, and just getting them into the product.

GI:  With all those additions, it sounds like you’re making Fight Night Round 4.

Tsunoda: We can’t really go into too much detail right now. Our focus right now is 360, and Xbox and PS2.  This studio is always known for innovation, so you know we’ve got something up our sleeves for PS3 version when we’re coming out with that later in the year.  It’s just something our studio is focused on with any game here – delivering a title that’s bringing big innovation in gameplay and other areas to the table.  That’s the goal we set for ourselves on any project, and what ever it’s called or whatever it is, I’m just not happy delivering anything that does not provide that level of big quality improvement and really changing the way the game is played so that people such as yourselves that really play the game a bunch really can see the difference in the product and get a much better gameplay experience out of each particular version.

GI:  Can we assume that the game is being simultaneously developed for PS3?

Tsunoda: No comment.

GI:  What are your thoughts about the PlayStation 3 prototype controller and how it will work with Fight Night?

Tsunoda: I think the cool thing about the controller, especially with our game, is that I think it allows people with not as large hands to better utilize the analog sticks.  Our game is so analog stick driven. I think that controller is set up nicely to work in our game.

GI:  What are your thoughts about making a boxing game using two Revolution controllers?

Tsunoda:  Again, I think it’s harder to tell until you’re in developing and prototyping ideas – any new controller like that – I just think it’s really interesting technology and we could do cool things with it.  As a developer, I’m always excited seeing new things being done because it definitely gives you more things to play with, you know?

GI:  I think your arms would get super tired after awhile. (laughs)

Tsunoda:  It’s funny how tired my arms and thumbs get playing the game on current controllers.

GI:  This is another thing from our cover story, but you said that the differences between the PS3 version and Xbox will be indistinguishable.  Do you still believe that now after you’ve been messing around with the 360 technology and PS3 technology?

Tsunoda:  I guess when we’re making games, I just never look at the hardware you’re making it on as something that could be dictating to us what the gameplay experience is.  I think the general premise of “there’s not going to be any differences between Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3,” – I don’t know.  I just feel that, if you’re really trying to build a game based on, “is it this hardware or that hardware?” that that’s just fundamentally a bad design approach.  We have really kick ass engineers at EA Chicago, and what that does is gives us the creativity to go, “This is what we want in the game.” And the engineers go and figure out how to put it on all of the hardware.  As a creative type or as a designer, I never try to look at, well we should do this on this machine or do this on that machine.  It’s, “here’s a game that we want to make” and then the programmers are able to figure out how to get that experience developed on which ever platform it is.   The two technology infrastructures are built differently, but what we’re trying to do is build a game experience that should be transcending which platform that it’s on.

GI:  Do you think visually, pretty much that they’ll look the same?

Tsunoda:  The funny thing about doing the E3 press conference, and now getting out and doing some press with the 360 game is I heard just so much feedback after E3, like, “Oh that was a target video,” or “Oh, there’s no way they’ll be able to get that game quality on a different platform,” or this or that?  I mean, the PS3 demo is frickin’ awesome, and it was great working on that stuff, but I heard so much about it that was fake, and we’d never be able to achieve that….

GI:  But you’re pulling that off with 360?

Tsunoda:  Totally.  It just comes back to, this is a game we want to make.  It doesn’t matter if it’s PS3 or if it’s Xbox 360. They’re both great consoles.  To a consumer, I don’t feel that which platform it’s on should really affect the experience that the consumer has at all. I should be able to get the kick ass game that I want no matter what platform that it’s on. That’s our job as developers to make sure we’re delivering the best gameplay experience regardless of what the hardware is.

-Billy Berghammer, Matthew Kato