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All Star
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Hold up, I'm going to post the interview in full, so people don't get anything misunderstood about what was actually said.
Q: In your perspective, what are the features that you're most excited about with Madden 25?
Rex: The one biggest thing we'd like you to take away from next gen is the team driving the stake in the ground about the direction we want to take this game with next gen. It's not necessarily the same direction that we have been going in on gen 3. That direction we're heading is firmly towards realism authenticity and a realistic representation of the sport. I think for many years Madden has been a great game and it's been fun for a lot of people, but it's definitely played more like Madden than realistic, authentic football and I think a lot of people still feel like they can't get a true simulation experience out of the game. This dev team is committed to giving them that game. Gen 4, this first year, I think you'll find is the most realistic representation of the sport that we have ever built. It's really just the tip of the iceberg about where we are going.
Q: We see a lot of the line play in Madden is not causing there to be many penalties. Is there anything on the horizon that would start to produce a higher instance of line related penalties?
Clint: For this year we did not make a feature surrounding increased penalties along the offensive line. From my own experience with this year's game and my own testing, what I've found is due to the horsepower of the new consoles, penalties do trigger more than they would have before, but it is good that you bring up the penalties especially on the offensive line because it's something that is on our radar and something we're looking to improve in our future games.
Q:Expanding on that, will we start to see more interference penalties on defensive backs and offensive penalties on WR's?
Rex: Yeah and that's going to be a little more complicated for us to take on. When you consider the way our catching system works and physics. Just kind of building a system around hey there was organic contact between them. We wouldn't be able to essentially control those outcomes so we have to kind of build towards the pass interference system. We have to kind of restructure the architecture of our catching system to support true pass interference penalties that we can actually build into the game and control them the way we need to control them. I would expect that you will see that if not next year(M15), then within the next two cycles (Madden 16) we'll get to that.
Q: Will things like bad snaps from the center or ls being mishandled by either punter or the holder for the placekick be in the next cycle or two for next gen?
Clint: That's something that we look at every year, the difficult thing is trying to come up with a mechanic that surrounds that so the user feels like they have some control of the outcome. The scenario I like to bring up is if you're playing in a tournament with $200000 on the line and you're about to go for the winning score and you have a bad snap and it's nothing you did on the sticks, but we just happened to throw one at you, like a bad dice roll. When we are able to come up with a mechanic to give the user some control over that, it's something we may look at.
Q: How does True Step affect every player on the field or does it just affect the ball carrier?
Rex: So the way True Step is implemented. True Step is a huge piece of technology, what we're doing with True Step is ripping out the old locomotion system and implementing a new locomotion system. True Step is light years beyond what we have ever done before. The amount of time it takes for us to take an assignment out of the game and replace it with this new locomotion system is fairly significant. So originally we set our target on ball carriers only, was the initial True Step. The team actually did a great job and increased their velocity over the course of the cycle and we were able to get it on all user controlled defenders as well. So what you'll see in the game shipping in a few weeks is True Step for all ball carriers including cpu as well as any user controlled player in the game on both sides of the ball.
Q: We've seen some of the pass rushing animations, from a defensive end perspective, look really good. If we're user controlling the DE and you go into one of those animations, do you have to let the animation run it's course or can you break out of it mid-animation to pursuit the QB?
Clint: You'll be able to break out of it if you're the one pass rushing, also the CPU AI can break out of it as well.
Q: Any improvements made to WR/DB interactions?
Rex: That can mean a lot of things. You have to think about all the different components of the feature, are you talking about press and release, behavior at the line or jam, are you talking about route running, hand fighting on the routes, or the interactions at the catch point? There's a lot of different factors of that feature. The one thing that will really jump out at you is with player sense and human intelligence at the DB position. You'll especially see this in zone coverage, the way defenders will react once the ball is thrown and break on the ball is really a lot more realistic. I think most people who played Madden 25 gen 3 felt zone was a little soft this year, but that is definitely not the case on gen 4. Zone defenders are brutally effective and will take much better paths to the ball, so their ability to break on the ball and target to their correct position to make a play on the ball or the receiver is vastly improved over what you've seen on gen 3.
Q: What about signature throwing and running animations?
Rex: My own personal opinion, I know the community really wants signature styles and animations specific to players. It's in our plan, however, from my perspective, I still feel like there's so many little issues within our animations with the pops, the warps, the slides, we have a lot of work to go to squeeze all of that stuff out the game. I'd rather make sure we nail the core animation quality in our game before we start talking about adding signature styles. Now that said, I don't think those two are mutually exclusive, I think we can work on both simultaneously, but we're still working on nailing our core fundamentals of football before we start going into expressions of individual style. All that said, our new animation system with step loco will give us a lot more flexibility and space to open up the door for us to do signature styles in the future. My first priority is make sure our animation quality is AAA and then we'll work on signature style.
Q: Are we going to see significant improvement in aliasing on next gen?
Rex: Yes, just like with any console launch, I don't think you're going to see all the benefits in year one. It's going to take some time for engineers and graphics artists to really figure out these rendering pipelines, decide where we're going to get the most impact, learn how to work with these boxes to get the best visual effects. From our perspective we really pushed a lot more of the investment for us, to make sure the game feels different, it feels smarter, feels more like football. 90% of our focus on our side (Gameplay developers) was how can we use this horsepower to affect the way the game plays and feels.
I'll post the rest of this interview later tonight.
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10-25-2013, 05:43 PM
