EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

[23bluesman]

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[Mossfan8480]

Re: EA Sports MMA: Frank Shamrock Interview (w/gameplay clips)

Looking good. Really like the way the submissions are being handled. Thanks for posting the video.

[russwg1970]

Looks like a button mashing fest. Though, it's an interesting take on submissions and the toll they can take. I'll be interested in playing the demo when it's released.

[VUUAASSHHH!]

Ordem e Progresso, which translating to English is Order and Progress.
That`s the slogan printed in Brazilian flag.

[Facts]

This is like when EA asked Drew Brees to say Madden was simulation. Money talks.

[Anim8or]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Looks like a button mashing fest. Though, it's an interesting take on submissions and the toll they can take. I'll be interested in playing the demo when it's released.

If you mash, you lose VERY fast. The joint lock submissions are a stamina management game with button presses. You will instantly notice Arm and Leg submissions are tuned very differently so different tactics work and even though they are both button mechanics they feel totally different.

When you don't push the button your stamina comes back, but your opponents presses are moving him towards victory. When you DO hit the button depending on where your stamina currently is, you move the submission more in your direction and deplete some of your stamina. (as the battle continues over time these button presses become worth more for both fighters). So the entire meta-game (which takes serious time to master) is about managing your stamina and has NOTHING to do with being able to mash fast (turbo controllers will instantly make you lose), and deciding when to burst through and try to escape based on how much each button press is worth. Losing all your stamina results in a short penalty where your presses are worthless (if you are being submitted) or failure (if you are submitting).

There are several different ways to play and even our most advanced members of the dev team still haven't decided what the best method is.. but the way I play it is hang on and conserve my stamina and watch my opponents stamina and mine, when he gets tired, I'll try to quickly escape or finish (the gamble here is trying to make sure I can survive long enough for him to get tired, then get swing the battle all the way back and not completely deplete my stamina doing it).

Your opponents MAX stamina (which is depleted during the fight by having his grappling attempts and escapes countered or denied) can also affect the outcome because it maxes out what his potential button press is worth, so in the end the real way to submit someone is to wear them out with some ground and pound, and go for the submission when they are exhausted, you have a much easier time in the battle... There is a lot of strategy to it. Ground fighters get quite good at setting it up and then very good at the submission battles themselves...

[Mossfan8480]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

If you mash, you lose VERY fast. The joint lock submissions are a stamina management game with button presses. You will instantly notice Arm and Leg submissions are tuned very differently so different tactics work and even though they are both button mechanics they feel totally different.

When you don't push the button your stamina comes back, but your opponents presses are moving him towards victory. When you DO hit the button depending on where your stamina currently is, you move the submission more in your direction and deplete some of your stamina. (as the battle continues over time these button presses become worth more for both fighters). So the entire meta-game (which takes serious time to master) is about managing your stamina and has NOTHING to do with being able to mash fast (turbo controllers will instantly make you lose), and deciding when to burst through and try to escape based on how much each button press is worth. Losing all your stamina results in a short penalty where your presses are worthless (if you are being submitted) or failure (if you are submitting).

There are several different ways to play and even our most advanced members of the dev team still haven't decided what the best method is.. but the way I play it is hang on and conserve my stamina and watch my opponents stamina and mine, when he gets tired, I'll try to quickly escape or finish.

Your opponents MAX stamina (which is depleted during the fight by having his grappling attempts and escapes countered or denied) can also affect the outcome because it maxes out what his potential button press is worth, so in the end the real way to submit someone is to wear them out with some ground and pound, and go for the submission when they are exhausted, you have a much easier time in the battle... There is a lot of strategy to it. Ground fighters get quite good at setting it up and then very good at the submission battles themselves...

Terrific insight! Thanks for stopping by, Anim8or.

[23bluesman]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Nice post Anim8or, I'm really excited to try it out for myself.

Quick question though, where does the grappling skill of your fighter come into equation during these submission battles? Seems to me it's all about stamina..

[Sandbox]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Anim8or,
fighters slide frequently to get in position to connect with a punch, which leads me to believe that a fighters reach isn't that important in this game.

So is reach important?
Was EA MMA designed to be more of an arcade or sim game?

[Anim8or]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Nice post Anim8or, I'm really excited to try it out for myself.

Quick question though, where does the grappling skill of your fighter come into equation during these submission battles? Seems to me it's all about stamina..

Yes attributes definitely factor in to how good you have to be at the submission game. The way we do this is adjust how much each press is worth or the size of your choke window on the stick and how much more each find is worth at full stamina (you have multiple submission skills that play into this, your specific skill (joint/choke) and your overall grapple skill as well as your stamina regeneration attribute, defending submissions is stamina regen, grapple defense, and your skill at that submission type). When you build your career fighter to be a grappler it's important to level up all of these if you want plan to spend a lot of time on the ground.

[23bluesman]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Yes attributes definitely factor in to how good you have to be at the submission game. The way we do this is adjust how much each press is worth or the size of your choke window on the stick and how much more each find is worth at full stamina (you have multiple submission skills that play into this, your specific skill (joint/choke) and your overall grapple skill as well as your stamina regeneration attribute, defending submissions is stamina regen, grapple defense, and your skill at that submission type). When you build your career fighter to be a grappler it's important to level up all of these if you want plan to spend a lot of time on the ground.

Nice def more complicated and deep than I initially thought! Thanks for the info, can't wait for this game!!

[Anim8or]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

Anim8or,
fighters slide frequently to get in position to connect with a punch, which leads me to believe that a fighters reach isn't that important in this game.

So is reach important?
Was EA MMA designed to be more of an arcade or sim game?

Reach is very important, we may step in to strike, but how far is dramatically varied based on each strike and the fighter and connecting is still going to be based on your reach attribute and skill per strike and the distance you were at Vs. the ideal distance for each strike.

We are attempting to make the closest simulation of the sport that we possibly can. Visually in a lot of these videos we don't see the game at 60fps and it looks faster and more twitchy at the reduced frame rates of the compressed for the web videos. Responsiveness is important to feeling like you are in complete control of the fighter though, so while we focus on responsiveness so we don't rob you of executing what you want to execute we have no "arcade" gimmicks, no rock paper scissor mini-game, not one dice roll in the entire game. It's about doing the right thing at the right time (the right strike, right angle of movement, right counter, right defense, momentum, ring position, seeing openings and taking advantage of them.. it's the closest thing to the chess game of real fighting I have experienced since actually fighting, and it's less painful ..). Even our submission battles aren't "mini-games" they are an attempt to actually represent the stamina management and energy bursts in joint locks, or the twisting and trying to fight for leverage in chokes. We really tried to take what we know from fighting (our creative director, gameplay manager, gameplay designer, animation director, lead animator, physics programmer and technical director for gameplay all have trained and/or fought, and to us it's very important to translate the sport into gameplay than to come up with gimmicks and metagames).

[Sandbox]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

I was too vague, I didn't mean arcade in the sense of mini-games or anything.
I love that a physics engine is being used to simulate the sport. It's what I was hoping for since the original Rampage/Liddell Undisputed trailer. The game certainly looks better than Undisputed does now.

What I meant by arcade vs sim was in the twitch control typical of Tibouron games. I'm just not a fan of hyper-realism. The step/slide in to punch is automatic correct? I prefer Undisputed's handling of the step-in where it's a specific button press and not automatic, so you can choose whether or not you want to close the distance.
The question I have is, does the game sacrifice realism for responsiveness/control?

EDIT: Actually on second thought doesn't automatically stepping-in to strike take away from control and realism? i.e. if my fighter is a tall rangy fighter with little KO power, my gameplan would amount to working from the outside with quick strikes just finding my range and scoring points. If my fighter auto-steps then he's put himself into his opponents range. I thought Fight Night did a good job with punching and they didn't use an auto step-in. Control is being removed from the player's hands if you automatically make moves for them, similar to what madden did in terms of user-catching with player's no longer needing to press a button to catch. Thoughts?

Also,

• Have you played the competitions game and what do you think of it?

• How comparable are stats to that of a real MMA bout?(strike connect% etc.)
• Why don't refs stop the bout after a KO or submission, limited resources?
• If the CPU fighter is beat on points for the first 2 rounds, does the A.I. come out more aggressive looking for the KO or submission in the final round?

[Anim8or]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

I was too vague, I didn't mean arcade in the sense of mini-games or anything.
I love that a physics engine is being used to simulate the sport. It's what I was hoping for since the original Rampage/Liddell Undisputed trailer. The game certainly looks better than Undisputed does now.

What I meant by arcade vs sim was in the twitch control typical of Tibouron games. I'm just not a fan of hyper-realism. The step/slide in to punch is automatic correct? I prefer Undisputed's handling of the step-in where it's a specific button press and not automatic, so you can choose whether or not you want to close the distance.
The question I have is, does the game sacrifice realism for responsiveness/control?

EDIT: Actually on second thought doesn't automatically stepping-in to strike take away from control and realism? i.e. if my fighter is a tall rangy fighter with little KO power, my gameplan would amount to working from the outside with quick strikes just finding my range and scoring points. If my fighter auto-steps then he's put himself into his opponents range. I thought Fight Night did a good job with punching and they didn't use an auto step-in. Control is being removed from the player's hands if you automatically make moves for them, similar to what madden did in terms of user-catching with player's no longer needing to press a button to catch. Thoughts?

Also,

• Have you played the competitions game and what do you think of it?

• How comparable are stats to that of a real MMA bout?(strike connect% etc.)
• Why don't refs stop the bout after a KO or submission, limited resources?
• If the CPU fighter is beat on points for the first 2 rounds, does the A.I. come out more aggressive looking for the KO or submission in the final round?

As a former fighter, it never occurs to me not to step in or back up to make contact with a strike in real life (it's sort of second nature). I know my reach and range, so I just do it naturally. We discussed this a ton on the game team (I talk about it in my power of the punch blog at length) we really unanimously felt it was more realistic to do the "heat seeking". We want it to be about throwing the right punch, especially since we introduce steerable "circling" strikes. Your intent is to close the distance, and if you don't want to, you can throw a fake strike.

My goal is responsiveness first, visuals a close second. The games I have directed animation on have this signature (like NBA Street Homecourt), I feel the way the game plays is paramount. However, I have written entire articles about how this doesn't have to be a balancing act if you make the right tools for the animators, and designing those tools have been a huge part of what my entire career at EA has been about. We have some incredible advances on MMA for keeping the game looking smooth and more realistic but Jason Barnes and I have always wanted it to feel like a fighting game but look like a Sim.

we have all played the competitor quite a bit (we would be nuts to ignore or discount it). I kept TRYING to love it. Some of the guys on our team like it though. I was just playing ours for more than a year when their first one came out, and to me we already had something more fun, especially on the ground, but even in stand-up ours just felt way more responsive and consistent and to me feels more like actually fighting.

Real MMA fights last from 10 seconds to 20 minutes, so I would say stats are very hard to "average" out. What I love about our game, is people who haven't played much end up knocking each-other out and veterans end up having really long fights when they know their fighters strengths. The orignial Bushido Blade was like this. If you stand there and don't defend yourself, or are overly aggressive and don't respect your opponent you are gonna get wrecked fast. I think I said this before, but Victor and I have these long but exciting fights with me as Cung Le and Him as Jacare.

Spot on with the ref, this was our first outing, having a ref at all was a must, but we didn't want to overly invest in the ref when we had gameplay features. With that though, he does actually step in and stop fights, we just didn't want him in the way of the camera in replays and such.

[Phobia]

Re: EA Sports MMA Video: Frank Shamrock Interview with Gameplay

I think I said this before, but Victor and I have these long but exciting fights with me as Cung Le and Him as Jacare.

How about you post one of these fights up. I want to see a video of two guys that know what they are doing on the sticks and the chess match that can come from it. :wink: