2009 was a great year for mixed martial arts, and UFC was at the forefront of it all. THQ's UFC Undisputed 2009 was fantastic, but it still lacks in many areas. That team is only a couple of months from releasing their 2010 followup, but at GDC this year, EA finally showed us some live gameplay of their upcoming offering, EA Sports MMA. EA's game will have the same basic format and relatively similar controls, but after talking with some of the guys behind the game, it's clear that the team has figured out an entirely different way to try and deliver their unique MMA experience.
The pre-alpha build on display showed some clear signs of being highly unfinished, with a placeholder crowd and no ring entrances for its combatants, but with many months to go, that's to be expected - and what we got to see already looks very impressive. Nate Diaz and Cung Le were the demo fighters in a Strikeforce six-sided cage, and it even included legendary MMA referee Big Joe McCarthy and other signature Strikeforce elements like the big wrestling-style ramp for fighter entrances and ring announcer Jimmy Lennon, Jr.
EA's rendition of Nick Diaz looked very close to his real-life counterpart, and included the same fight stance, high hand position, and facial expressions as we have seen in his fights. At the same time, Cung Le had many of his signature kicks, which were motion-captured by the fighter himself. The developers were quick to mention that fighters with unorthodox styles will have those represented, and while they're not going to the level of bringing every fighter into the mo-cap studio to do every stance, punch, and kick, the fighters will act similarly to how they have looked in the ring.
When it came to the ground game, it was clear that the EA Sports MMA team are still working on it, as they didn't do much in the way of posturing or switching positions. We saw things like half guard and side control, but there was no posturing up, submissions or ground and pound. The devs played coy when we asked if that stuff was in, but it was all with a bit of a wink and a nudge that tells us all that stuff would be in there but they just can't talk about it yet. (It seems reasonable, as any modern MMA game without that just wouldn't be right.) The dev team believes strongly that timing and strategy are key to the ground game, and the wax-on-style stick "shining" seen during submissions in UFC Undisputed won't be a part of their game.
As far as button mashing goes, there's only one place that EA's team wants it in, and that's when a player gets knocked down by a clean, powerful strike. While your opponent figures out how to close in and finish you off, you'll have to mash a button to try and recover, hopefully by tying him up and shaking the cobwebs loose.
When it comes to one-hit knockouts, there's definitely a different strategy here than THQ's team. UFC Undisputed 2009 essentially rolled some virtual dice every time someone was struck in the head with anything, and one lucky dice roll meant that the lamest of punches could be the knockout blow. And hey, sometimes in real fights that's how some huge punches have looked, even in the replays, but it's not good for a video game. In EA's game, a single knockout strike will only come in the right situation, like when one guy is in the process of missing a big haymaker punch while a perfect counter comes in from the opposite direction to meet a jaw. The end result is that EA intends for every one-hit knockout to hold up under the scrutiny of a slow-motion replay, which UFC 2009 didn't often do. (Let's hope that THQ also works on this for their 2010 iteration as well.)
We got to see some blood in this demo, as Cung Le kept getting clocked by Diaz's punches and having cuts just above his eyebrow. While the team did announce that blood will transfer from one fighter to another, we didn't get a chance to see it in action. I also couldn't get anyone to talk about whether cuts will wind up stopping a fight, but my assertion that stopping a fight right when it turns into a bit of a bloodbath, as some fights do, is killing the game right when it gets fun. And in real life, many fights go on even when someone gets tagged with an elbow that opens up a gusher - as long as the long-term health of the fighters is assured by the doctors, it goes on. At this point, we'll have to wait and see how blood changes fights as the game nears completion.
The fighter selection screen showed some tantalizing details, like how each fighter's abilities are summed up into five basic stats. But there are actually a lot of fine-tune stats that make up the five major ones, and serious fight fans will get their chance to hit a button to scrutinize every little detail. (Not that we got to see any of them in this demo, but they'll be there in the final game.) And you'll be able to create your own fighter and use him in a career mode, but none of that was on display, and everyone got real quiet when I asked about using an existing real-life fighter in career mode. That would be a very tough feature to implement if career mode included things like learning new moves, as it'd potentially mean that real-life brawlers could be brought up as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu experts and such. But it'd still be fun as hell, and I hope that the EA team can figure out how to get it working.
With the support of multiple fight organizations comes multiple rule sets and different rings, and while Strikeforce is the only announced organization so far, I was able to find out that EA Sports MMA will have, at the very least, three ring types (six-sided cage, circular cage, and a traditional square ring) and three rule sets (Unified rules like the UFC has, Strikeforce which is similar but disallows elbows, and Japan rules). This likely means that fighting under different rules will allow for specific moves, like kicks to a downed opponent or elbows from the clinch and on the ground.
It might have been a trick of the light, but I do think I saw a little bit of that advanced animation we saw when fighters got up close in Fight Night Round 4, as well as some interesting ragdoll and other effects when fighters were knocked down near the cage. The guys kept redirecting us away from any inquiries on that, but it was definitely there and it should be very interesting to see how they do with clinches and the ground game up against the fence.
When another journalist asked if any female fighters will be represented, we were assured that yes, UFC president and notorious lovable loudmouth Dana White will be in the game. It was a great off-the-cuff joke and a perfect redirect away from something that clearly they don't want to commit to answering just yet.
Back when EA Sports MMA was announced, I was surprised to see was that a lot of MMA fans (especially those who loved UFC Undisputed) seemed to almost want it to suck. For me, if you're a serious fight fan, then it doesn't matter what group is putting on the fight - or what company is putting out the game to simulate it. It's all about the skills fighters bring into the ring and what happens when they collide. Competition can only be good from here on out, whether it's on TV, on pay-per-view, or on a video game console.
In the end, this hands-off demo of EA Sports MMA spawned more questions than answers, as the developers didn't want to get into specifics yet on a great many elements of the game. They assured us that just about all of our questions would be answered at E3 this coming June, but it's easy to see that this game will definitely rival UFC Undisputed. The release date so far is "late 2010" for 360 and PS3.
