EA Sports MMA Hands On Preview
A lot of games that we first saw at GDC in March have come to E3 in style, playable and much-improved over the last time they saw the light of day. No game was more improved in my mind, though, than EA Sports MMA. Not only were the graphics crisp and smooth, but the striking looked great, the ground game was impressive, and the overall presentation looked great.
My demo for EA Sports MMA consisted of picking up a controller on the show floor and just experimenting with another E3 attendee; there was no card showing off the moves, no developer around to help us (or at least, not until just before I had to leave), and no help on-screen. The most obvious change is that the game's default controls are meant to transition players of Fight Night, not UFC Undisputed, over to EA MMA. In fact, the whole thing is kind of swapped from UFC - strikes are done by flicking and twisting the right stick (and the left trigger is used for setting up kicks rather than all low strikes), and clinch and ground transitions and moves are done with the face buttons.
The ground game in EA MMA includes a different solution than the UFC Undisputed developers created. The problem is that grappling on the ground is a very messy activity, with arms and legs all over the place; even today we still see positions and situations in real MMA matches that surprise the commentators. The A button (X on PS3) will allow you to try and improve position, and the opponent's controller will rumble for a split second to let him know that he's about to have something bad happen. If during that rumble he hits A, he'll block the transition. But if you rain down some strikes while in the ground game, that makes his controller rumble as well, so he might be thrown off and try to do a poorly-timed grapple, and that's your chance to either throw harder strikes, or sneak in your own grapple while his timing is off.
The ground game has some interesting strategy and timing, and I think that it has a lot of potential, but it seems like there's still a ways for the developers to go, too. That being said, I didn't have time to get a really got a good feel for how submissions work or how to do everything our fighters could on the ground, but my twenty-minute impression makes it seem like it'll all be there for release and we'll just need a good tutorial to learn it. The only possible downside I see is that those of us who still have the old SIXAXIS controllers (with no rumble motors) won't be able to notice an opponent doing a transition; I'm sure that the solution is as easy as some kind of on-screen indicator instead.
The graphics in EA MMA are superb, with antialiasing rounding out edges, self-shadowing making the fighters under the bright lights look very realistic, and a good polygon count for every fighter I saw. We mostly focused on matches between Strikeforce fighters Alistair Overeem and Fedor Emelianenko, but there were others in our demo as well. There are multiple fight organizations, too, meaning that different rings, rule sets, and whole fight presentations will be included. I do think it's unreasonable to expect EA to have multiple sets of commentators, as many, many hours of studio time would be required just to get one set of commentators sounding half-decent.
I had a lot of doubts about the hands-off demo of EA Sports MMA that I saw back in March, as the developers were very shy about showing off the physics system, ground grappling, clinching, and fighting against the cage. Any of those things not being right would make EA MMA generally just an inferior game. But now, all of those elements are in, and the overall product looks great. Sure, UFC spokesmen and publisher THQ will continue to insist that the UFC has the best MMA fighters in the world as well as the best MMA game in the world - and right now, that's 100% true - but there's no reason why other developers shouldn't add a little competition and figure out how to make their game even better.
UFC president Dana White famously maintains that several years ago, EA Sports executives rejected his bid to make an EA UFC game, telling him that MMA is not a real sport. Clearly they've since found a respect for the sport, and if the company continues to put their (relatively) newfound love for MMA into this game, then I think it could be a damn good competitor for UFC Undisputed when it's released on 360 and PS3 this coming October.
