UFC Undisputed 3 Preview
After the release of UFC Undisputed 2010, it became clear that this mixed martial arts series was not going to survive in the grueling yearly cycle that so many other sports games thrive in. With a release date about twelve months after UFC 2009, the sequel included quite a few new features for serious MMA fans, but gamers at large struggled to see the difference from one game to the next. That won't be a problem this time, because not only did the Japanese development team at Yuke's (and THQ's own considerably sized team overseeing the project) take a good nineteen months to make a third iteration of the game more action-packed and complete, but there are plenty of new features, too - and many will make online play much more fun and even add some accessibility to what can often be a confusing fighting experience for first-time gamers. UFC Undisputed 3 not only includes the expected roster updates to give players the biggest roster of any AAA game that revolves around fighting, but additional rule sets, control options, and dynamic tutorial elements make things much more approachable.
Career Mode
At an event in San Francisco, we got to play the game for hours, and most of us spent quite a while in the game's brand new career mode. In it, you can create your own fighter from scratch - still males only, unfortunately - or recreate the career of one of the game's many dozens of roster fighters. Yes, you can pick Brock Lesnar and give him a jiu-jitsu base, if that's what you really want. (You can't do anything about that awful tattoo, though.) When not fighting, you'll primarily be strategizing over how to build your skills, stats, and move set, and that includes setting up game plans that can increase your stats even further if you execute them properly both during training and in an actual fight. The number of training activities available has been increased to add more variety, and stat decay has been removed, although now some training sessions that work on one set of skills will cause other skills to drop a bit. The weekly schedule and stamina/rest system have been removed, allowing players to just perform a limited number of "actions" (like training exercises or learning/improving a particular move at a fight camp) before a fight, so the drudgery of dealing with spending weeks resting has been removed. As a result, you spend more time actively looking at stats, training, learning and improving moves, and fighting. Unfortunately, you'll also be spending a solid amount of time staring at loading screens, or at least that was true on the Xbox 360 debug consoles we played on.
Career mode starts a fighter in a local fight organization called the WFA, and players can now become (and stay) the WFA champion in there for a while, building their skills, before answering the call to join the UFC. And after some success against licensed UFC fighters, they can jump over to join a Pride Grand Prix tournament, allowing for new rules, a new style of ring to fight in, and an entirely unique look with its super-bright lights and brilliant white mat. All of this is part of a career mode that's designed to last players dozens of hours for each fighter, and include more meaningful decisions and strategies that get closer to the core of training for fights and executing game plans to win them.
The only real downside I've seen in career mode is that a few of the training games are really strange, with confusing on-screen help indicators and no terribly clear directions on what to do. (Even the developers seemed to have a tough time explaining what knowledge a couple of these training mini-games were meant to impart to the players.) While I loved UFC 2009's career mode and found a significant amount of frustration near the end of 2010's, I think this third game's career mode will be the best yet.
Pride Mode
Beyond that, most of the rest of the time I spent with the game was in versus matches at all seven of the game's weight classes, both in UFC and Pride mode. It's nice to be able to take any fighter in the game over to Pride, including those who only started their careers years after the Japanese fight organization had gone out of business in the real world, and you still get the full introductions by a Japanese announcer as well as by the Pride "crazy lady" Lenne Hardt, although many of the newly-created announcements don't have quite the over-enthusiastic trills and screams that were used for fighters back when Pride was still around. Bas Rutten and Stephen Quadros even have tons of commentary in there as well! More popular Pride fighters like Bob Sapp, who never fought in the UFC, are in, and those that moved from Pride to the UFC - like Rampage Jackson or Wanderlei Silva - have two versions, each with older and younger looks and separate stats. With the way Pride can be run in retro mode or pulled forward into the modern day and integrated with the career mode, hardcore MMA fans who loved this organization's fights are in for a real treat. In UFC 3, it's almost like Pride never went away in the first place.
Submissions and Gameplay Changes
The stick-spinning "shine" from the first two UFC games is still in use whenever you're struggling for or against a takedown, but it's been axed for the purposes of a submission. Now, a HUD comes up when a fighter attempts a submission, and while it's difficult to explain in words, it makes sense once it's shown to you. I'll try my best: there's an Octagon shape that appears on-screen, and both fighters have a bar of color that runs either inside or outside of that shape. The attacking player's on the outside and is trying to use his bar of color, rotating around the octagon, to "cover" the defending player's color, which is on the inside. Players rotate around using the right stick, but not with a fast spin; it's a cat and mouse game instead. If the attacking player covers the defending player's color with enough of his bar and/or for long enough, the submission is locked in and the victim taps and loses the fight. If not, the defender breaks out, possibly getting a dominant position in the process depending on the move. What makes things interesting is that the size of the bar and the speed at which the player can move it depends on how tired the fighter is as well as his Submission Offense and Defense stats. While I think THQ did a good job making a system that's more intuitive for seasoned UFC veterans, it might still be a bit confusing for those entirely new to the series or for those who don't understand how some submissions work or why they're so painful.
UFC 2009 didn't support many cage positions, and 2010 only improved the situation a tad; now, you have seated cage positions that can be a real problem for fighters that can't grapple on the ground, although those who can are capable of walking up the cage to get out of a bad situation. The optional fighter HUD that used to have just stamina bars now includes paper dolls that show how much damage each body part has taken, and that's important for many matchups - especially those of vicious leg-kickers who can now actually finish fights with leg kicks. (Fighters who can switch stances now have a reason to do so, especially if their front leg has been damaged too much.) On top of this, fighters can now sway back and forth when they're fighting from their backs, allowing for more defensive options when they're in trouble - although being on the bottom in positions like side control doesn't help much. Finally, yes, in Pride mode, all the kicks, knees, and soccer kicks to the heads of downed opponents are there, and yes, side control defense is much a more dangerous place to be in Pride mode because of the possibility of powerful head strikes.
Controls
The biggest change to the controls in UFC 3 is in the addition of a simple grappling system where the old quarter circle and near-half-circle motions can be optionally replaced by something much more simple. With Amateur controls, a flick up on the right stick has your fighter attempting a minor transition, and a flick down attempts a major one. While it may seem at first like the Pro scheme (the original one that veterans are used to) is useless because of this, it actually comes into its own at a higher level. You see, feints are a big part of a real fight, and while feints have now been implemented in UFC 3's stand-up game for some attacks, the fake-outs you could do in the ground game in past UFC titles was only possible with what is now known as the Pro control scheme. With Amateur controls, the character animation for a transition is fixed and more predictable for a high-level player to block or reverse, but with Pro controls, feints are very possible and often quite effective. I'm no expert in the high-level UFC game community, but those high-level players who were at THQ's San Francisco event seemed happy with it.
Even Fights and Simulation Options
A few extra features this year will hopefully round out the online mode in UFC 3 and make for more interesting and fair matches. First, both players can now choose the same fighter if they want, setting up mirror matches for perfectly even games. But there's more than just that - players can now enable a Competition Mode that completely removes the more random elements from the game, like flash knockouts and doctor stoppages. (This is an option I've been calling for since 2009.) And if that's not enough, you can go one further and enable both Competition Mode as well as Equalized Stats, which gives any two fighters an equal rating (although weight classes are still enforced), so that they only differ in the actual move sets that are available.
Finally, there's a separately-toggled option called Simulation Mode which drains the fighters' energy much more as they perform attacks, transitions, blocks, and other moves, and this can be used in the Career mode as well as in versus and online play. So, to be clear: mirror matches are available in all versus modes, Competition Mode can be set up in versus modes and then taken further with Equalized Stats (but you can't turn on Equalized Stats without also enabling Competition Mode), and Simulation is a separate toggle and is available in Career and any one-on-one mode.
UFC 3, the Fighting Game?
THQ's reps made it clear that they're pushing to get the fighting game community into UFC 3; their ultimate goal is to one day get it into online streams alongside Street Fighter IV 2012 Edition and Ultimate MvC3, and maybe even have a big showing at the big dog tournament, EVO in Las Vegas every summer. Unfortunately, there's one serious issue with that goal: time. UFC 3 implements five-minute rounds and a clock that ticks by at time-and-a-half speed, so one three-round match could take more than ten minutes to complete if it goes to a decision, and many of the games put in by high-level players at this event did take that long.
Plus, the fighting game community would at least want to do best two out of three, so that puts two guys fighting each other at anywhere from a few minutes to over half an hour; that's a huge variance and a complete nightmare for tournament operators to juggle when fielding dozens or hundreds of entrants. Then there's the matter of double-elimination which just extends things out even longer. The community already has a bunch of games that, from a time perspective, cater to a tournament setting much better, so at this point, I just don't see UFC 3 breaking through. This game will almost definitely include a more even playing field and will be much better to play online competitively than past entries in the UFC series, but I wouldn't expect to see it get much further in the pro-gamers community than maybe a short little exhibition series at EVO.
Closer to the UFC than ever
While there will always be disputes over why some UFC fighters were left off the roster or over the game's rather complex fighting system and whether it's fair, one thing I came away with is the notion that this game is closer to the UFC than ever. Not only did the organization put together exclusive video for use in the game (often with never-before-seen fighter interviews), but the presentation is even closer, with customizable ring entrances, more (and improved) voice work from commentators Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan, and the surprisingly full-featured Pride mode that integrates itself into several gametypes. As long as these modes hold up under long-term scrutiny, which we'll be sure of once we get a copy for review, I will be happy to give UFC Undisputed 3 a great score. One might think that such high marks would be a given coming from a game critic that's also a huge MMA fan, but I assure you it's not, and I went into this demo worried that the developers had only improved the game the same amount as when they moved from 2009 to 2010. That's not true at all.
UFC Undisputed 3 will be available on Xbox 360 and PS3 on Valentine's Day, February 14th.
