UFC 2009 Undisputed Interview

UFC looks brutal on the TV, but when you see it while stood 20 ft from the cage, blood clearly visible as it flies from bruised faces, you see it in a completely new light. Having been to see both WWE and UFC live, we appreciate both as a spectacle, but UFC makes WWE look like the light entertainment it really is. When a fight is over in UFC both guys look like they’ve seen much better days, usually extremely bruised and bloody. It’s also an extremely complex sport, with many rules to adhere to, ground and stand-up fighting and numerous weight classes. Having played THQ’s forthcoming Xbox 360 and PS3 take on the sport, we sat down with product manager Neven Dravinski to get his thoughts on finding the right balance between hardcore sim and accessible video game.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us…

Neven Dravinski: No no, my pleasure! As I said, you guys [journalists] are a really big part of us getting the word out there, especially with the control scheme. As you saw, there’s still a learning curve to it, and we want to make sure you guys are getting the word out about how to pull off these manoeuvres and how to be successful in the game.

VideoGamer.com: Well, I don’t know about that – I think my first three matches were the quickest defeats I’ve ever had in a video game! I’m getting better though! Was the control system the hardest thing for you guys to nail? UFC is a complicated sport…

ND: Certainly! That’s kind of the challenge. I mean, how do you encapsulate something like a ground game where there’s so much nuance and so many different things that can happen. And that the same time we obviously want to make the game accessible to people, so that it’s not just niche-based. Making an MMA game is hard; a lot of people have tried, and it’s a difficult thing to get the struggle on the ground. Traditional fighting games are just punch punch, block block, throw – thank you very much. The control scheme went through a lot of different iterations, from completely super-easy inputs to something much more difficult. I think we’ve settled on a happy medium where there is still that initial accessibility, but it takes some skill to master. Certainly when I play against people who don’t play so often it’s easy for me, but when I play my lead designer he just rapes me! Obviously since he knows the intricacies of the control scheme, he’ll get me into positions where I have to really think and be calculating. Like a real UFC fighter I have to think, “Okay, maybe when he gets me on the ground I won’t be so aggressive and try to do stuff. I’ll play defensive and won’t let him get to the mount position.” I always try to stay away from him, to just chop away – but it inevitably always ends the same way! But I think that’s the cool thing. Even having played the game for hours on end, I can say that I’m very good but there will always be someone who’s better because they’ve mastered even more of the subtlety – mastering reversals, knowing how to keep you in position. I think that’s a very important aspect of it, especially with allowing people to play online and having them invest time in the game. You think you’re good, then all of a sudden you play someone who knows exactly what you’re doing, and how to combat that.

VideoGamer.com: You’ve already said you want this game to be accessible. Those comments notwithstanding, do you think this is quite a hardcore game? There seems to be lot of depth here.

ND: Without question. Our goal is to make as dedicated a portrayal of Mixed Martial Arts as has ever been created. Our designers worked on a lot of fighting games that you might be familiar with, so we wanted to do something different that would still incorporate these elements of traditional fighting games, but also newer elements of sport simulations. As such we’re kind of this strange hybrid. It wouldn’t be fair to call us a fighting game, as we don’t really follow fighting game traditions – even though it is still a fighting game! It’s also a sport simulation, with grappling and stand-up games. I think that’s the thing that really differentiates us: we’re able to compact both of those things and put it on a controller, where you can do all these things at the same time. So there’s a huge amount of depth, and we’ve tried to be faithful to the different disciplines.

VideoGamer.com: There seems to be growing concern among some gamers that “casual” titles are diluting the medium. What’s your stance on that?

ND: Well, I think it’s awesome that it’s helping to make gaming a more accepted medium… We’re still telling a story or delivering an experience. When I see people pick up the game for the first time I can tell that the adrenaline is rushing – they’re all nervous, bashing the controller. I think there is a market for both. Obviously the sales numbers will tell you that you want to a make a game accessible. If people don’t want to play it, if they’re frustrated, they’re not going to. But at the same time there is that art to making it acceptable enough but in a way still makes you want to get better – much like playing golf, or something. You do want to invest in getting better at it. I think that we do a good mix. If you’re not a gamer but you’re a UFC fan, you could just throw it in and play before a fight. But if you’re serious and you want to win, and you always want to win, you have to master all the subtleties and all the ground game. The example I use is that a couple of years ago with the UFC, there were a couple of guys coming in who were just knock-out artists – they didn’t have much of a ground game. But now you see a shift, where you have to be multidimensional. With guys like George St-Pierre or BJ Penn, you have to have exceptional stand-up and exceptional ground game. And I think Undisputed translates that well: You can be one-dimensional if you want, but you won’t always win.

VideoGamer.com: The 360 build we’re playing today looks pretty nice. How’s the PS3 version coming along? Will there be any difference between the two platforms?

ND: They’re identical. It’s easier for us to put the builds on Xbox machines, but yeah – you’ll have 60 frames per second on both platforms, and it’s going to be identical in terms of content and everything.

VideoGamer.com: Was that a struggle?

ND: Yeah, because it’s different pipelines and different architectures, it’s certainly a struggle – but I don’t think the PS suffered in any way. Obviously there were some challenges, but there’s complete parity between the systems.

VideoGamer.com: The PS3 was a bit behind the 360 last year, in terms of hardware sales. Do you think 2009 could be the PS3’s year, so to speak? There are a lot of good-looking exclusives due for release…

ND: I think so. The PS3 has a lot of things going for it. I personally had an Xbox that broke then I went and bought a PS3, also for the Blu-ray. I think it did a lot towards making Blu-ray the standard. There are a lot of things the PS3 does well. Unfortunately since it came out late and there weren’t a lot of titles for it, and it was a difficult development process, that kind of hindered its adoption rate. But I think it’s really about the titles, and I think you’ll start to see people gravitating towards the PS3 now, especially with Blu-ray being the standard high-def movie platform. When you can buy a PS3 for a hundred dollars more than a basic Blu-ray player, at that point why not just get a PS3? I have a friend whose Dad just re-did his house, and the AV company actually put PS3s in every room rather than just Blu-ray players: you’re able to update the firmware via the internet, it has a built-in browser… so it offers you so much more than a standard player. It has that going against the Xbox, because it’s able to tap into more of that mainstream commercial market, as opposed to being just a hardcore gaming machine. It’s really just a media box.

VideoGamer.com: Sony say that the PS3 will last 10 years. Do you think this generation will last that long?

ND: You know, I don’t know. A lot of economic factors will come into it, and also the issue of getting people to adopt brand-new technology. I would personally like to see the longevity, because the quality of the games only gets better the longer the platforms are out there. Changing hardware, while good technologically, damages the quality of the games. Certainly at the end of the last cycle, when you think of some of the amazing games that were coming out on the PS2 and Xbox 1… the best games of those consoles were coming out in the last two years. Then suddenly you had this push, okay now it’s Xbox 360 and PS3. So my hope would be that yes, we get a long, long period to make games for these consoles, because that’s how you end up maximising the hardware and getting the best quality. We are limited only by how much time we have and how much experience we have with it. Once we start finding all the tricks and nuances with a console, that’s only going to translate to the game.

VideoGamer.com: Do you have plans to support Undisputed with DLC, and what do you think of the ongoing trend for downloadable add-ons? Do you think there’s any pressure on developers to hold back content and ideas so that they can release them later?

ND: Well, I can’t really comment on the first one – I’ll have to take the “can neither confirm nor deny” aspect! But I think it really depends on the game. For some it really makes a lot of sense – downloading maps or characters, specific things. I think DLC adds to the longevity of a game, you’re able to update the game with content. Granted, we’d love to put everything in the game at once, but it also offers you time to distribute your development over a couple of months, so you can concentrate on getting the core game into great shape. And then the extra content you’re able to give to players later, so when they’ve had their fill to a certain amount, you give them a little more so they re-invest or rediscover the interest they had in the game initially.

VideoGamer.com: Undisputed looks really polished, but do you think there’s any truth to the idea that some studios rush games out with a load of bugs, and that they then use DLC as a way of doing work that should have been done before it’s out the door?

I wouldn’t really be able to comment. I’ve certainly seen elements of that in games, where you see all these bugs but then they do a day one title update. Sometimes that’s just necessary – you’re up against the wall and you have to get stuff out. But for the most part, I think most people want to get the game as great as it is before they submit. I don’t think that any developer I know wants to keep working on a game for longer than they’ve planned to! [laughs]. In that respect I think if it has to be done, it’s done to augment the quality of the game – not necessarily because they want to push the game out first, and fix it later.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time Neven.

UFC Undisputed is due for release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the spring.