Having pummelled our opponents senseless in EA Sports’ first ever mature-rated game, we sat down to speak with Fight Night Champion producer Mike Mahar.
JOE: What is the future of boxing games now and do you see Microsoft Kinect and Playstation Move peripherals as part of it?
MM: I don’t know that right now. Our consumers necessarily are in good enough shape to throw punches for two minutes straight for ten rounds, so that’s probably the single biggest hurdle to get us moving right into the Kinect or the Move. We’re looking at ways to integrate the technology in a smaller way to start. Perhaps mini-games, perhaps a different game entirely. We’re definitely looking at the Kinect and Move as places we can move into in the future.
JOE: In terms of Fight Night Champion, what does it bring to the fore for the franchise?
MM: The single biggest thing that we did in this game, hence the name, is the Champion mode. I don’t think that what we’ve done has ever been done in a simulation sports game before and what we’ve done is we’ve taken a boxing movie and put it in our game.
So essentially you get to play what is a boxing movie, the story was written by an Academy Award-winning writer called Will Rokos (Monster’s Ball), we had a bunch of Hollywood actors do voice talent and motion capture (Eliza Dushku), so you’re getting a wicked story to play through.
Your character is Andre Bishop and each fight in the mode itself is like a boss battle, so there are very unique challenges within each fight. So if anything that would be the biggest new feature you can find.
BOFF! ZANG! SNORK!
JOE: So it brings a narrative…
MM: Absolutely. You move back and forward in time, to the story of Andre’s life. In and out of prison as well, so there’s definitely some very cool stuff.
JOE: Compared to most sports titles, Fight Night is unique in that it’s bi-annual. Considering you’ve brought in such a huge story mode, would it be fair to say that in terms of the actual game itself, is it hard to add much more to the simulation-style gameplay?
MM: I get this question a lot and all I would have to do is point you to our forums, where our community members are not shy to tell us what they want to see. So in that respect, no. There’s so much more consumers would like us to add, which we think we can add too. In addition to the Champion mode, we still have a sim career mode, with an RPG-esque level tree, where you build XP and can level up your skills, earn unlockables. We’ve added money, purses, not to mention keeping all the sim elements of online and offline fights and adding a narrative.
JOE: Do you think that for post-release DLC, it might be more exciting for players to not just have new fighters to download, but new episodes to download along their story tree?
MM: That’s a good question. The single biggest hurdle to that is just expense. What we can recoup from the DLC versus how much it costs to add additional elements to a narrative. It’s not cheap but it’s something we’re looking at doing for sure. DLC in its entirety, whether it’s additions to the story or additional boxers.
JOE: So do you think that Champion mode can build a new identity for Fight Night and help move it forward?
MM: Yeah, I think so. It’s been both a blessing and a curse to have the history that Fight Night has, in that it’s been seen as the first ‘next-gen’ experiences, so we have to continually add features to capture the imagination of consumers. So we’re hoping that Champion Mode in its present incarnation will help that.
JOE: Finally, one of the Fight Night features that everyone loves are the Legendary fighters. Any chance of seeing Rocky or Apollo Creed in there?
MM: [Laughs] We actually looked into that. Sylvester Stallone owns the rights to his own likeness and the Rocky likenesses so I can only imagine that’s not going to be very cheap. But in terms of Apollo, Drago and the rest of the guys, never say never.
JOE: Well Ivan Drago was the best of all time, we all know that…
MM: To that point, we have a GameFace feature that allows you to create a bunch of boxers and customise the colours of your trunks, gloves and tattoos, so the object of that is that if you can’t find what you want in the game, you can always create it.
JOE: That’s brilliant, and thanks for your time.
MM: No problem.
Fight Night Champion is set for release on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on March 4. You can find our previous first look at the game here.
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