Brent Nielsen is the Executive Producer of Tiger Woods 14 and has worked on a huge variety of EA’s sports titles, and we got the chance to chat golf, games and the next-gen consoles with him.
JOE: We’re excited to get a look at Tiger Woods 14, what can we expect in the new game over previous versions?
Brent Nielsen: Well the biggest new feature mode is definitely ‘Legends of the Majors’, which sees eight of the greatest golfers of all time added to the game: Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Jack Niclkaus, Arnold Palmer, Seve Ballesteros, Gary Player and Lee Trevino.
All four major championships are licensed in the game also, and when we got those licences, we wanted to make it bigger than just winning the Grand Slam or adding them to the career mode, we wanted to make it a lot more epic, so we decided to take our gamers back in time to six different eras that they can play through, each with a different visual treatment and equipment that reflect that time period.
So if you’re playing in the late 1800s to the early 1930s it’s going to be in black and white and you’ll be playing with old clubs like the baffing spoon or the mashie, or in the ’70s you get that early technicolour feel and newer equipment.
When you come to the end of a certain era, then you face a challenge against whatever legend you’re playing. If you can defeat them then you unlock that legend and can use everything that goes with them for use in other parts of the game. It’s the sporting equivalent of a boss level.
JOE: How did you get to grips with the physics behind the older equipment?
BN: Our design team and engineers did a great job, and a lot of research went into this mode. The team reviewed a lot of footage, looked at a lot of statistics like average driving distances, doing a lot of research across a number of different areas to get the physics just right.
We also spent quite a bit of time with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus and they were really helpful for those eras, the late 1950s through to the ’80s, talking about how the ball flew and how it worked, they gave some great insights.
JOE: There’s a lot of emotion attached to people having their favourite golfers of all time, especially someone like Seve Ballesteros, how did you assess the legends?
BN: Obviously the legends are the highest rated players that we have in the game, but we have a number of attributes that we assign a rating to. We looked at a lot of statistics for accuracy, putting, driving distance, things like that, all relative to the era that they played in.
We’ve also come up a new feature called Swing Styles. Last year we introduced Total Swing Control so that you could create any type of shot and that was very well received, so we added a bit more depth and layers to it.
Now when you create a golfer you can choose to be a power golfer, fade golfer, draw golfer, or whatever you want, but all of the licensed golfers from Tiger to Rory, including the legends, they all now play with their real life swing styles.
JOE: Do you ever get the golfers complaining that their stats aren’t high enough?
BN: I think that’s a universal thing across all of our sports titles! You get the odd comment when you meet with some of the guys on tour, like “you need to jack up my power stats, I’ve increased my driving distance five yards this year”, but it’s all in good fun.
In our FIFA game and our Madden game titles though you constantly hear about players thinking that their ratings are too low!
JOE: What are the challenges of designing a sports game above other titles, in particular golf?
BN: For sports titles in general, one of the challenges is releasing annually. A lot of people think designing a sports game is easy because you’ve got the rules of the sport and everything is already laid out, but you’ve got to put new content into the game to convince people that it’s worth spending their money on.
A lot of people buy the team sports franchises for the updated rosters, but for golf, that’s a particularly difficult challenge. We’ve got to add content, game modes and so on, so for us, new courses are really important.
You get the chance to play world class championship courses all around the world, which is a great feature, especially if you’re a golf fan.
JOE: Are you guys in production, development and design excited about the next-gen consoles?
BN: Obviously we all saw the same press conference from Sony that you guys saw, and looking forward it’s exciting to be working with more memory and better graphics and the obvious things, but what struck me is it really seems to be giving us a lot more tools to drive the social aspects of gaming.
For sports and in particular golf, they’re social by nature, so we’ll have scope to work with that. Currently, you can have live tournaments and play with friends, see their shots with the new shot arc, as well as enhancing our country clubs feature so you get bigger and more robust clubs, really making you feel that you’re playing against someone else in real time. I think that’s the direction it’s going to head in.
JOE: Visually, did you guys feel that you’d hit a ceiling and the next-gen was needed?
BN: I think you always try to push boundaries, even as we come to the end of this console cycle. But our designers, our art directors, they’re never satisfied, they always want more and it’s amazing what they can do with even just a few lighting tweaks.
A new feature we added this year is that the time of day dynamically changes, and you can even play golf at night in the game, so visually it looks really different this year.
It’s amazing, you think you’ve reached the end or hit some limits, even though this has been a longer console generation, and yet here we are, seven or eight years later and we’re still coming up with new ways to improve the graphics, so we’re looking forward to that on the new console too.
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