SPOnG: Is there a danger that your passion for the sport and the game may see any adverse effects on development?
Nick Laing: I have never seen my passion create any danger for the game itself, no. It probably creates danger for my family, as I spend so much time working on it (laughs)! But my wife, she's actually a national-level Kung Fu competitor so the passion runs in the family there. In fact, my wife may be a bigger
MMA fan than I am!
SPOnG: Were there any challenges in how you thought of representing things like takedowns and grapples? Other games do it a little bit differently to yours, so how did you come to approach that?
Nick Laing: I don't know if I'd call anything a challenge, but something I'm really proud of is the feel of the fight. When you're wrestling or in Judo combat, there's something that happens when two people are in a hold, where you're existing so close to each other that both combatants become sensitive to the nuances of each other's movements. So a very good grappler might be able to tell the shifts in the centre of gravity, weight and the tensing of certain muscles that might signal an explosive move or submission. And these guys are good, they can read this stuff and react to it before it even happens.
That's what we're doing with the rumble in the controller right now. If the controller rumbles, the guy that's really in tune with that sort of fighting and wrestling will feel it sooner and more intensely than someone who's not. That opens up opportunities for these guys, and I'm really proud of that. I'm really proud of the strategy and the thinking of
MMA that made it into this gameplay.
SPOnG: One thing you said a moment ago was that MMA is very much a Tiburon game, but you also consult other EA departments. How much of a consulting role did they have?
Nick Laing: Right now we at Tiburon are trying to close the game out, and we've done a lot of the work here, but early on other EA studios played a very big part in
MMA's development. We sent designers and engineers to BioWare's studio in Canada, we brought some of their people into our team as well. Our tech is supported by the same that supported fight night.
That's one of the benefits of working at EA is just the pool of shared knowledge and foundation that everyone brings in each studio. We're all constantly updating and improving on each other's titles, as well as our own.
SPOnG: One of the things you've probably been asked about a lot already is the fact that THQ already has a mixed martial arts game in the form of UFC Undisputed...
Nick Laing: What? I'm not familiar with it (laughs).
SPOnG: You may have heard of it from some crazy guy, I don't know. That series has been going a couple years already, and is extremely successful. What makes this game different, or in your eyes better, than the UFC games?
Nick Laing: We're big fans of
MMA, we watch all the UFC fights – and we have plenty of UFC fighters in our game, actually. One of the things I'm proud of with this title is the global nature. The fact that there are fights happening in Britain, Japan, Brazil... they're all different and good for their own reasons. You know, three five-minute rounds in a unified bout is practically a cakewalk compared to a twenty-minute Vale Tudo match, or even the ten-minute first round in Japanese rules.
It changes the way you play the game, so it adds a lot of depth to it. Yo don't have to play in those places, you can stay with local unified rule events and things like that, but if you're looking for a change and are interested in that, then... just the stamina management challenge of fighting twenty minutes with a grappler changes the way you think about and play your game. I'm really proud of that.
There's also the consistent control – nobody should feel frustrated by the control scheme of our game. At the end of the day, the right stick is always used for striking, and that left stick is always move. If you wanna go a little more in depth, add the modifier and you get kicking. A little more in depth than that, and you get blacking. So now you've got timing involved. More in depth than that is parrying, where you can knock an incoming strike to one side or the other, opening up opportunities for takedowns and big hits. A little more in depth than that, and you have catching, where you catch a strike and drill down with your own attack. That stuff is depth that will happen.
You've been playing it and having a good time, but I guarantee you that nobody has been able to grab an incoming kick yet today. But give it a couple of days, and you guys will start running through those depths, but right at the very beginning – two dudes punching each other, you can get right into it and just start to learn the sport of
MMA right there.
