TapOrSnap AMA

[Freakywwe]

Quote: Originally Posted by TapOrSnap

We made this change to address feedback that walkouts were too long, so were looking at ways to shorten the prefight and get players into game quickly. For 3 round fights in career, we wanted to build the experience up to the player and save all the 5 round pageantry for later in career. Giving the player a sense of progression. TOS

Is there any chance this could ever be looked at? Definitely understand where you're coming from as I would imagine 99% of players skip the entrances and intros anyway and I'm all for speeding up getting into gameplay, but it would be great if this could be left up to the users choice, especially offline. In event mode, for instance, the entrances are all about building the hype for the fight. To have Bruce quickly get through the fighter intros takes away a bit from that, or to not have entrances at all for three round fights, makes them feel like prelim fights rather then main card fights.

That and the champion shorts are really the only thing that's holding back event mode right now IMO, which I'll admit is where I spend 99% of my time, so I'm definitely biased. Probably just a little excited since event mode in UFC 4 didn't feature entrances after the first one that if we could get them back, I'd be ecstatic lol

[TapOrSnap]

Quote: Originally Posted by Freakywwe

Is there any chance this could ever be looked at? Definitely understand where you're coming from as I would imagine 99% of players skip the entrances and intros anyway and I'm all for speeding up getting into gameplay, but it would be great if this could be left up to the users choice, especially offline. In event mode, for instance, the entrances are all about building the hype for the fight. To have Bruce quickly get through the fighter intros takes away a bit from that, or to not have entrances at all for three round fights, makes them feel like prelim fights rather then main card fights. That and the champion shorts are really the only thing that's holding back event mode right now IMO, which I'll admit is where I spend 99% of my time, so I'm definitely biased. Probably just a little excited since event mode in UFC 4 didn't feature entrances after the first one that if we could get them back, I'd be ecstatic lol

There is always a chance. When we have to make decisions which please one portion of our player base and displease another we will often leave both options and make it a setting with the default being the easier or more popular choice. This comes with added cost as we now need to maintain and support both options. It also puts onus of the choice onto the user, everyone thinks they want choice until they have to go through five million settings just to get into game. We try to be surgical in our selections and provide choice in the most impactful areas.

Regarding the shorts which frankly I'm surprised is such a big sticking point, but that's personal, I always just take the default myself. With the exception of mirror matches where I just pick a different color. I can't speak to any plans regarding fighter likeness as that is not my area. I can say that your consternation has been communicated to the folks who control these things.

TOS

[AleBrew]

A couple of things.

First off I’m really enjoying the game. There was a lot of negativity on here pre-launch and after playing I can safely say it was mostly unwarranted.

On career mode a couple of odd things have come up that I doubt we’re intended.

1) I’m playing on Hard simulation mode. One fight I have a HUD at the top of the screen, the next I don’t. Not a big issue for me as I’ll be switching to Legendary next go around (and played 4 with no HUD) but might be an issue for some.

2) I just had a pre-fight cut scene where Coach Davis told me this fight was a 5 round main event (didn’t notice anything different in training or fight offer). However Buffer announced it as 3 rounds and on screen it seemed to be a 3 rounder. I finished it in the first so I can’t say for sure, but seemed like an error.

[skz1904]

Quote: Originally Posted by TapOrSnap

This is a really good question. Anyone who can come up with a really good answer will have a long and prosperous career in the games industry. First let me say that on our team we take great pride in how smooth we have managed to get the animation without taking away player agency or responsiveness. To attempt to answer your question I will use a couple examples. When people walk they know what they are going to do next. If I am walking forward and decide to turn sideways or back up I instinctively plant my feet accordingly before I try to move. We can't read the player's mind so if they try to change direction mid step we have to either wait until the animation plants or blend as best we can. We have chosen to prioritize responsiveness. Strikes are a similar issue. We have always prioritized predictability with strike timing. So while we have captured animations with actors moving in many different directions we still have to blend the strike if the player hits that button mid movement. The opponent's actions multiply the challenges because they might be swaying, moving or striking themselves. In real life a fighter takes all these things into account and the computer between their ears adjusts on the fly. We have targeting and blending logic to do the same but depending on how far the captured animation differs from the current state of the game the results can be imperfect. Long story short. Our animations look fantastic in a vacuum but we have to do a fair amount of post processing to make them work during gameplay and give the player the agency to do things that are unexpected or even strategically unsound. Button mashers do not make our job easier. TOS

Thank you for the detailed explanation. It makes sense and I guess it also does explain why I always felt like going in practice mode and just doing strikes and not hitting anything, or even hitting the dummy AI, always felt and looked a lot better than live AI dummies or human opponents. I just wish maybe punches across the board felt like they came from fighters' feet more often than they currently do. Especially stepping body jabs. Hell, stepping jabs in general. They just look disjointed. Like the foot is not properly planting before the hand reaches its target. Dominick Cruz is the one example I remember where his signature animations for fakes and stepping are so well-done and clean that this problem is non-existent. But you need to trigger those animations to begin with.

I also assume that it's hard to achieve FNC levels of quality when an MMA game has to take more striking and movement complexity into account than just hands, head movement and lunges. Plus you're responsiveness-drive.

Appreciate it.

[Mr.Nicewatch22]

First of all thanks for doing this. Im hoping I can get this answered because it may be the deciding factor in me purchasing the full game.

I am pretty much an all offline player. I like to run events that mirror IRL fight cards. In UFC 4 the advanced settings were separated by player and CPU. In UFC 5 it was changed to red and blue corner. That means that if i want to do custom settings I can only fight out of one corner for the whole fight which really kills the immersion for me.

Do you know why this changed and if theres a chance it could be reverted back?

[Freakywwe]

Quote: Originally Posted by TapOrSnap

There is always a chance. When we have to make decisions which please one portion of our player base and displease another we will often leave both options and make it a setting with the default being the easier or more popular choice. This comes with added cost as we now need to maintain and support both options. It also puts onus of the choice onto the user, everyone thinks they want choice until they have to go through five million settings just to get into game. We try to be surgical in our selections and provide choice in the most impactful areas. Regarding the shorts which frankly I'm surprised is such a big sticking point, but that's personal, I always just take the default myself. With the exception of mirror matches where I just pick a different color. I can't speak to any plans regarding fighter likeness as that is not my area. I can say that your consternation has been communicated to the folks who control these things. TOS

Appreciate the response!

Absolutely understand from a design point of overwhelming the end user with too many options, and having to support all of those options, it's something I try to avoid myself in my own job while designing applications.

To give a little background on why we feel so strongly about the shorts. Many of use run our own "Universes" in an excel spreadsheet that tracks our cards that we use as a tracker (My personal sheet even has some calculations for rankings and such), so we effectively use event mode as our "Universe" mode so not being able to put our "Champion" in his championship shorts just takes away from that sense of realism. It's an incredibly minor thing, but I think it all stands out to us because it was in the game for UFC 2 and then just disappeared with no real explanation behind it, so we've all kindof been wondering for years whether this was deliberate design choice (Either by the team or a direction from the UFC) or was just a glitch that was never looked at.

I think people also have the idea that it should be an easy fix since it's just shorts, but having worked in application design I know full well nothing is ever a simple "fix" without something seemingly unrelated breaking in the background, so I appreciate that you could at least confirm it's just something the dev team never saw value in, which I can absolutely understand, even if we do.

Thank you!

[TapOrSnap]

Quote: Originally Posted by AleBrew

A couple of things. First off I’m really enjoying the game. There was a lot of negativity on here pre-launch and after playing I can safely say it was mostly unwarranted. On career mode a couple of odd things have come up that I doubt we’re intended. 1) I’m playing on Hard simulation mode. One fight I have a HUD at the top of the screen, the next I don’t. Not a big issue for me as I’ll be switching to Legendary next go around (and played 4 with no HUD) but might be an issue for some. 2) I just had a pre-fight cut scene where Coach Davis told me this fight was a 5 round main event (didn’t notice anything different in training or fight offer). However Buffer announced it as 3 rounds and on screen it seemed to be a 3 rounder. I finished it in the first so I can’t say for sure, but seemed like an error.

I am glad to hear you are enjoying it.

Regarding the issues you mentioned, thank you. Both of them are known and are being investigated.

TOS

[Irish0331]

Quote: Originally Posted by TapOrSnap

We made this change to address feedback that walkouts were too long, so were looking at ways to shorten the prefight and get players into game quickly. For 3 round fights in career, we wanted to build the experience up to the player and save all the 5 round pageantry for later in career. Giving the player a sense of progression. TOS

Firstly, I'm that guy. Had my tantrum. I was gonna show EA by not buying the game/won't support EA again yadda yadda and cancelled my pre order. Then I get home last night, yeah...i went back and bought it. You guys love people like me. Fortunately $100 doesnt break the bank for me so whatever. Whats done is done.

This intro thing is a great example of decisions that are baffling. I know you have thousands of them to make, literally, but some are just...I dunno. So in this case, intros are cut down to cater to the people who think they take too long. Well, they have the x button to skip thru it. You've given that community of people the option to get into the fight quick. But then you remove a few extra seconds worth of immersive content from the people who actually do want to see/hear it for the same reason? Seems a bit overkillish.

Sounds alot like the cage grappling/grinding choice, which is a huge gripe of mine. My understanding is that there is some large community of players who "dont like getting stuck against the cage" and thats why grinding was removed. I get it. I dont like getting stuck on my back against the cage. Also, I dont like getting full mounted, but thats still a thing. Anyway, you catered to this community by giving them stand and bang. Boom, problem solved for the non grappler types. So, why drop it from MMA mode? Cage grappling is as integral to the sport of MMA as striking and ground fighting. We had it. The stand and bangers are happy. What about the rest of us. After all, this is an MMA game.

Lastly, I know its probably not as simple as installing an on/off wall switch, but offline caf customizing is a must. Archetypes were/are an awesome add in order to get a caf up and running asap. But being able to truly build a CAF from the bottom up adds so much value for a big community of fans who've been buying your games since Fedor and Randy graced the cover. I get that online, its a trainwreck full of 99's. But theres gotta be something that can be done to give the offliners something they can really sink their teeth into.

I think alot of fan frustration is born from the fact that alot of these things were already there for us in the past. Like, shorts colors/champ shorts. Removing something that worked completely fine vs improving upon it is why alot of folks feel like we're moving backwards.

All that said, I got about an hour on the sticks last night playing 5 and it feels different in a good way.

There, I've wiped my tears and put my big boy pants on.