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Posted
May 11 2008, 06:02 PM
Back home after a big week up in Vancouver. We hosted our first-ever EA SPORTS Season Opener, a showcase of most of our upcoming games for this year for media from all over the world. It was a great chance to give early looks at our new games to media who had come from near and far to get a taste of what they can see this year from EA SPORTS.
You may have read some of the news and game previews that have come out of the event over the past few days. A few things I wanted to highlight:
• I’ve mentioned a number of times that a real priority for us as the gaming industry evolves is diversifying our portfolio. We unveiled two new initiatives last week that I think we will do that.
o We announced a new sub-brand with games designed for a broad casual sports gaming audience. EA SPORTS Freestyle replaces EA SPORTS Big, and we plan to ship three new games in the next year under this brand. FaceBreaker, coming in September, will be the first. While no announcements have been made, I’m also very interested in the health and fitness space and think we can be a leader in this space. Afterall, I was a P.E. teacher years and years ago and am excited about what we could do here.
o We also announced an initiative for the Wii called “All-Play”. We’re designing five of our most popular franchises exclusively for the Wii this year and they’ll feature unique controls, unique modes, unique presentation, and unique packaging. All-Play is a much more all-encompassing design philosophy that expands significantly on last year’s Family Play control scheme in Madden, FIFA and NBA LIVE.
• Last Wednesday, we confirmed that Fight Night Round 4 is in development and slated to release in 2009. It was an honor to have three of boxing’s best at EAC to make the announcement. You’ll see below that Winky Wright, Lennox Lewis and Sugar Ray Leonard look more at home in the ring that I do, but it was sure fun listening to them talk about the sport and picking their brains for ideas for Fight Night. We obviously also listen to feedback from the fans on what you want to see in our games, and so we’re also excited to be bringing Mike Tyson back to videogame boxing for the first time in nearly a decade. That’s something fans have been begging for.
• I also had a chance to catch up with a number of our producers over the past week and remain really motivated by the great work that’s being done. After we had our first announcement about this year’s Tiger Woods game last week, we had some questions about some of the new features. So I caught up with Executive Producer Mike Taramykin and asked him to clarify a few things they have planned for this year. Click here to see what Mike had to say.
Cheers,
Peter
Posted
Apr 27 2008, 07:53 PM
Following our unveiling Thursday evening of Brett Favre as the Madden NFL 09 cover athlete on The Late Show with David Letterman, we followed up with a luncheon in New York City honoring the legendary quarterback on Friday.
Sponsored by EA SPORTS, we brought in Sterling Sharpe, former teammate of Brett's in Green Bay, as the MC. Also present were Steve Mariucci, who was Brett's QB coach in the early years, as well as Matt Hasselbeck, who was back-up to Brett in Green Bay before moving to Seattle.
I've attached some exclusive pictures of the event, including the presentation to Brett of a limited-edition Xbox 360 featuring the cover artwork. Great event, honoring a tremendous athlete and human being.
Posted
Apr 04 2008, 06:43 AM
As
I’ve mentioned previously, I enjoy reading a lot of the very colorful comments many of you have been providing on my blog. I now regularly take many of the ideas and questions I see straight to our development teams and look for answers. I figured it would only make sense if I started sharing some of what I've been finding out.
Again,
the best way to get the scoop is to go straight to the source – our production
teams. And about once a month or so, I’ll be trying to report back at
least a handful of answers to your most commonly asked questions. Of course, as
we get closer to launch on many of this year’s games you’ll want to view
our producer blogs on each product website as well for even more detail.
This
week, we talk NBA LIVE and Madden.
Tim G says “There's stuff that should just not happen in
basketball games when there's no pressure on your character; going out of
bounds on an inbound, stepping back over center court. There’s a lot of
frustrating issues in both games but Live they are far more prevalent. Also the
"Hot Zones" are quite obnoxious looking. Colouring the entire court
during play is ridiculous, and 2k's solution of cell-phone-style signal bars is
much better.”
Here’s
what Brian Ullrich, our line producer for NBA LIVE had to say about hotzones:
“We
built our hotzones based on the real hotspots tracked by the NBA,
so the look was based on that. We found we had to add a third color (the
NBA ones are red, blue, and a kind of brown color) to make them
understandable. We didn't have as much rendering or systems support on
hotzones as we would have liked. The hotzones were done late in the schedule
and there wasn't much time to iterate on them once they were done. We
tried a bunch of color combinations and found the ones the best we could do in
the time we had. We are improving them significantly this year so stay tuned.”
Regarding
Inbounds/Center Court Issues, Brian says:
“We
had many problems around accurately determining exactly where all of a player's
limbs are with respect to out of bounds. At the end of last year this
resulted in players being called out of bounds more than they should have, just
through the act of receiving a pass, dribbling in place, etc. The only
way we could fix it was to make the out of bounds call pretty generous.
Usually the camera is far enough away that you don't notice this, but when you
look at plays on instant replay it becomes noticeable. We will be tuning
this again this year, and it will be better, but this is something I doubt
we’ll ever be able to keep it from happening in all cases.”
AJ says, “My league has been running now since Madden 06.
We love being able to draft our teams from scratch and taking them online and
playing a full 16 game schedule and playoffs included. Problem is this year
there are no stats after the games? Why not Mr. Moore? I ask you to allow us to
have the stats of our games, custom teams or not.”
Here’s
what Dale Jackson, our Executive Producer for Madden NFL told me:
“Year
after year, the discussion of league play and stat tracking has been a
recurring theme in feedback on Madden. Madden NFL 09 will address this
feedback directly. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that
those who enjoy online stats won’t be disappointed. Based on the amount
we see this requested in forums, we’re very excited about our features we have
planned here.”
Ron says, “ Mr. Moore, I recall in an interview
with Game Informer you mentioned something along the lines of making Madden
more playable for casual gamers. Is there way to customize the engine to
satisfy the casual as well as the hardcore gamer who wants more simulation and
realism? For instance why not just create a separate arcade mode for the casual
user who knows very little about football. This can possibly perhaps increase
your sales which from what I understand decreased last year.”
Great
question, Ron. I’ll take this one first. I’m passionate about making our
games more approachable without “dumbing down” the experience. Sometimes
that means new modes (as you point out), sometimes that means creating different
control schemes (as we did last year with Family Play on our Wii games), but
it’s also very important that this also mean creating approachability in our
core game experiences as well. Tuning our games to be fun and
approachable regardless of what your skill level is at first and making them
adapt to meet your skill level.
Here’s
Dale’s take on this:
“Designing features
that make the game more approachable while also adding a layer of depth for the
hardcore can be tricky. Madden NFL 09 has new features that adapt the
experience to be fun no matter what your level of skill. On top of that,
it’s highly customizable for those that enjoy tweaking the game themselves.”
Smokecapone
says, “What are you guys going to do about cheating in online gaming? I
play Madden religiously (PS3) even though the game is not what it is on the
PS2. I get tired like many others that play the game the way it’s played in
reality to go home from work or whatever and relax and chill by playing a quick
game online only to be cheated because the idiot can’t pick up on basic
controls of Madden."
More
from Dale:
“I
spend a lot of time playing online as well and have fallen victim to the same cheats or
glitches that many have complained about. Believe me, nothing makes the team more
angry than to see folks using these to ruin the experience of honest Madden
players. We're constantly reading the boards and reviewing game logs to
hunt down any major issues. Through a few patches for Madden 08, we
greatly reduced the number of major cheats in the game. We’ll be even
more diligent for Madden NFL 09 and will patch any serious glitch or cheat
that’s discovered. All issues reported by the community from the 08 product
have already been addressed in 09.”
Again,
as much as I'd like to, there’s no way I can respond to every question I get on here. But I'll do my best to address as many key themes as I can. Much more of this
to come.
- Peter
Posted
Apr 01 2008, 07:34 PM
As I mentioned when we migrated to this new format for the blog a couple of weeks ago, one of the things I was looking forward to being able to do was to share more videos. As we get deeper into the production and launch cycle for our 2008 games, we’ll have plenty to share. To get things started, I wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes taste of life at EA Redwood Shores, where I am based full time. Obviously, our two main development studios are just outside of Vancouver (EA Canada) and in Orlando (Tiburon), but I thought you may like a look at what goes on back in the Bay Area, including our player’s lounge, sports bar, my desk and video conferencing area. Take a look.
By now, I gather you’ve all seen our news last week about our
Madden NFL 09 20th Anniversary Collector’s Edition. As anticipation starts to grow for August, there were a few common themes that I wanted to pick up on from many of the posts and chatter on the boards the past few days.
1. Reviews were mixed when we shipped
NFL Head Coach a couple of years ago. Believe me, I think I’ve heard most of the good and bad on that one, mostly from our development teams who are acutely aware of everything you liked and didn’t like…down to the finest details. From what I’ve seen of new Head Coach, this is an entirely new game. I know you don’t want to just hear that from me, so listen to our producers over the next few months talk and show you everything they’ve done to re-work a concept that has a ton of potential, especially with how we’re creating a connected experience between
Madden and
Head Coach.
2. We knew that our decision to not develop this year’s
Madden for the PC would be an unpopular decision in some circles. But I’ll reiterate what I said a couple of weeks ago in this space…the PC presents some very serious business challenges to us in the sports category, particularly because so many of you all are playing your favorite sports games on the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. We are committed to shipping a limited number of our games on the PC this year, but we’ve also had to cut a few of our games from the platform. We do have ideas for how to revitalize the PC for sports games and the types of games that are best suited to the platform, and we’ll continue to explore those.
Couple of other quick notes…
Last time I mentioned that I’d be speaking with Will Brooks, founder of
MyFootballClub.co.uk. We had a terrific conversation late last week, and I’ll be sharing some of that over the next couple of weeks on the blog. You don’t have to be a football fan to find what Will is doing fascinating, so hopefully that will be something to look forward to.
You’ll no doubt be happy to hear that I have climbed out of the basement of the EA SPORTS
March Madness bracket (which, by the way, benefits a great charitable organization, the
Jimmy V Foundation -
http://www.jimmyv.org/). I head to San Antonio for The Final Four on Friday, and I will report back to you on what goes on during this great sports weekend.
Liverpool produced a workmanlike performance to beat Everton on Sunday morning, and unlike last weekend, made the early alarm call worthwhile. Big game versus Arsenal on Wednesday night – wish us luck.
Oh, and play ball!!! Go Sox…
Posted
Mar 27 2008, 06:26 PM
Many of you will have seen this announced today, but just in case, I wanted to make everyone aware of this exciting announcement from EA SPORTS regarding Madden 09. Everyone here is so proud of having reached this incredible milestone with our storied Madden franchise, and we couldn’t be more delighted to offer this collector’s edition to commemorate the 20th anniversary. For more information, read this release we just sent out.
Press Release