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Note: Sections of the original article have been edited in respect of Electronic Arts Tiburon employees.
Early last week Xbox Evolved had the opportunity to go down to sunny Orlando, Florida to EA Tiburon and between playing the CoD4 beta, and Tiger Woods 08 I managed to write this article up. Electronic Arts Tiburon is best known for the EA Sports brand of games, specifically Madden NFL, NCAA Football, NASCAR, and now for the first time this year Tiger Woods PGA Tour series.
In the past two years, specifically in the next-generation of systems the Tiger Woods series hasn’t been going much of anywhere; and apparently EA recognized this, so they shipped all the previous code to EA Tiburon from EA Canada to see if a new team could improve the title vastly and conveniently due to acquiring develop Hypnotix in 2005, the creators of the Outlaw Golf series they had plenty of experience to help it out. What better place to develop a golf title? Tiger lives in the area, and Orlando is nothing but theme parks and golf courses, so it is a surprise they didn’t do this earlier.
This is me—in videogame form.
The bar was set high for this year’s edition according to one of the producers of the game, issues that previous EA Sports titles had online, with little support after the game had to be solved, and through this year’s Tiger Woods title they think they have found at least part of the answer. New to Tiger Woods this year is Gamernet; a way for players to post challenges and videos of their favorite strokes, holes, and other specific challenges. Let’s say you have a nine-hole game with three eagles, or you’re on a green and make a hole in one. If it is something cool that you think is worth posting up, you pause the game, hit X to go to the Gamernet options and can either make a clip of the game, or a challenge. You can set the rules to the challenge once you go into your clips and then post it onto Gamernet. You receive points for challenges you beat, and you can find all kinds of interesting things to do there. You may also opt to upload your video clip to EA’s servers. In which case you go onto EA’s new Sports World site, login, and check out your clip. At the moment of writing this there doesn’t seem to be any apparent way to download and save the clip into a readable file so that you could post it on perhaps YouTube, but EA should have something working here shortly. It is very similar to what EA Sports has also done with NCAA Football 08. Surprisingly, the Gamernet feature was made specifically with PGA Tour in mind by the Tiger team, and the various teams at EA actually work as their own separate entities in many cases. While EA wouldn’t comment on Gamernet showing up in other EA Sports titles, can you imagine the possibilities? This would especially work for big hitters such as FIFA, Madden, and NBA Live.
EA is also listening to the fans, and seeing what they are saying about their titles in the forums. EA invited two gentlemen by the names of Fred and Tim; both long time fans of EA’s series of golf titles, and both very critical as well. Imagine the most hardcore Halo fan you know, and I can almost guarantee that these guys are more involved in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series. Yeah, they are that serious. So serious that Tim won a EA sponsored PGA Tour game tournament before, with a prize of $10,000! These guys are involved in various parts of the online community, such as Xbox.com forums, EA forums, and others. You could say that they somewhat represent the TWPGA Tour community. They both came wanting more, and they got mostly what they wanted. A harder game, that even these diehards had trouble with, and both had incredibly interesting stories to tell. They are the kind of guys EA listens to, and next time you wonder if EA listens, well they are the answer.
One of the issues that just recently surfaced is the news that employees of Electronic Arts have been editing their Wikipedia page, but the news seems to have gone on deaf ears down in Florida. “I honestly spend to much time worrying about making a good game to worry about stuff like that.” one producer told me. “I know it was from somewhere in EA Redwood Shores, I don’t know why they would even care to do that, it’s kind of a weird thing to me.” a PR specialist revealed.
Another, more interesting issue that was harder to decipher between PR hyperbole and the truth was issues with developing the games on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. A producer for Tiger Woods said because of the nature of golf, both 360 and PS3 versions of the game would be virtually identical in terms of gameplay, visuals, framerates, and any other technical issues you could think of other than features that are exclusive to each of the consoles. However, talking to some developers that worked on other games at Tiburon, I heard other stories but let’s keep it at that!
So what is next for the team working on the series, specifically since they have the guys from Hypnotix helping them out now? I asked about the possibility of a EASports BIG golf title, going back to the old team’s roots when they were working on the Outlaw Golf series. One of the head designers on Tiger Woods said they would like to do it, but it probably isn’t in the near future.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 is looking great this year and you can check out our full review of the game here.
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