Rearranging Your Opponent’s Face

Hey! My name is Kudo Tsunoda, and I am the executive producer on EA Sports Fight Night 2004.

In our last developer diary, we talked about the genesis of our game's most innovative feature, Total Punch Control. This feature allows you to control your fists with the analog sticks to throw precise punches. Gone from gameplay are the days of complete button mashing. Landing punches is now a skill you have to master.

So one thing we are very focused on doing in Fight Night 2004 is giving gamers an immediate graphical reward for landing punches on their opponents. Fortunately, boxing provides this naturally, since boxers' faces are constantly being damaged and deformed by the impact of fists. Punch impacts have never been done justice in other boxing and fighting games.

You can't have a boxing game without busting up some faces.

Gathering the reference materials for this part of the game was the most bizarre research task of the project. We put together thousands of photos and videos of viscous cuts, grotesque swelling, and devastating knockouts. And we went to great lengths to bring this part of boxing to gamers in Fight Night 2004.

The damage your fists will cause is broken down into three parts: punch impacts, facial damage, and knockdowns.

Getting punch impacts right was especially tricky. We watched endless hours of slo-mo video and looked at thousands of pictures of when power shots landed directly on boxers' heads. We wanted to see exactly what was happening to boxers' faces right at the point of punch impact. The three most noticeable effects were sweat flying off guys' heads, blood spraying out of existing cuts, and the ripple of boxers' facial flesh as it distorted from the power of the punches. Fight Night 2004 has all of these effects, the most impressive of which is the deformation of the boxers' faces when they get hit by punches.

In the replay cameras, you can watch from multiple slow motion angles as your opponent's face completely distorts based on exactly what punch you throw and from what angle. The realism of this feature is stunning, and it really adds to the trash talking when you land a clean shot on your friend and then can taunt him as his face caves in on impact. In the never-ending quest for the most realistic effects, we even went so far as to capture many facial reactions using our motion capture system. All of our standard boxing animations were done with "mocap," but it is the innovative use of motion capture to gather these facial animations that brings Fight Night 2004's effects to a level never before seen in other games. The stunt people we used to capture these animations certainly earned their money that day!!

The multiple camera angles used during the replays will let you know just how much pain you caused your opponent.

While seeing your punch crush your opponent's face is awesome, one of the easiest ways to see who is winning a fight is how beat up a boxer's face is from repeatedly getting hit. During the course of a fight, boxers' faces bruise, cut, and swell in sometimes epic proportions. This happens dynamically during a fight, and you can really see this happen as you are hitting your opponent in Fight Night 2004. Bruises develop in the exact areas where your punches are landing; you can break your opponent's nose with clean shots to the center of his face; landing punches repeatedly around a boxer's eyes will cause the eye areas to swell dynamically during a fight. The more you pick at a specific area of your opponent's face, the worse the damage in that area will become. Eventually cuts will open, and the blood will start to flow. The cuts in the game look really sweet! They have a great viscosity to them.

One thing I am really proud of about our damage system is that it is not just a visual effect. Like we have tried to do with all features we put into Fight Night 2004, the damage done to a boxer has a realistic effect on the gameplay. With the great defensive capabilities of Fight Night described in the last developer diary, you need to be able to block and lean out of the way of punches in this game, or you are in trouble. It is no longer a nonstop slugfest, so you need to keep your guard up. However, the more damage done to a boxer in the game, the harder it is for a boxer to protect himself. For example, if a boxer has a bad cut near his left eye, he will not be able to react defensively to punches coming from that side of his face. Like in real boxing, he has a harder time seeing the punches as they are coming toward him. This means once you start doing some damage to your opponent, you can repeatedly drive punches in to the blind-eye side of his face to really put the hurt on!