GccTxs67
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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Preview (Xbox 360)
By: Nate Ahearn - "NateDog"
April 12th, 2007
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 (Xbox 360)
Connectivity is now an official way of life. Because of the vast amounts of connectivity now offered by sites like MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube the Internet has turned into a venerable community of intertwined users. Over the next year gamers can expect video games to follow a similar pattern. With Bungie adding in the ability to record your favorite kill shots and send them to your friends over Xbox Live in Halo 3, the flood gates have opened for other game developers to follow a similar pattern. EA Sports’ 2008 lineup looks as though it will be among the first to offer players a community atmosphere unlike any we’ve seen in gaming before.
Recently EA Sports’ Tiburon Studio in Orlando, Florida flew TeamXbox down to the sunshine – though it rained everyday we were there – state to checkout their up and coming set of surefire bestsellers. While the event was dubbed an “open house” on the invitation, it was more of an “open room.” Gaming journalists huddled into a room and were witness to the sports lineup that everyone will be playing through the coming year, with one pleasant surprise.
As it turns out, the Tiger Woods series has migrated south, and is now being developed by sports powerhouse known as Tiburon. The country club member in all of us rejoiced.
Walk softly and carry a big stick.
The advent of GamerNet
The first step in Mike Taramykin’s presentation was introducing something known simply as GamerNet. At its most basic level, GamerNet is used to store exemplary shots that you make on the golf course. Make a once-in-a-lifetime hole-in-one? Save it to your hard drive and send it to your buddies for bragging rights. Shoot a remarkable 40 on 18 holes? Save it to your hard drive and forward it to your pals. Sounds cool right? Well that ain’t the half of it.
Where GamerNet will really get its legs is from the community features and economy that EA is building into the game. When you hop onto GamerNet you’ll see a list of channels, a round of the day link, and a shot of the day link. The round and shot of the day are self-explanatory. Everyday EA will select the best golf shot and round and post it online. The four channels – more can be added at any time by EA, but at this point there are four – are basically different categories of challenges. That’s right, challenges. See, the real idea behind GamerNet isn’t just boasting about your own achievements within the game, but instead it’s about whether or not other gamers can do what you just did.
After you save your clip of greatness, it’s up to you to set certain victory conditions for others to complete. Hit a monstrous drive that landed half an inch from the hole? Set the drive length and proximity to the pin as things that people need to beat. The AI in the game then assigns a point value to those conditions. The harder the conditions of the challenge, the more points it’ll be worth.
As we said before, there are four channels for your perusal. Depending on how much time you have, you may want to choose to browse challenges for an entire round of golf, or maybe just a single shot. There are channels for that sort of thing. Then there is a long drive challenge channel; obvious enough. And then there’s my personal favorite, the freestyle channel. Described by Mike of Tiburon – though he was the President and CEO of Hyptnotix before EA purchased the studio after they developed their Arena Football game – as, “just do the goofiest stuff you can do on a golf course, and challenge other people to do better.” Sounds like fun right?
The victory conditions while creating a clip for the Freestyle channel can get pretty zonky. There are things like hitting ‘x’ number of buildings, ‘x’ number of people in the crowd, or bouncing the ball ‘x’ number of times on the cart path. Basically it’s the one and only time in Tiger Woods history that you’ll be rewarded for sucking. Of course, there are also tons of traditional victory conditions that you’ll be able to tinker with too.
Tiger's so good, he can pull off the pink polo look.
It just wouldn’t be online gaming (though you can also save challenges and complete them offline) without leaderboards, of which there are two flavors within GamerNet. One type of leaderboard is for players; those people that complete challenges by the truckload and have a number of points that resembles Microsoft’s payroll. The second is for authors. See, everytime you play a new challenge you’re essentially voting for it, and the most popular (read: most played) challenges will climb to the top of the list. Don’t worry though, you can’t boost your buddy’s rank by playing his challenge over and over again. Only the first time you play it counts towards their rank.
GamerNet seems like it will really change how people play Tiger Woods, especially the way you play online. No longer do you need to wait for your friend in Nevada to finish dinner while your resistance to sleep wanes over on the east coast. Instead you can simply save a challenge, send it over to your buddy, and wake up the next morning to see if they gave it a try. The only real downside to the GamerNet system seems to be that server space could become a constraint. Obviously you can’t throw up hundreds of challenges, and EA alluded to the fact that dreaded microtransactions could work their way into the game to open up unlimited server space. We’ll see how that pans out.
GameFace undergoes a facelift
Back in the 2004 version of Tiger Woods the gaming world was taken aback by the limitless possibilities that the creation of GameFace opened to the classic create-a-golfer mechanic. Now, EA Sports is changing GameFace yet again with what they’re calling Photo GameFace (for now, that name could change). By now you can probably guess where this is going. Basically Photo GameFace allows you snap a picture with the Xbox Live camera, or any digital camera, and upload it online. To be more exact, you need to snap two shots. One of you with no smile, looking directly at the camera, and a profile shot, again, sans smile.
EA used the test dummy, and we do mean dummy, of Jon Miller from IGN (just kidding Jon, we love you) to show us the capabilities. They had already uploaded his shot, so all they needed to do was place a series of face shaping dots around his face. There was an example shot to show us where the dots were supposed to go. One at the corners of the mouth, a few on the nose, jaw line, eyes, etc… The whole process didn’t take more than a few minutes, and then we had a fairly accurate – if not slightly chubby – representation of Mr. Miller. At the end of the process, if you don’t like your virtual self, you can always go back and customize your generated face to fit your liking. Then it’s time to build up your character, or try to complete challenges on GamerNet!
Be the ball, Danny.
The visuals within the actual gameplay have also gone through a bit of a facelift. While the character models are just as defined as ever, the course now looks much more true to life. The whole course has been normal mapped so fairways are now no longer just expanses of green nothingness, and now have divots, imperfect blades of grass jutting out, and plenty of other things that you’d see on a real golf course. Bunkers have also been redone, and now feature comb lines where golf course attendants have groomed the sand. Leafs on trees now look great too, with what looks like some sort of fur shader producing a very natural look where appropriate.
The Outlook
This year’s Tiger is obviously trying to do something that no other game in the series has. Its community features look stupendous, with EA aiming to give players the ability to become online celebrities through the use of GamerNet’s challenge system, and Photo GameFace. They skillfully dodged our questions about changes to the core gameplay – though we expect the right and left bumper to be used in totally different ways than before – but the info that we were given was tantalizing enough as it was. Keep an eye on TeamXbox.com as more info of Tiger Woods 08 becomes available in the future.
< Message edited by GccTxs67 -- 4/12/2007 7:31:40 AM >
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