PS3 Madden Screenshots

PS3 Madden Screenshots w/article

http://media.ps3.ign.com/media/811/811802/imgs_1.html
Early PS3 screenshots. The game is not finished yet for those who complain. Hint:^ look who's name appears.

 

http://sports.ign.com/articles/706/706168p1.html
E3 2006: EA Sports Lab Interview
Talking PS3, new technology, and the future of sports games.
by Jon Robinson

May 9, 2006 - The ability to look at the screen in a game like NBA Live and know who is winning simply by body language and facial expressions. The ability for Dwyane Wade to actually walk and run on a court instead of skating around like Gretzky in shorts. The ability to look at Tiger Woods in a game and for a second lose yourself and confuse virtual for reality.

Those are the focuses of EA Sports in the next generation. To feed gamers the emotion and movements of real-life athletes and blur the difference between polygon and player.

At E3, in a behind closed doors theater known as the EA Sports Lab, EA Sports will demo some of this new technology, focusing on PS3 versions of Tiger, Live, Madden, and FIFA to show not only the fluid movements that can be reached with the next generation of systems, but the emotion that has been missing from sports games.

IGN Sports sat down with Steve Chiang, VP/GM of EA Tiburon to go more in-depth of what this new technology means to the future of sports gaming.

IGN Sports: Explain the idea behind Athletic Performance and what you'll be showing at E3.

Steve Chiang: This is really made up of a bunch of different technologies. Some are new like data acquisition and universal facial capture, and we're doing a lot of different things to recreate authentic player movement, action and reaction on the field or court. When you look at what we did last year with the 360, we had realistic looking characters, but with anything, you get good at one aspect, then you realize you might be lacking in other areas. What we're really targeting this year is player performance and movement. That is our focus at EA Sports, and that's what the lab is for, to showoff the beginning on what's a long journey. We've been trying to get these players to look real since the PS1 days, and it's taken a while, but we think we're finally in a situation to take this to the next level and make these players feel like they're alive.

IGN Sports: How is emotion going to come into play in games over the next couple of years?

Steve Chiang: As we look at these players in high def, all of a sudden you're seeing pores and sweat and a level of detail we've never seen before. Tiger is really the first of our titles that is going to explore what we are calling Universal Capture. This is where we connected all of these sensors to Tiger's face and connected it to the optical, then we tracked his facial position as he smiles, talks, and then put that exact detail into the game. We're creating a Tiger like we've never seen him before. And that translates out to other games like NBA Live. You're going to see some stuff related to what T-Mac's scowl looks like after he dunks on someone. Those are the types of things we want to start translating, but it's not just the face, it's about the movement, from the way he's pumping his fists to the way he's shooting to the way he's walking around the court. Remember the days of sliding or skating basketball players? Those days are over. Now you're going to finally see players who don't just run at 45-degree angles, but have full movement complete with body lean. Those are the things we're trying to recreate for the new games to make them look more realistic.

IGN Sports: Is that realism also tied to how players are going to react out on the court or on the field?

Steve Chiang: Exactly. In a game like Madden, it's pretty straight forward to get one player to react to a certain situation, but when you have a bunch of players around him, getting all of those interactions right is a fundamental aspect of Bio Mechanics and what we're trying to do on another level with next gen. We're building on top of what we've already been able to accomplish. When one guy pushes into another, then what happens. It's not as simple as taking Rag Doll when you shoot a guy in a first-person shooter and they fly out backwards. They're pretty much dead and they have no muscle control. That's easy to recreate. But when you're trying to recreate athletes on the field and they're bumping into each other and jostling, it's a different problem, but that's what we're working on.

IGN Sports: How have you improved some of these aspects from Madden 06 to Madden 07?

Steve Chiang: We're going to have pretty full versions of Madden and NCAA in the Lab and on the show floor. NCAA is looking great. We have all of the Dynasty with in-season recruiting and all of those kinds of things that have made the franchise great. Plus when you see the fans and the bands playing their instruments and the way the crowd gets so animated with the fight songs…we've really been able to capture the details of the college atmosphere. But most importantly, the gameplay is great. On Madden, behind closed doors, we'll be showing off a lot of the new awareness. Looking down a receiver before passing. Linebackers will look at their target before they start to move, and it's a lot of those little things that start to create the sense that these players are real. With individual sports like golf, we can concentrate on capturing that personality. But when you have team sports like football, the focus is a little different. How do you make these guys act like a team? Those are the questions we're trying to answer.

IGN Sports: Emotions and everything you're talking about are great, but what about the gameplay? Shouldn't gameplay ultimately be the focus?

Steve Chiang: You're right, gameplay is the focus, but it's going to be a lot of little things that are going to contribute to why these games feel better to play. And this will eventually lead to new areas. Just like Fight Night, how you can see the damage, you can see the fighters get beaten up to a point where we were able to turn off the HUD. And as you start to see these things, it's going to change the way we build these games for the future. On the features side, it's really about reinventing. In Madden this year we have the mini-camps, and the whole concept of the living practice field is something that's very different than anything we could've done in past games, and this new technology has allowed us to do it. Rather than give you the same old, we're really trying to recreate. The bench press is really cool, the 40 is cool, and you can start to see the potential and where we're going with it. I think we'd be doing gamers a disservice if we just ported over the same features and asked people to buy it again. Another example is back in PlayStation days. We had Franchise and Dynasty, now that's become staples in sports games. On PlayStation 2, we brought back Franchise and Dynasty, then added Owner mode which was totally different and a new way to play.

IGN Sports: I can't wait until Madden 2080 when Owner mode might actually make it back in the game.

Steve Chiang: Hey, look forward to Madden 07 first, we have some great things in the game. [laughs] We've got a couple of surprises for you this year, don't worry.

IGN Sports: What can we expect to see with the ESPN integration this year?

Steve Chiang: With ESPN, we really want to make our games connected. In the booth, we're going to show what we're doing with NBA Live and NCAA Football. There are a couple of different categories of features. In NCAA we have ESPN Classics mode, where you're taking your greatest games and you're making them Classics. We're going to be able to show that in the booth. On the NBA side, we're focusing more on the real-time data feeds and how they're going to be integrated in the new titles. MVP is a good example of how we're taking this, and certainly with the Xbox 360 and PS3, there is going to be a different paradigm for online gaming and how that works within our sports games. We're not going to be talking a lot about that, but there is a hint of that throughout what we're doing with NBA Live.

IGN Sports: How is the development for PS3 different than what you went through with the 360?

Steve Chiang: Definitely different. The PS3 has an interesting and unique architecture and it's very powerful. But it's different, because it has some parallel processing that we've never seen before. Our guys are getting a kick out of pushing the hardware to its limits. The Xbox 360 is more like a traditional multi-processor PC. It's more like what our guys are used to seeing. They are both great systems, and we're really pleased where we're taking our engines. As you know, we rewrote our Madden and NBA Live engines last year, and I think this year we're starting to be rewarded by that. We're finally able to build. We're getting Athletic Performance this year because of the investment we made building our games from scratch.

IGN Sports: Are the PS3 versions going to be any different than the 360 games?

Steve Chiang: We have a different development team on Madden. We have a 360 team and we have a PS3 team. Our PS3 games, what we're showing is still pretty early, we're still five-six months from launch. We're really working to create specific features for the PS3, but we're not talking about those yet.

 

IGN Sports: Have you had more time to develop Madden for PS3 than you had for the 360?

Steve Chiang: I think in the end, it will end up being around the same. They are both going to ship around the same time frame, just a year different. The difference between the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in terms of games, our goal is to have everything we have on both platforms, but since we have more development time for PS3 since the games will ship later, we will have more development time to create more stuff. We're pretty excited about what we've got going, not only in Madden, but all our games. What we're showing at E3 is a unique perspective, a look under the hood at some of the new technology that we think is going to push sports games into the future. The more we can make the players come alive, the more we'll be able to blur those lines between what you see on your PS3 and what you see when you're watching a real game. That's always been the goal, and right now, we're closer than we've ever been.

 

Don't have the pics just go to link I had above