Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

Apr 12, 2007

EA catches plenty of (justified) flack for a lack of innovation, particularly in its yearly sports titles. That just makes it all the more stunning that one of its premier titles, Tiger, has been revealed to be the testing ground for one of the most innovative features I've ever seen in a console game. This year's Tiger introduces Gamernet, which will allow you to take any part of a game of Tiger, save it as a miniscule file, and then make it available for any other player to try and match or beat. The goal, which Gamernet looks like it could simply nail, is to let players play against each other, online -- even if they aren't online at the same time. The changes to Gamer Face aren't necessarily as ground-breaking, but they're still pretty spectacular.

EA Tiberon is now developing the series, and it wanted to really take things to the next level. Not just graphically, but really leveraging the connectivity of next-gen. So, every time you play Tiger 08, everything is recorded: every swing, every hole, every nine, and the entire 18-hole game. The save option exists after every stroke, nine holes, or 18 holes, and the clip is automatically saved to your hard drive, ready for upload. It's important to note that this doesn't take you out of the game at all. So when you clear the front nine at Pebble Beach with an utterly unbelievable shot, you don't have to worry that you weren't recording. Hit X, finish the course, and then upload the clip for your friends to gawk at.

But humiliating your friends is only half of what makes Gamernet such an awesome concept. This year's NCAA will offer a similar ability to upload choice clips, for example. But with Tiger, when you choose to upload a clip, anyone else can choose to play against your performance. Your friends can do more than watch your Pebble Beach round -- they can watch you play through, and then try to beat your performance. When you upload your clip, you can pick various factors to determine how many points it's worth. The default win condition for any clip is distance to the pin, but you can set up to three from a list that will include (but isn't limited to) the number of spectators hit, airtime, ball travel distance, landing on the fairway, landing on the green, bogey, double bogey, and hitting structures. The more numerous and more difficult the challenges you create, the more points the clip is worth to beat. A minimum number of points are necessary for a clip to be allowed, to prevent inflation.

EA will be maintaining servers, separated by channels, for the service. Channels so far include Single Hole, 9 Hole, Grip it and Rip it, 18 Hole, 9 Hole Challenge, the Buick Challenge, and the everything-else category of Free Style. When you upload a clip, the system automatically lets you pick from the appropriate categories to post to. In addition to these channels, though, EA will maintain two separate sets of leaderboards. One will be for the points earned beating other player's clips, and the other will be for authors. Every person who plays through your challenge gives it a "vote," so people who have the most (and most-played) clips up will have recognition. Also, if you're just looking for the best of what's out there, you can look at the author leaderboard and just grab the top few posters' clips. Incidentally, the first person to beat a clip gets double points, so everyone on your friend's list will get a message letting them know when you've posted something.

Gamernet is an interesting risk for EA, because it's going to depend entirely on the user community to provide content. I can't help but applaud it for taking the risk, although I am concerned about where we'll see charges arise with the service. The plan at the moment is for each user to be allowed to upload three clips for free, and beyond that to charge to maintain the servers. Hopefully, EA can come up with as elegant and innovative a pricing scheme for Gamernet as Gamernet itself.

In addition to Gamernet, Tiger 08 will feature what's being called "Gamer Photo Face." More than just the ability to import a picture and have that be your character's head, Gamer Photo Face actually creates a geometry for your head, and then a texture map for that geometry (most games' "import your face" features just creates a texture map of your face, creating weird distortions). Using an editor's picture as an example, the team showed us how you can easily align a small set of points -- on the eyes, the cheeks, the jowls, the nose, the edges of the mouth, and the chin -- on the imported photo. In a few minutes Tiger will turn it into a creepily accurate version of you, using Gamer Face settings. There are some limits and issues -- the system can't capture teeth, so everyone will have the same pearly whites. And hair is out of the system's league, so you'll have to create your perfect 'do in the Gamer Face engine. But it's still a promising system, letting those of us who can't make anything but Dick Tracy villains in Gamer Face actually bring our own image into the game. And it compliments Gamernet nicely -- who doesn't want to have their own face being the one that makes the shot no one can match? As EA put it, "we want to make celebrities out of our customers."

I wish that Tiberon had shown some of the gameplay changes it has lined up for Tiger, but I applaud the decision to really take a risk with the franchise. Hopefully, the team can deliver on what it's promised when its first Tiger is released.