Polygon: How EA's loss could be golf fans' gain in The Golf Club
The Golf Club will be the first original title in three years from Lunenberg, Canada-based HB Studios, which primarily performs contract work on sports games for publishers such as Electronic Arts. HB and EA have had a fruitful relationship for more than a decade, but The Golf Club only exists because of a recent hiccup in that partnership that had nothing to do with HB.
The most recent entry in EA's long-running golf franchise was Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, which was released last March on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. That series was known as Tiger Woods PGA Tour until October, when EA and the legendary golfer parted ways. But shortly after the launch of PGA Tour 14 last spring, a report indicated that EA had decided to cancel the game that would likely have been released this spring as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 15, even though the company had reportedly been planning to outsource the development of that title.
"We last year had built up a golf team in anticipation of potentially working with EA," said Peter Garcin, executive producer on The Golf Club, in an interview with Polygon this week. "We were potentially going to work with them on doing a port — making some of the Gen 3 versions, the 360/PS3 versions — but then that [...] work, that bidding process, didn't come through.
"It wasn't till later that we learned it was because they were canceling, or delaying — putting the whole series on hold," Garcin added. EA, alongside last fall's announcement of its breakup with Woods, said it had begun working on a new PGA Tour title for "mobile [devices] and next-generation consoles."
When HB's arrangement with EA fell through, the studio decided that it still wanted to make a golf game, so it began development last spring with initial plans to release the title on PS4 and Xbox One. Once the studio started building The Golf Club, it realized that the game had "a lot of cross-platform potential," and the title is now being made on Windows PC as well. In particular, many of the team's ideas for The Golf Club are features that you don't usually see in mainstream sports games: a major focus on the social sharing of user-generated content, with a basis in a robust course creation tool.
"We had a number of really [...] what we felt were innovative ideas that we wanted to explore that we probably would not — that are harder, maybe, to explore under the confines of a yearly franchise," Garcin explained.
For more, visit Polygon.
Well I am rooting for them and hope they can garner enough sales to keep the project moving. EA does not want to offer a course creator, ever. Not because it is some impossible dream on a console but because a course creator cost development time and money with little return. New licensed courses = more money for DLC in upcoming years.
Therefore everyone should buy The Golf Club. That way we golf fans can have a sweet customizable game with tons of courses and one with a license heavy game for a PGA experience in 2015.
P.S. Please license your tech to Activision so we can have a Cabela game with unlimited lakes and forests. Walmart is hurting right now and a really cool Cabela game, alongside discounted moon pies could be the solution.
Any game where you have to regularly have to put in and spit out a dip should be an award winner.
Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk
The dude abides.
That looks sexy.
The dude abides.
I'd make a bitch of a course
The dude abides.
StealthyBox interviews Executive Producer Pete Garcin.
Some excerpts:
SBX: How would you describe the gameplay mechanics? Is The Golf Club intended to be a true simulation, more of an arcade experience, or both?
PG: It’s definitely a true simulation. Like I alluded to earlier, we spent a lot of time working on the “feel” of the game. And as a result of that, we’ve done away with the traditional power meter in golf games. We’ve tried to move the focus away from lining up pins and accuracy zones and whatnot and focus on performance of the shot. So what this means in practice is that there is a lot of subtlety built into the controls, but in a way that feels natural. Especially in the short game, we’ve found that what you instinctively want to do on the stick and the result you’d expect is what happens in The Golf Club. It’s not a situation where you set your targets and then just always ream on the stick to hit that target –- there’s an element of performance that will make competition really exciting between players. Additionally, we have level stats for all the avatars, so you can’t grind your way to excellence here –- your success lies entirely in your hands. That level playing field for all users was a crucial piece of the puzzle for us.
SBX: What has it been like developing on next-gen consoles for the first time? What have they allowed you to do that hadn’t yet been feasible?
PG: It’s definitely been exciting, and I think there’s been a lot that’s been possible that previously wasn’t feasible, at least for a developer of our size. So course creation is the one thing that jumps out because it’s not just an editor; we’ve got a pretty sophisticated algorithm that auto-generates courses as well and “assists” you when building a course so that you don’t have to do a lot of manual sculpting to integrate a new bunker or whatever. And this stuff all happens really fast – so that’s one. Zero loading times is another – we knew from the beginning that we wanted a game where you weren’t waiting a minute between holes for the game to load – and so now with the entire environment in memory we’ve realized that and there is literally zero loading between holes. And then there are lots of the online features that are now way more accessible and straightforward to develop on these new consoles because the console ecosystems themselves are more welcoming of that kind of stuff. And then the platform holders themselves are really supportive of independent devs so that’s another huge benefit to us.
SBX: Is there anything else interesting going on at HB Studios that you’d like to share? Other games fans should be watching out for?
PG: Well, we’ve always got lots of exciting stuff going on here and now more than ever. One of the things we’ve been talking about a lot of the past couple of years is how we as a smaller developer who has a deep history in sports across the board can re-imagine and re-invent the sports genre in a way that’s feasible at our scale. So we are definitely looking at how we can apply that concept to other sports and that’s something I think you’re going to see more of from us in the coming years. And we’ve also recently received some funding to explore a really exciting idea we’ve had floating around here for awhile that is outside the realm of sports but leverages the really deep simulation experience that we have inside the studio. But that’s all I can say about that for now!
Good night my psn message box keeps getting hammered from guys I have golfed with about this game. Momentum is gaining
Damn. It won't let me put a tee box with a tree in front of it
The dude abides.
Bookmarks