Polygon: A warship crashes into EA Sports' golf game, but it's not a disaster

I imagined Brent Nielsen, the game's executive producer, being told damn the torpedoes, and shove a destroyer through those greenside bunkers.

Nope, he told me. They weren't forced into it. Actually, that hole is, literally, the Paracel Storm multiplayer map from Battlefield 4 with a golf course laid out on it. And why EA Sports' PGA Tour developers were doing that explains, in a roundabout way, why that beauty shot of No. 17 at Sawgrass looked so damn good.

It's because it was done in Frostbite 3, the engine behind Battlefield 4. PGA Tour won't use "Ignite," which though it's referred to as a game engine is really more a collection of shared resources, assets and practices. If PGA Tour, due for release next year, was truly going to showcase a golf course in detail rich enough to be called next-gen, it needed to use Frostbite 3, Nielsen said.

"Hockey and basketball are fixed arena environments; football and soccer are fixed stadium environments," Nielsen said, referring to the four games that do use Ignite — NHL, NBA Live, Madden and FIFA. "And then you've got golf, where the environment is the experience. As we dug into it more, it made a lot of sense for us to use the Frostbite 3 engine.

As they got their feet wet with the engine, someone got the idea to pull in Paracel Storm, the Battlefield 4 map whose "levolution" event includes a destroyer running aground. Nielsen said longtime designer Justin Patel then started building a course, including a hole around that crash site. "In a couple of weeks, we were playing golf on Paracel Storm," Nielsen said. Just goofing around.

***

More importantly, it will improve the realism of a round played. Anyone who has logged a hundred holes or so has sliced at least one shot that, though it landed in a playable area not out of bounds, the game has called it out of bounds, set you back on the tee and penalized you a stroke. Out-of-bounds rulings in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series on PS3 and Xbox 360 seem almost random because the way the hole loads into a single perspective, for some lies it's impossible for the game to allow any shot, even a recovery back to the fairway.

Have you noticed also that some shots will have an unfortunate lie changed to a favorable one — with no penalty —when you came to the ball? That too was because of how the game loaded the holes. It was most commonly seen in some bunkers, but I've also seen this happen when a ball lands in the rough and a tree is in the way of your backswing. In next-generation PGA Tour, suck it up, sunshine. Make your recovery and don't hit it here next time.

"It doesn't matter where you hit the ball, if it's in play, you're in trouble, and you play it where it lies," Nielsen said, of this allegedly arcade game.