There’s a lot of cool new stuff coming in EA UFC’s next patch, let’s break it down

There’s a dude you should be following on Twitter named @DGfishingTime. It’s a strange name for someone who doesn’t talk about fishing (much), he mostly discusses the minutia of MMA games. Specifically, EA UFC and its long list of ups and downs. mostly ups now after a few patches.

Think about it for a second, have we ever seen an MMA game as supported as EA UFC post-launch? Yeah, it needed these patches, but still, this game is not dying on the vine, it’s growing into a delicious grape that we can either pop in our mouths,  dry up into a raisin or crush beneath our feet into a fine wine. Delicious, this EA UFC. Truly diverse and all-purpose. You can sprinkle it on top of your oatmeal or get wasted on a Wednesday afternoon in northern California, it can do anything. Thanks, EA.

So the new patch is coming. This should be (I think) the the fourth patch post-launch, and in this we’re getting a lot of stamina tweaks, grappling tweaks, and a Jackson Camp pre-fight nipple tweak (last part is a total lie). There’s no word if we’re getting any new fighters, but the host of gameplay fixes, move additions and enhancements in general should get you very excited, as if you were getting your nipples tweaked by Greg Jackson while getting drunk on wine on a Wednesday afternoon in northern California. Or even having your nipples tweaked by Greg Jackson while you eat oatmeal. It’s whatever. 

Courtesy of DGfishingtime’s MMAchat, here are many of the changes that have been deciphered from the patch rumors facilitated by various members of the EA UFC team:

Takedowns can now be countered into a guillotine. Only some fighters will have the ability to pull this off. You can initiate it while someone is shooting for a takedown by holding block and R1/RB instead the takedown denial of block and R2/RT.  

Fighters with this move are: 
Alistair Overeem  Antonio Silva, Benson Henderson, Brad Pickett, Brian Bowles, Bruce Lee, Cain Velasquez, Cat Zingano, Chad Mendes, Chael Sonnen, Chris Weidman, Clay Guida, Cung Le, Dan Henderson, Daniel Cormier, Demetrious Johnson, Demian Maia, Dennis Siver, Eddie Wineland, Francis Carmont, Frankie Edgar, Gilbert Melendez, Glover Teixeira, Gray Maynard, Jake Ellenberger, Joe Lauzon, John Dodson, Johny Hendricks, Jon Jones, Joseph Benavidez, Josh Koscheck, Junior Dos Santos, Khabib Nurmagomedov ,Louis Gaudinot, Luke Rockhold, Mark Hunt, Mark Munoz, Martin Kampmann, Matthew Brown, Michael Bisping, Miesha Tate, Mike Easton, Mike Pyle, Nate Diaz, Pat Barry, Rashad Evans, Ricardo Lamas, Robbie Lawler, Roy Nelson, Ryan Bader, Sara McMann, Scott Jorgensen, Stipe Miocic, Takeya Mizugaki, TJ Dillashaw, Tyron Woodley, Urijah Faber, and Wanderlei Silva.

Next up are the new ‘fatigued kick’ animations. Considering I run a highly-organized role-playing kickboxing organization on EA UFC, I’m really looking forward to the fact that a gassed dude can no longer knock someone out with a floppy and tired head kick. I can’t even begin to tell you how many five round wars I’ve lost in the waning seconds of the fifth round. Seriously, ask Gary LaPlante or Sir David Walsh of House Walsh. This is a great change, and I look forward to it. 

Stamina regen while throwing strikes has also been frozen, which really helps the fun factor as well. 

The following is from the EA UFC forums:

1. Clinch transition denial tuning

Similar to the changes made to the ground game last patch, we have a new table of denial tuning values for the clinch along with latency compensation and locked in denial direction selection. You might say, “wait a minute, I thought denial direction didn’t matter in the clinch?”. Well that’s about to change. 

The following transitions in the clinch now require correct left/right input in order to deny, and an incorrect input will get locked in. 

• SC (dom or sub) – to Thai and OU 

• OU (dom or sub) – to SC or DU 

• DU (sub only) – needs to defend Thai or Back transitions

This should make the neutral positions more challenging defensively and make getting into a dominant positions easier – then dominant positions become deny pass (left or right) or deny break. You also have to worry about strikes and TDs more in dominant positions than in the neutral positions so there’s better balance there.

2. Takedown denial tuning 

I’ve gone into most of the details on this in another thread, but same as with the clinch, all the various takedown denial windows have been tuned, latency compensation added plus all the awesome new outcomes. 

3. Parry tuning 

A hot topic for sure, here’s what we did. 

As you may know the parry window was quite large, at 90 ticks (or 1.33 seconds). This has been reduced at the high end to 60 ticks (or 1 second) and 30 ticks on the low end. The window changes between those numbers based on stamina, so the lower your stamina, the harder it will be to parry. 
In addition, if you successfully parry and throw a counter punch, your opponents parry window will will be cut in half. And if he manages to successfully parry you and throws another counter, your parry window will be halved from that, and so on until the window is so small it may as well not exist. 

This was done to make parry wars much less likely. 

Finally, if I get hit clean by a strike, I will won’t be able to parry for a certain period of time after the hit. 

4. Stamina tuning 

A bunch of small changes here, I’m not even familiar with all the details, but the biggest take away is we tried to find a balance between the previous patch and the one before that in terms of stamina and damage bleed through on weak block. Hopefully this time we hit the sweet spot. 

5. Judging 

Lot of complaints on the judging logic since we released. With the help of user feedback we identified two significant bugs in the logic which were fixed, plus some tuning on other aspects of the logic. 

6. Referee standup time tuning 

We had lots of complaints about the ref standing you up in mount and backmount, so we doubled the referee standup timer for all dominant positions. 
 
 
This is a big one:
 
 
If you’ve ever been knocked out with gentle ground and pound while on the bottom of side control, you probably feel helpless like a Ben Askren opponent. That’s changing. Check out what Jake said on the EA UFC forums:
 
 
I’m on the fence about the next change:
 
 
Apparently, Finish the Fight 2.0 is taking inspiration from this classic moment:
 
 
Dazed animations (to me) are already pretty ridiculous in the game, and finishes can come far too easily considering the other fighter can’t even defend during these moments. Maybe they’ll tune defense after getting the offense set? We’ll see… I’d like to be able to see a Scott Smith-esque window of opportunity for people opening up and getting overzealous when they are trying to Finish the Fight 2.0.
 
From the devs:
 
The high speed pursuit locomotion and striking is all contextual, and only available if: 

-you have enough stamina 
-your opponent is wobbled 
-you are pressing the left stick towards your opponent 

You will continue to pursue as long as you keep striking fluidly. You will pursue faster if you alternate left/right punches. The force of your punches will drive him backwards until you reach the cage or he gets knocked down. 

Defensively nothing has changed, except the stakes are higher. You can parry these strikes but they must be timed well. A well timed parry has a good chance of taking you out of the health event. 

This is meant to eliminate the frustration players were feeling in trying to chase down their opponent when they were wobbled. This is not an all purpose run mode. 

More of a fun new way to capitalize on the wobbled health event, not something I expect to see happen all the time.

 
There is even more information than this out there on what should be tomorrow’s patch, read the info here.

Published on September 22, 2014 at 6:13 pm
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