Building An “Icon” Ronda Rousey in EA UFC 3
Most people who play EA UFC 3 online know what it feels like to face an opponent who chose Ronda Rousey as their character. Digital Ronda is ruthless, throwing up armbars from every possible angle and tapping people out at will. A regular person would say she’s just too good, gamers would call her “OP.”
Now EA UFC 3 is introducing “Icon Ronda” to the game, bringing her stats to the highest ever, at the peak of her Octagon dominance.
We spoke to EA UFC 3 gameplay engineer Geoff Harrower, who walked us through the creation of Digital Rondas of the past, present, and future—as well as discussed UFC 3, which continues to become more refined.
I just wanted to start by discussing Icon Ronda. What was the impetus for creating her?
The main reason was to honor her for her induction into the UFC Hall of Fame and obviously, we have a history with Ronda—she was on the cover of UFC 2.
I’m not personally involved in a lot of those decisions; I’m a gameplay programmer so I just kind of get told which fighters are coming in. But it was pretty cool to see an Icon Ronda come in. We had some mocap playing around from the UFC 2 days that we were able to slap in there for her. She came in for a MOCAM shoot back in UFC 2, kinda at the end. So, some of that data got in pre-UFC 2, but some of it we were able to hold off or carry over into UFC 3. She’ll have a custom idle that she recorded while she was here in Vancouver as part of her Icon fighter that’s coming out in the next content update.
A custom idle animation?
We released this new technology in UFC 3 called RPM: Real Player Motion tech. And it was a new way of doing motion capture for idles and locomotion and basic movement around the Octagon. As a result, we weren’t able to use a lot of old mocap for the movement that we had in UFC 2. But, we were able to bring across a basic idle stance that Ronda had captured when she was here in Vancouver. We were able to layer that on top of the RPM system. I believe that’s Carla Esparza’s RPM set that we’re using and we layered Ronda Rousey’s signature idle stance on top of that to get a full RPM set for her.
The fact that you can go back and gather of all of this data from a motion capture that was years ago and you’re still using it…
It’s a big part of why sports games in general, and UFC as well, get better and better every year. We try not to throw out things unless we have to because doing mocap is expensive, especially when you fly in star athletes to do kind of signature shoots like that. You don’t want to lose any of that data, because it’s hard to come by again. So, we try as much as possible to reuse as much animation content as possible from year to year and just grow the breadth of animation data in the product so that by the time you get to UFC 10, you’re looking at 10, 15 years of animation data all put together
You see that in UFC 3 but I’ll use your colleagues at Madden, for example—you can really see that there. Stuff that’s been going on for half a decade or longer. That’s interesting.
Oh, totally. And imagine trying to build a game like that from scratch. There’s no way you could catch up quickly to someone who has ten years of development history. Sometimes you have to throw out data because you’re changing technology and you need to capture animations in a new way, but a lot of time you don’t have to throw it out. It’s better to have more content and variety and keep all the old stuff around.
So in other words, this old mocap data you had, you wouldn’t have been able to use it as well if you didn’t have the RPM technology?
No, we would have. If we just stuck with UFC 2, we would have been able to use it. But we did the mocap shoot with Ronda very late in the production cycle. It was a bit more of a promotional kind of thing, right? The game had already launched, she had come in to visit the studio and we kinda showed off the mocap studio and did some marketing videos and stuff. But we always try to capture everything we do in those promo shoots because there’s always an opportunity to use something. And I know that we had put in her ring walk and pre-fight routine animations for UFC 3, based on that shoot, as a carryover from UFC 2.
But we never really put in the idle because of our focusing so much on this new RPM tech. And when Ronda Icon edition Ronda came up, it was a good opportunity to go back and say, “Hey, what did we leave behind from that shoot? What could we bring over to UFC 3 that we just never had the time to put in?” And her signature idle was one of those things. And we already built the technology to be able to layer on signature idles on top of our RPM sets, just to try and increase the variety. So, everything was there and it was a no-brainer to just throw it in for Icon Ronda.
Interesting. Is there anything left over now that you haven’t been able to use or is everything thrown in now? Icon Ronda is the purest form of Ronda you could ever create?
Icon Ronda is the purest form of Ronda we’ve ever created. There are a few things that I wish we could use. She did a bunch of striking for us in the mocap shoot, but she did it to UFC 2 specs and with the new striking system for UFC 3, it’s a whole new motion capture process that we go through to capture all the moving strikes and combinations and stuff. We just didn’t have data in the proper format to be able to use her strikes, which is unfortunate. If we could get her in again for mocap it would be awesome. We could get everything.
That’s what happened to Sean O’Malley actually. He’s another fighter who’s being released in the same content update as Icon Ronda, and he came in for a mocap shoot a couple months ago and we were able to run him through the entire, new process. So, his fighter will have a full RPM set, custom strikes, a few custom grappling moves.
That’s kind of the future of UFC video game fighters:Â H
Oh yeah, because then UFC 3, more than any other game, you can really see it. I always go back to Nate Diaz’s kind of like, flicking jab, you know? It’s really impressive what you’ve guys have done.
It’s a lot of fun. That one I believe was Kajan Johnson who came in and basically acted like Nate Diaz and threw his custom one-two. Kajan Johnson also did the Wanderlei Silva hooks. I remember he was screaming like a wild man while he was trying to impersonate Wanderlei and it turned out really well.
It’s so much fun when you can take something very iconic like that and get custom animation in for it. But it’s even cooler when you can play with the real athletes and get them to perform it themselves. I think we ended up getting a dozen UFC fighters to do their own mocap this year and I was excited to get an opportunity to do that. I hope we are able to do that at an even bigger scale for any future products.
Can you name off a couple of people that came in this year for you?
Yeah, give me a second I can give you a full list.
Dennis Bermudez was the first one we ever did. He was a lot of fun to work with and he picked it up really quickly. And that’s when we knew, “You know what? I think we can do this on a larger scale with UFC fighters.”
The routine that we run them through is pretty complex and we get them to do movements that might not be completely natural for them in a fighting environment. We need to make sure that they do every possible movement that the video game might need, not just the stuff that they’re used to doing in a fight. But all the athletes picked it up really quickly. We’re able to run through an entire fighter set in about forty minutes in the mocap studio for just movement.
So, let’s see, we’ve got: Felice Herrig, Uriah Hall, John Dodson, Corey Anderson, Kaitlin Curran, Carla Esparza, Angela Hill, Sean O’Malley, and one more I can’t mention because he hasn’t been released yet.
Oh?
A little teaser there. And we also got Kajan Johnson to mimic Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz.
Ronda’s one of the highest rated, if not the highest rated fighter female fighter in the game. What else has been added to her arsenal? We’ve gone through these sims and I’ve seen her fight online dozens of times, and if she gets you to the ground it usually over. So, what is different for Icon Ronda?
The idea was to bring her back more towards her prime ratings. This is to try and bring people who want to play Ronda like she was in her prime to be that dominate j
Are there any new moves, any new Judo throws or animations?Â
There’s a huge focus in this patch on clinch and grappling balance with the striking. That wasn’t done just because of Icon Ronda, but Icon Ronda will definitely take advantage of that stuff. There’s good synergy there with Ronda coming out on the same patch as this one.
One of the things I get, there’s like these factions online of people who really want to grapple in the game and other people who just want to stay standing. It’s a constant battle between those two groups of whether grappling is over-powered, or if striking is over-powered. We’re trying to find ways to improve the balance between striking and grappling without alienating either group. With this, we’ve improved clinch entries quite a bit to allow you to set up clinch entries better than you could before. If you duck under a strike or slip a strike, you’d be able to do a quick, clinch entry.
Another thing that we did: You can now set up clinch attempts off of footwork, so you can lunge to evade a strike and then set up clinch attempts that way. And you can chain clinch attempts quickly off of lunges as well. A lot of new things, a lot of new ways to set up clinch attempts. Which I think Ronda, if you’re playing against A.I. Ronda, you’ll definitely notice a difference.
I’ve been keeping up very much with all the work that you’ve done since you launched, what? The first week of February, I believe?
It was late January, early February.
We’re coming up on a year almost—nine months—and you have done a ton. It’s quite different then when it launched. What are the challenges of adding all this information and constantly tuning and constant balancing? This doesn’t seem like a typical post-launch cycle.
Honestly, it came down to the desire of the people who were left on the game to do post-launch support to just keep pushing the game forward.Â
It’s kinda like we were building a car. Early in the production, the car doesn’t really work. You start getting pieces working and then by the time you get to finalizing a game, the car is finely tuned and moving really, really fast. And you know exactly how to drive it. Often times when the game is final, that’s it you’re done. Now you have this awesome car—which in the development process is an engine—and it’s working perfectly, then you just stop. What we did this time was just keep going at the exact same pace as we were when we
The first big batch was those referee actions on knockouts. That was something people wanted and we just didn’t have time to get it in before we finalized. But all the content was there. We just pushed hard through January, February to get that stuff out in the first content update. The reaction was extremely positive to that kind of stuff. We figured, “You know what? Let’s just keep going.”
This is the first time we’d ever done mocap shoots post-launch, where 100% of the content went into the game post-launch. It was a lot of fun because when a game finals there’s a lot of stuff you can do to fine tune it and maybe even push some features forward, add a few features. But you’re really limited on how far you can go with that by whether or not you have animation content.
And meanwhile, you know in your back pocket that you have all of this content, like you said, for Icon Ronda. How cool is it to know that you had all this to fall back on? Is that well going to run dry anytime soon?
It’s getting pretty close to being run dry. I’m always scouring our database for stuff that was left on the cutting room floor for whatever reason. It’s not coming in this patch but I went through and found a whole bunch of cage grapple transitions that just never made it into the game for some reason. Transitions between a double
We’ve got a huge database dating back to the EA MMA days of just content lying around and I’m not afraid to draw on that stuff at all. The days of massive, 30, 40, animation features coming in are coming to a close because we are definitely running out of content in the backlog that hasn’t already made it into the game.
How many armbars does Icon Ronda have available to her?
I believe she has every single
I’m going to note that you’re
Here we go. One, two, three, four … five … six … We’ve got six different armbars, unique armbar setups and I believe we’ve got another three from a clinch so let’s say there are nine armbars.Â
She was actually the very first custom A.I. that was ever set up for EA UFC, back in UFC 1. We had systems for A.I.s. But she was the only one that had a hand-crafted, custom A.I. back in UFC 1 because she had such
For UFC 3, Ronda’s A.I is based around a Greco-Roman wrestling style, with striking and BJJ customizations on top of it. She has a tendency to go for armbars all the time when on the ground and she also has a signature takedown A.I. She’s the only fighter in the game who looks to engage in the clinch and then immediately do quick-trips and hip tosses. No other A.I. has this custom behavior. If she shoots for a takedown, it’s only ever single legs and she has a high propensity to use the j
Impressive.
Yeah. Her customizations make her a very singular A.I. which aims to stay in like really close and on the feet and get in tight, throwing small combos to open up her opponent and block shots and counter with clinch attempts straight into a throw and then obviously go for armbars whenever possible.
Do you have anything else to tell the readers and EA UFC 3 players as they download Icon Ronda this month?
I just hope that they, fans of Ronda who download Icon Ronda—who is free with the game by the way—I hope they get a chance to relive Icon Ronda in her prime.
I remember I was traveling down to the Game Developer’s Conference and it was in the midst of the Ronda hype. I went to a bar there to watch the pay-per-view and the buzz around Ronda’s fight at that time was huge. Someone else likened it to Tyson in his prime because you would buy the pay-per-views just to see if she was going to be able to beat her opponent in 30 seconds or 20 seconds. It was such an exciting time in the UFC.
It’s pretty cool to get the chance to get Icon Ronda out there and have people relive that experience in the game.