In general, online play with friends. We would do rivalry matches and we would always rematch. You’d usually have to leave the game completely, go into player selection, load back in…

So I’m assuming there’s no long load times between the matchups. With that said, is there a functionality to be able to rematch friends online without going back to the main menu and loading?

It’s not really rounds in the sense that it’s a timed 5 minutes, there’s no clock for the round. It’s a best of 3 and each round ends with a knockout or a finish that is driven by the knockout physics of that game. If you play a sort of traditional arcade fighters there’s always that best of 3 system in play. Because if you get caught out there in the first round in 20 seconds then you have a second round to get back in the thing. It’s not a very timed round system but a finish round system. So you can do sudden death where the first knockout wins or you can do best of 3, best of 5.

Most often if a game has a two-year cycle, what would happen would be a fair amount of sort of temporary downsizing. People who you wouldn’t need at that point would go off and do another game in production. In a two-year cycle, you first have the portion of it that’s design groups thinking together. That didn’t happen much. The whole team pretty much stayed on board right after EA UFC 1. And you saw all the updates that were done post-launch – we just stayed working on it immediately after it launched and never really stopped. That’s really the key reason why the 18 month cycle didn’t seem like that fast of a turnaround.

Of course, EA UFC was gorgeous. It showed off the power of the next-gen consoles, and laid the groundwork for potential sequels to impress even the most hardcore MMA fan and fighting game lover, but what exactly has the team been working on? EA UFC 2 is currently scheduled for a “spring 2016” release, which is quite a fast turnaround considering the first game’s June of 2014 release.

The cover stars are set . Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor are ready to move some units with CM Punk helping out in the crossover appeal category, and the UFC is enjoying one of its most successful years ever. Now, EA UFC 2 has a big challenge to meet after a fun yet deeply flawed first attempt fell short of many expectations.

That functionality still does that not exist, but that’s something that we are still looking at. There’s an interesting legal ground as to what we can say is being done post-launch. But again, titles are being supported post-launch with additional features and content. Right now that functionality does not exist online. More importantly to you, Knockout Mode is only available offline, like multiplayer on the couch. That’s not because we don’t think it’d be totally awesome to play online, but it was somewhat of a later addition to the game. Sort of mid-development. We found that if most fights go to the ground, they get back up and keep it a kickboxing match. So we’ve done a lot to the game to try and improve the grappling, make it more accessible, because not that many people were playing there. So when we were also developing the new knockout physics, we were putting together a video to show internally so our marketing execs see that it’s really cool. So we were putting together this video showing off the knockout physics with myself and character artists, including those who work in marketing, and you’d have this debug setting where the first three punches were a KO and you’d have these really intense matches where there would be this circling around the octagon, trying to find an opening. This is actually really fun to play, but it came along quite late in development in that 18 month cycle, so we were only able to get it support offline for the time being.

In the last game, it seemed like there was a lot of picking and choosing between procedural animations. In EA UFC, if I threw a flying knee and they went for a takedown at the same time the animations sort of nullified each other and nothing would happen. Are we seeing those animations filled out in EA UFC 2?

There’s a vast, vast multitude of player interactions that can happen. We’ve certainly covered a lot more. I still would expect that at some point there’s still going to be some outlier, fringe interactions that still come up. If you’re throwing a spinning kick and someone goes for a takedown, we now have a takedown where you get the person’s back kind of thing. The KO physics themselves actually solve a lot of really complicated two-player situations. For example, if we have one guy doing a superman punch of the cage and the other guy was doing a capoeira heel kick, now you can get a knockout where a guy gets hit in the air and falls down to the ground. The procedural physics for the KOs does resolve a lot of those situations, but we’ve also done some motion capture for areas that were problematic. We needed additional content to solve these situations because you couldn’t allow the physics that looks totally goofy. We’ve done quite a lot of work on both avenues.

I know this isn’t the best example considering it’s a UFC product, but it seems like a very Fedor/Andrei Arlovski type animation system. Like, flying in the air and getting knocked out, something like that?

If you’re able to pull it off, that can certainly happen. A lot of thing would have to come together in order for that to happen. Number one: you need to have your opponent hurt and on the verge of getting KOed. Then they’d need to be coming at you with something flying so that you can knock them out of the air, but it’s certainly possible.

Have you done any work on the judges?

There’ weren’t any tremendously clear shortcomings that we were aware of. When you start redoing the game and adding to it, like we’ve done with the entire ground game and the way it works functionally, judges look at transitions and how they’re scored, top position, that sort of stuff. The game feels so much different on the ground now that we have to make sure the virtual judges in the game are aware of how mixed martial arts has evolved within EA UFC 2. With changes to core gameplay, there have to be some correlated work on the scoring system as well.

CM Punk is in the game. Was that something you guys came up with or UFC?

For us that wasn’t a thing we talked about a huge amount. Our biggest thing was really that we were trying to get the roster to be as big as we possibly could for a couple of reasons. One: it makes it a little cooler for UFC fans when they’re playing Career Mode and there’s more than 8 or 10 guys in the weight division they’re playing that are real UFC fighters. There’s the new live events feature, which is kind of a fantasy pick-em game in our game, but then there’s also the ability to get bonus points by making your pick happen in the game. If you’re playing a live event in our game right now, like the event coming up this weekend, you can say you think Robbie Lawler will win by KO in the 4th round as your prediction. You can get bonus points by picking Lawler and trying to KO Condit in the 4th round. At the end of that fight, you get bonus points for sure for that, but if your pick was right, you get a more rewards based on how many points you earn over the course of the event. Having a really big roster allows for more playable bonus point fights and that allows more features. So we wanted to make sure we had a huge roster and as we’re going through it we’re trying to pick recognizable names that people want to play with and events coming up. So whoever CM Punk’s first opponent is, hopefully we’ll have them in the game.

Are you going to have to unlock the roster or is it available from the outset.

The ones who would be unlock-able would be the sort of pre-order exclusive characters.

Like Bruce Lee in EA UFC.

Yeah, Bruce Lee was unlock-able last year and Royce was unlock-able last year. There are some pre-order characters that you can unlock if you preorder the game.

Will there be any surprises in the women’s’ roster divisions? Perhaps a single 145-pound female?

There are no surprises of that nature at this time.

Will Bruce Lee be back?