Facebreaker Interview: EA Starts a Fight

EA's Todd Batty discusses the decline of beat-'em-ups and why Facebreaker's a sleeper hit. Plus, what happens when Jack Thompson and Peter Moore get punched in the game?

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By Adam Doree, September 3, 2008

When we first found out about Facebreaker at a recent EA event, it came as a pleasant surprise. It was nice to see something a little less serious in terms of styling, but also its wacky, standout characters that go back to the old school of cheesy character design, and its phenomenal character creation / sharing that leave it wide open to celebrities taking a pounding, indicate a promising title that can't fail to generate a buzz on YouTube.

We sat down with Todd Batty, the game's designer at EA Canada for the following brief but interesting interview. The game is out today in America and at the end of the week in Europe.

Kikizo: I want to ask about the create-a-character thing - do you think it's inevitable that there may be legal issues because of people who don't understand that they're not in the game as it shipped!

Todd: Yeah, we've sort of gone back and forth with legal on that, and their stance is that they're not promoting the game like that; we're actually going to ship with some celebrities in the game, just to give people an idea - we're trying to pick celebrities that people would actually want to beat the crap out of! [laughs] Heidi and Spencer from The Hills want to be in the game because they like to make fun of themselves. But our stance from a legal point of view is that if any user creates content like a celebrity, and the celebrity doesn't like the way they're being portrayed, we'll just pull it down off of EA Sports World. But you know, inevitably someone else will just create another one and put it back up there, so it's fair game - they put their pictures up on the internet, it's kind of fair game if they get used!

Kikizo: Well I think it will be measured in minutes - not hours or days - in terms of how quickly Jack Thompson goes up on there.

Todd: Definitely! [laughs]

Kikizo: What about speaking to that audience of hardcore fighting game fans, which I know isn't the target audience for this, but what will keep them playing? You mentioned you've had good feedback from them?

Todd: Well, they actually just loved the core fighting system. I mean from a gameplay point of view, we don't have the breadth of a game like Virtua Fighter 5 - no question - we don't have, you know150, move lists or button combinations to do. But what hardcore fighting game fans do seem to like is that the core system still involves a lot of defence and strategy - we have parries, dodges, blocks, in addition to all the different attacks. And what you get is a really balanced fight between two people that ends up becoming kind of a mental strategy battle, and they have not grown tired of it yet, they keep finding new strategies that go deeper and deeper, as opposed to, if I sit down and play a game of Virtua Fighter against somebody who's really good, I'll just get my ass kicked. And that doesn't feel fair, because I just say, well, you're just doing all the things that I don't know how to do!

It's like playing someone at Madden if they're running all these plays and doing all these things, using all these buttons, and you're like, well it's not a fair fight when we play against each other, because you're using tools or weapons that I don't have. So in this game, the breadth of what you can actually do from a gameplay point of view is actually very narrow, so that very quickly two people understand what the controls are, and then it becomes about how to use them against each other. And in that, it goes very deep.

Kikizo: It's important to give new players a chance, right?!

Todd: Yeah, in some fighters, people are like, I'll beat you and you won't even punch me once! We don't want that, right, because it's supposed to be a social experience, we want everyone who picks up the game to feel really good and have fun with it, so just by virtue of the sort of 'strategy layer' that we've designed, it's basically a rock-paper-scissors; you've got light attacks, strong attacks and defence. If someone is doing light attacks all the time, all I have to do is play defence to beat them. If someone is playing defence all the time, strong attacks play through defence. And if someone is doing strong attacks all the time, then light attacks are faster, and they beat strong attacks. So you just end up going round and round in rock-paper-scissors, from more of like a Meta strategy point of view. And just by virtue of the fact that one of the defences is offensive - meaning you have to use light attacks to beat strong attacks - everybody gets shots in! I don't think it would be possible to beat anybody without them at least punching me once, no matter how good I am at the game and even though I designed it!

Kikizo: It's interesting that you are referring to this as a 'sleeper hit' - do you think that's because the fighting genre in general is in decline? That's a sad thing - and I hear you when you say you wanna do what's great about classic fighting games but on next-gen - but why do you keep mentioning sleeper hit?

Todd: Well I just think we're going to fly under a lot of people's radars; we're coming out in the fall, there are a lot of big titles coming out around then, and I think it's one of those games that seems deceptively simple on the surface - like, "yeah OK that looks like a fun little game", and yet anyone who gets their hands on it is like, "holy crap I need to buy this game". I just think we're going to fly under a lot of people's radars, and it going to end up being one of those niche cult games - I think word of mouth is going to spread this game, even more so than... well EA is putting a lot of advertising and push behind it, because it's the launch of Freestyle, but I think it's going to be the word of mouth of people playing it and having a lot of fun, that's really going to push it up to the next level, kind of like what we've seen with Rock Band - it's just turned into this huge party game that you see everywhere - I mean I can't get away from it!

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