Subsequent courses took less time as artists became more familiar. It was a mountain of work to get through." The first course Nielsen's team finished, TPC Sawgrass, took a very long time because designers were learning to work with Frostbite, an engine that powers EA shooters like Star Wars Battlefront and the Battlefield series. "Even putting aside the licensing," executive producer Brent Nielsen said, "all of those courses needed to be recreated from scratch. "It would have been a lot more of an effort to go into our old assets, pull out those holes and paste them together," Patel said. In Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, all 18 holes of a course are rendered together, on a single layout. "All those old courses were built in 18 separate environments," Patel said, meaning that each hole was a discrete file. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 had more than 40 courses, 20 on the disc and the rest sold digitally, and none of that data was usable for the Rory McIlroy PGA Tour reboot, Patel said. But it would also require completely remaking every course. This kind of fidelity was possible thanks to the power of the new consoles and the new engine Tiburon would be using. "You might learn how to putt at PGA West, but when the green speed changes, the break of the putt changes, and that is another exponential layer of difficulty to the game." "With the per-course physics we have now, we're able to make the greens at Oakmont behave like the greens at Oakmont," Patel said. If you can't attend, watch it in three weeks the only TV show CBS gets to plug is 60 Minutes if the final round runs long.īottom line, if Augusta does not want to participate in a video game - and given its ties to Tiger Woods, it may have lost interest once he left the franchise - there aren't many appeals EA Sports can make to convince it otherwise. This is a spectator event that still sells $3 beer and sandwiches, after all. Finally, despite the notoriety of The Masters, Augusta notoriously curbs the commercialization of the tournament and its course. It's a single course and event, not the custodian of an entire sport, like a league. It's also a private club, meaning it has no need for publicity or "brand awareness" and has literally no obligation to the public. For starters, Augusta doesn't need anyone's money, so it can't be induced to participate with a huge check alone. When Augusta National Golf Club left, a former EA Sports rep who worked closely with the game mentioned to me that the deal between the two was one of the more unusual licensing arrangements ever in sports video gaming, and I believe it. This more falls under the never-say-never end of an ongoing cordial relationship than it suggests any license negotiations are actually in play. Last spring, when it became apparent Augusta would not be featured in Rory McIlroy PGA Tour, an EA Sports representative still left open the possibility that it could be added later. I asked executive producer Brent Nielsen, and he replied with a blanket no-comment. The Masters begins April 7 and, no, there is no news, no tease, nothing to share that suggests that event or its course could make any kind of a surprise return to EA Sports' golf simulation after its run from 2011 to 2013. That meant Oakmont, a links course featuring wide-open views and no water hazards, was one of the easiest courses in 2013's Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 despite being one of the hardest in North America for nearly a century. By this Patel means that a ball struck under the same conditions, onto the same surface on one course, would behave exactly the same way on any other. "On the old Tiger Woods game, every course played the same," said Justin Patel, a longtime veteran of EA's golf operation and a lead designer on this title. Oakmont is one of major tournament golf's most difficult courses, and it is the last of six that EA Sports promised to deliver for free to Rory McIlroy PGA Tour by the end of this month.Īrriving in a title update March 8, Oakmont is an appropriate finish to a redemptive second-round performance for EA Tiburon's designers, in how it showcases the promise of Rory McIlroy PGA Tour and explains why it took nearly a year after launch for the game to fulfill it. The downhill fairway will roll the ball within 60 yards of the pin's Thursday placement.Īnd from there, it's just an easy wedge shot to your first bogey of the day.Įven from 60 yards, any approach to Oakmont's inscrutably tough greens will skitter and slide like a one-legged bobcat trying to cover his crap on a frozen pond. With the wind at your back - an 8 mph breeze is plenty enough - and a proper attribute boost equipped, you can rip a 400-yard drive on the first tee at Oakmont Country Club, the latest course introduced to Rory McIlroy PGA Tour.
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