September 7, 2007

NHL 2K8 Developer Interview Part 2
By Louis Bedigian

“Any time you're pushing the graphics it can affect game performance. So I think we had a bigger challenge this year to still maintain 60fps.”

Knowing that certain sports titles have failed to deliver a solid frame rate, Scott Krager, Project Manager at Kush Games, addressed the issue of bringing 60fps to NHL 2K8.

“For the first 360 version, NHL 2K6, it was tricky because we were dealing with new technology. On top of that we had the pressure of finishing the game in time for launch,” he says. “But from day one running at 60fps was very important to us. We definitely made that a goal to achieve. That was driven by the fact that on the old-gen hardware, that was always a goal for us as well.

“For NHL 2K7 it was definitely easier because we had more time to dedicate our resources to it. On 2K8 one thing is that we’ve made improvements on the graphics side. Any time you’re pushing the graphics it can affect game performance. So I think we had a bigger challenge this year to still maintain 60fps.”

“The Wii is really successful and it’s something we’re looking at. We don’t have any plans for it yet but it’s certainly something we’re researching.”—Ben Bishop, Producer at Visual Concepts

Franchise Expansion

Colin O'Hara, Lead Designer at Kush Games, comments on NHL 2K8’s franchise expansions: “We have contract negotiations. We have a realistic salary cap. We have restricted and unrestricted free agents. We have restricted free agent holdouts. We have an all-new free agent signing feature. We moved away from the off-season scouting portion so the off-season is a little more revamped and simplified as well.

“Individual workouts now affect our player progression system. It doesn’t directly affect your attributes. What happens is, you can get experience points that you can filter down to your attributes. Enforcers will get more experience toward their physical, aggressive attributes, whereas a skater will gain experience that filters down to his skating attributes.

“Minor leagues play a more important role than they ever have before because ice time is really important. At all levels. It might be more beneficial for your guy to get first-line minutes in the minor leagues than fourth-line minutes in the NHL.”

Individuality Intact

Next up, Colin explained how the game keeps players from losing their individuality. “Players don’t jump around from player type to player type,” he confirms. “You can do so manually but they won’t do that on their own. As they progress they have a chance of becoming a veteran or an elite player, which helps them become better and more balanced players overall. But that won’t change their playing type.

“The one little twist on that is if you play good enough they can become a Superstar, which is an all-encompassing label. Basically they sort of lose their [specialty] and become really good at all categories. That doesn’t really replace the fact that they’re an enforcer. ‘Cause when they decline or when they get older and lose that Superstar status, they can go back to being an enforcer-type.”

Capturing the Motions

“The shoot lasted several days and [involved] a number of different athletes, about 10 or so,” Scott revealed. “We went in with a list of the kinds of moves we wanted to get. Again, they were based on actual moves of NHL stars. Every day we’d spend a little bit of time trying to capture these moves. It was actually kind of fun. It gave these guys the chance to show off what they could do rather than just the straightforward mechanics.

“The other cool thing is we had NHL great Igor Larionov. He came in and was one of the athletes we shot. He helped quite a bit with the capturing of the moves. We got a lot of information from him about when you would want to try those moves, what moves he thought would be cool to include. We spent some time with him capturing a lot of moves as well. That was definitely the fun part of the shoot.”

Jersey Action

Scott Krager: “When word went out that the NHL was going to be introducing new uniforms, naturally we were very interested to see how that would play out. There were a lot of rumors going around that it would be tight spandex outfits because they were going for a new look.

“When we finally got a look at the new uniforms and information on them… They’re very cool, as you may have seen now. They’ve unveiled some of them. They’re a little bit tighter but at the same time they’re still hockey jerseys. Our fears and question of how it would affect movement, they were not restrictive from a physical standpoint. On top of that, we really learned from the NHL that a lot of what the new uniforms were about is weight and moisture resistance. The streamlining kind of covered different aspects. In terms of integrating it into the game, it became more of a graphical task than a physics one. We designed are models to represent the new look. As far as the old-style jerseys, those are available in the game.”

“Full-team scrimmages are balanced between building chemistry and avoiding fatigue.”—Colin O’Hara

Question Time

How have the graphics been enhanced since the last version?

Scott Krager: That was a big area of focus. We did new player models and lighting. The players will be in their new uniforms. As Colin mentioned we have a lot of accurate equipment this year. We made unique models for the gloves, helmets, goalie helmets, goalie pads, pretty much across the board. We created higher-res models as well, [and] high-res textures. We’ve added self-shadowing. We’ve added hundreds of new animations. Pretty much across the board we tried to hit the key areas of graphics. In terms of the screenshots and video that are out there right now, I think you can see a night and day difference between NHL 2K7 and NHL 2K8.

Has the presentation (camera angles, audience interactions, etc.) been given any enhancements?

Scott Krager: We added new commentary. We have Bob Cole and Harry Neale. We spent a lot of time with them recording new lines. On the audio side we also updated a lot of the commentary system to remove… I guess what you’d call the stitching effect where you have two lines that are [combined] together to create one. It comes across as noticeably stitched. We updated that to get a much more natural-sounding effect.

We have real-time crowds, updated the crowd audio, added full-screen highlight reels. As Colin mentioned, we added the 2K Reel Maker. We created new action-replay cameras and new action-replay effects. We updated our sequences and pretty much tried to [a higher level] than we had in the past, even with little touches like the lead-in to shoot. We captured new animations and added some new cameras to create a more realistic lead-in.

Are any new game modes being introduced?

Colin O'Hara: The new modes are designed to help you learn the game. We have a couple of new training modes, one of which his called ProStick training mode. I like to consider them interactive game guides. You can learn how to do everything. Learn how to do the poke checks and some of the more advanced techniques.

Superstar mode training will allow you to view all the moves, experiment with them, master them, and you’ll have a little bit of help from a ghost player.

We also have changed the Challenge mode a little bit. You’re going to be going in and doing one-on-one games against some of your favorite teams in order to unlock them. [And] we don’t have the Challenge Points anymore – we’ve unlocked all the jerseys by default.

Now that you've discussed the ProStick's execution, talk about its implementation. What kind of research / experimentation went into the ProStick to make sure this was the right direction for NHL 2K8?

Colin O'Hara: We watch a ton of hockey. We’re all huge hockey fans. For the past couple of years this has been a feature we’ve had in mind. As we watched and made mental notes, we sort of had a mental note of things we wanted to do with the ProStick. When we were ready to plan and implement it, and get all the animations, we put a lead programmer on it who knew what we wanted. We knew what the endgame was. It was awesome [talking to Igor Larionov] about this feature. We talked to the best guys in the world and said, “What would you do here? What would you do there?” We got a lot of research and feedback.
 

You can read PART 1 here: NHL 2K8’s Developers on New Features, New Mechanics, Pushing Boundaries, and More

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