The game will boast both online and split-screen multiplayer, Arcade and Pro modes (the tougher one will have AI and visual assists switched off) and full team customization options, including a full logo editor. But of course the real star quarterback here is the physics engine -- while the video hints at some great dynamic tackling and movement, we'll have to wait and see if the gameplay provides some real innovation in the football genre.
The game will boast both online and split-screen multiplayer, Arcade and Pro modes (the tougher one will have AI and visual assists switched off) and full team customization options, including a full logo editor. But of course the real star quarterback here is the physics engine -- while the video hints at some great dynamic tackling and movement, we'll have to wait and see if the gameplay provides some real innovation in the football genre.
Reader Comments (46)
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 6:14AM RagingStormX said
LMFAO... i was thinking kind of the same thing as I watched the video.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 12:31PM (Unverified) said
I'm waiting for EA to buy the rights to use this in the next Madden
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:09AM (Unverified) said
Euphoria's a bunch of blah. It's all lies. I don't see technology, I see animations and a bunch of magnetic hands. The video seems to present itself as kill and lots and lots of hurtful tackles yet it is anti-climactic and doesn't make me feel anything other than "they don't realize how stupid this looks".
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:27AM Reznik said
I don't get your comment that 'all [you] see is animations'. That's the point of Euphoria. It generates procedural animations according to the situation, so you don't have to spend nine hundred trillion dollars on having a bunch of animators try to make animations for every situation that may or may not blend properly with each other. Now you don't have to see the exact same set of animations over and over and over again.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 4:59AM (Unverified) said
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 5:01AM (Unverified) said
If what you claim is true, that Euporia is actually something that isn't a bunch of animators, show me some hard evidence. I want proof showing otherwise that does not come from the company's marketing material. Do that before you choose to rank my comment down.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 6:33AM CynicalStrike said
@Saturn2888:
Go on the Natural Motion website and download the free learning edition of Endorphin, which is their other main product based on the same tech as Euphoria (the difference being Euphoria is a real-time engine and Endorphin is a animation program).
Just have a little play around with it and do some of the tutorials and you'll see the animation is all simulated on the fly; adjust one variable and the entire animation changes. Seriously, it's very hard to understand this tech unless you actually have a go yourself.
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Go on the Natural Motion website and download the free learning edition of Endorphin, which is their other main product based on the same tech as Euphoria (the difference being Euphoria is a real-time engine and Endorphin is a animation program).
Just have a little play around with it and do some of the tutorials and you'll see the animation is all simulated on the fly; adjust one variable and the entire animation changes. Seriously, it's very hard to understand this tech unless you actually have a go yourself.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:26AM Unvrfd said
"they aren't a public, purchasable product because they basically send engineers on-site to games that use it to tune/train their neural networks. It doesn't actually work without their guys *very* hands-on..."
"Yep, the Euphoria guys pretty much become part of the dev team for the given game."
Euphoria can get really disturbing by the way. Shoot a guy - you won't get an animation, but a response influenced by simulated pain. Jesus.
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"Yep, the Euphoria guys pretty much become part of the dev team for the given game."
Euphoria can get really disturbing by the way. Shoot a guy - you won't get an animation, but a response influenced by simulated pain. Jesus.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 11:32AM (Unverified) said
"I want proof showing otherwise that does not come from the company's marketing material"
GTA 4. The way people act when they get hit by anything, or diving out of speeding cars? That's Euphoria. I'm actually shocked more games haven't used it, as it's brilliant.
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GTA 4. The way people act when they get hit by anything, or diving out of speeding cars? That's Euphoria. I'm actually shocked more games haven't used it, as it's brilliant.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:11AM (Unverified) said
Glad Backbreaker is still going. I was beginning to think we would never hear of it again.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:24AM kinsella5 said
While I will admit I don't know that much about football games, after watching this trailer, I can't see how this game is any different from others like it. I own Madden 2010, I haven't played it yet, but have the past Madden's pretty faithfully. But this new Backbreaker looks rather boring and doesn't appear to be unique at all.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:48AM (Unverified) said
and Sports gets off with this shit?
talk about boring...Give me a weapon then I call it the next level of football gaming.
Muahahaha!
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talk about boring...Give me a weapon then I call it the next level of football gaming.
Muahahaha!
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 4:02AM Granger said
More like next-level handegg, amirite?!?!?!?!?
I'll give props to madden though, they've definitely stepped up their game in the last year or two. Maybe this will be the decent mix of arcade/sim gridiron I could get into. I'm not a football fan, and I never follow the NFL, but I did love the old Madden games (97 at the latest) and Tecmo Bowl. The new Blitz League series was a total joke.
I'd just like a modern SWOS type game except with American Football. One that doesn't take itself seriously, but is still fun for RPG loving stat whores like me. This looks interesting enough to pay attention to at least.
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I'll give props to madden though, they've definitely stepped up their game in the last year or two. Maybe this will be the decent mix of arcade/sim gridiron I could get into. I'm not a football fan, and I never follow the NFL, but I did love the old Madden games (97 at the latest) and Tecmo Bowl. The new Blitz League series was a total joke.
I'd just like a modern SWOS type game except with American Football. One that doesn't take itself seriously, but is still fun for RPG loving stat whores like me. This looks interesting enough to pay attention to at least.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 7:42AM LuTon James said
I hate to admit it, but I've spent far too much time playing the iphone version. It's a lot of fun, but I don't like Madden as much as Fifa or 2k Ball so this will have to be awesome for me to give it a shot. It really doesn't look all that exciting.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 8:16AM (Unverified) said
I actually messed around with it when I first saw it. It still felt really linear to me. Most of the rest was ragdoll. I'll say that portion is my opinion though. Thanks for being less derogatory and bringing in some evidence.
No matter what I said about Euphoria, the trailer still looked really stupid.
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No matter what I said about Euphoria, the trailer still looked really stupid.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:10AM CynicalStrike said
No problem, you wanted evidence and Endorphin is it. You're sort of right, it is ragdoll UNTIL you add behaviours to the characters (balance, stagger etc.). That's what Euphoria does in real-time; it tells the character to modify its animation based on what's happening to it. For example, if you dive out of a car in GTA IV, Euphoria makes your character curl into a ball and try to roll into the fall. A ragdoll character would never do that, it would just go limp and hit the ground.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 6:46PM ptcamn said
And just to clarify something from your previous post, you will always have an animator in your team even if you are using Euphoria (much like you still have a captain in a cruise ship even though a lot of modern ships are GPS driven). What Naturalmotion has been doing over the years with Endorphin, and now Euphoria, is giving a cheap alternative to motion capture. Rather than having an expensive mo-cap session to get all the reactions a character needs you use one of their programs to get a procedural solution about how a person would react to different situations. You will have an animator at the helm, however, that can do the work of ten people from a mocap session alone.
I was surprised to see Backbreaker in this form coming to consoles. The Iphone version is great and would have done for a terrific downloadable game for PSN had they just improved the graphics. That would have still been a good tech demo and could have given them a competitive edge over the other football offerings.
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I was surprised to see Backbreaker in this form coming to consoles. The Iphone version is great and would have done for a terrific downloadable game for PSN had they just improved the graphics. That would have still been a good tech demo and could have given them a competitive edge over the other football offerings.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:16AM Mogwai 279 said
If they put this out at a budget price I would buy it instantly. I hope they are keeping that Tackle Alley mode. Why does the quarterback jump up in the air or throw off his back foot every time they show them throwing though?
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 10:07PM KeithAsante said
Brick, a Rian Johnson film from 2005 that my friend suggested.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 10:08PM KeithAsante said
That was my first question after seeing this trailer. I wonder if they understand that that is not a good way to throw a pass in football. Also, I was wondering if that was the in game camera because you can't see anything but the player if it is.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:22AM (Unverified) said
That's what it's supposed to do at least. I still don't quite know if it's used like that. It could just be a team of animators working with Endorphin and making certain things work in realtime with smooth programming. There might not be an actual Euporia engine in that, it would have to be custom-programmed per game. That'd also explain why it's always implemented differently such as magnetic hands vs drunk people. It seems like it's a lot of custom stuff going on whereas their marketing team likes to say it's all like magic, and it's this super thing you just inject into your code. Do you get what I mean? You can't just buy the license to the Euphoria engine, you have to have the Natural Selection team make it work specifically for your game. That's what I'm pointing at and where my suspicions are.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:47AM CynicalStrike said
Well, from my understanding it does basically need to be completely integrated into the game engine from the start; you can't just stick it on top of an existing engine like you can with Havok (I know this is a massive oversimplification!). This is why all the Euphoria games we've seen have all been new engines (RAGE for GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, and LucasArts new engine for SW:TFU and the cancelled Indy game).
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 9:57AM StormEagle said
I'm not seeing anything different here...
#1. It's really crappy CGI implemented here.
#2. It looks like regular football to me.
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#1. It's really crappy CGI implemented here.
#2. It looks like regular football to me.
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 1:05PM Nate Addison said
Legit question: Is this in the same family as Facebreaker? If so, I think Legbreaker should be tennis or soccer, even though I care for neither sport, just seems to fit.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 12:47PM Mister Servo said
Damn, I was hoping it'd be like old school Blitz with crazier physics. I'd love to see a linebacker get powered up and go charging through a defensive line, sending the linemen flying through the air.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 2:37PM (Unverified) said
Looks exactly like their game developed for the iPhone -__-
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 2:50PM (Unverified) said
Here is the first football game that is tryng to push the bar on a technical level and most people are just too ignorant or biased to realize the benefit. So what if it doesn't have official teams? Does a fancy emblem and team names effect the gameplay in any form or fashion? Every tackle in backbreaker will be unique, unlike maddens oldschool method of motion capturing a bunch of animations and hoping it looks right. I simply don't understand how anyone could be that dumb to not see the HUGE advancement euphorias tech adds to games, and yet post on a gaming website.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:35PM (Unverified) said
tmacairjordan87, you missed the guy's comment before you, but that doesn't show Euphoria is an engine, it shows it is some kind of game-specific technology which makes things feel pain.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 3:36PM (Unverified) said
I think the next-level bit has to do with neural-net based AI and animation from what I've read about Euphoria's and Natural Motion's tech. In other words, the AI has a "real", unscripted sense of self-preservation or whatever goal you give it, as well as "real" control over its body as opposed to scripted animations. So if the AI is given the goal of tackling another player, it's actually sending signals from its virtual brain to its limbs, creating on-the-fly animation and responding in real time to what's happening on the field.
http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
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http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
Posted: Jan 8th 2010 7:34PM (Unverified) said
Well is the cost of a consulting company to do custom-programming as part of your game-design team less expensive than hiring actors or reusing old motion capture data? That's the big question. I was going back and referring to the fact that it seems like they're advertising something revolutionary with Euphoria, which maybe they are, as something it's not; a solution like Havok where it's almost plug-n-play.
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Posted: Jan 8th 2010 10:13PM Mogwai 279 said
yeah I hope that isn't the camera, at one point it looked like it was pointed at the receivers feet.
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