Published in Gaming

Fight Night devs hard at work on new UFC

by on20 July 2012

ea

Likely to be called EA Sports UFC when released

After Electronic Arts took the wraps off the fact that it had acquired the UFC license from THQ E3, everyone wanted to know what EA’s plan was. After all, THQ said that it had never been able to make money on a UFC title that it released and EA would need to do much better than that if they were going to take over the franchise going forward.

Now we know more than we did back at E3, and much of what we thought would come to pass is coming to pass. First, it comes as no surprise that EA Canada in Burnaby (which is home to the Fight Night boxing franchise) will be heading the development of the new UFC title. This will be under a new fighting team at EA that will be led by creative director Brian Hayes.

The “Fight Team” will be responsible for both the Fight Night and UFC titles, which comes as no surprise, and actually we predicted as much when EA picked up the UFC rights. It isn’t known yet if they will employ the strategy that EA had originally talked about where Fight Night and MMA titles would alternate yearly releases; but we suspect that we will have to see how well the first UFC title does for EA before that decision is made.

The new UFC title from EA will be called “EA Sports UFC” and we still have no idea when it will be released; but it would seem that next year is very possible if they use the EA MMA engine that they already have, which is based on the Fight Night engine. If not, we might have to wait till the Xbox Next/720 and PS4 arrive before we see the first EA UFC title.


Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: