Fight Night Champion's Brian Hayes

Boxing is a really tricky sport to add any co-operative or team-based multiplayer to. It is a single-player mode. It's not an online head-to-head. That being said, which is a great segue into other game modes I'm going to do whatever I can to get you off the topic of the new game mode [laughs]. Even though we're taking a big step forward with this new game mode, the online gameplay last year was something that even the development team found tremendously addictive. Between me and another producer we probably racked up 1000 to 1500 fights between us.

Heh! Certainly not. That's unfortunate. We know that probably for the first two weeks or so we're going to be hanging around the top of the heap, but it does not take very long... At the end of the day we still have jobs, and there are people out there that are literally spending eight to 10 hours a day perfecting every nuance of the game and finding out all the tricks. We can hang with almost anybody.

The online gameplay is an area we know people are still playing. Every time I go to the game, somebody sends me an invite to play: they know who I am and they want to beat me up because I'm the producer or whatever. As with a lot of games, that's the type of mode that keeps people playing the game, keeps the game in their consoles. We definitely want to do as many things as we can to make the online community in the game stronger and more vibrant, and communicate more information to the users about who's online, how to find good matches and all that sort of stuff. As far as details go, we're a little bit tight-lipped right now in terms of what features we're adding and improving and all that sort of stuff. The things that our community felt were missing are the things we're working on, to make it more fun to go online and find someone of a similar skill or playing style. We're making significant efforts [online].

There are elements of streamlining to make it easier to get there, but then there's also depth by adding more things. A more robust experience in the online experience is certainly something we want to provide.

To be honest, I have no idea what we're doing with that. I know we're doing something, but that's the other producer's ball.

How groundbreaking is it in relation to Fight Night? It's certainly the most innovative, groundbreaking thing that any Fight Night game or any Knock Out game has done. Even more so, in terms of EA Sports, this approach to a single-player experience is just something that no other EA Sports game has done.

It's possible. Obviously all that will depend on the success, which we hope is going to be very high! [laughs]

It's something that could work in a lot of other sports areas. It works particularly well for us because of the nature of boxing, but it's definitely something you could see other games doing down the road. If that happened that would be a pretty cool thing.

This is perfect! You're good. I have you going nuts.