Fight Night Champion's Brian Hayes

I can verify this: it's not a dog. [laughs]

All I can say to that effect is everybody here is really excited about what we're doing. Everybody here is on the same page in terms of like, "Wow, we've never really done anything like this before." At the same time, as much as they're excited about it, there's a wee bit of nerves. Everybody's working really hard to make sure we're knocking it out of the park.

I'm sure there's going to be some cynics out there that when the game drops someone will say, "This is not a big deal." But I can tell you that everyone here, everyone we've shown the contents to, thinks it's a pretty big deal and is genuinely excited and jazzed to see it.

The realism of the control system is a bit tricky. Obviously we're not putting you into an infra-red capture suit and you're controlling it that way, because that would cost hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars. More it's about what the control system allows you to do in the game, in terms of creating realistic boxing actions inside the ring. The control system is very user friendly and the benefit is that you can do things in better and more realistic ways.

We don't want to give too many details about everything just yet. The one thing I would say to you as someone who has experience of Round 3 and Round 4 is that one thing we wanted to do was make sure we don't throw a big monkey wrench into the gears of your Fight Night gameplay experience. For someone like you and for someone like me it's really an element of... you're probably not really going to notice a significant difference because you're already pretty talented at it. [I'm not -Ed.] But it's about making that same control scheme a little bit more entry-level friendly. Where you will find a difference is the fidelity of control you have over the boxer will be greater.

I can talk a little bit about the career mode, just to say that FNR4 had the Legacy mode and Legacy mode is back. There's a significant list of additional features and improvements.

It's going to be quite some time before the game drops and we don't want to let all the cats out of the bag right now.

[laughs] Can I let one little kitten out of the bag? All of the kittens are howling in fear at the bottom of that bag right now. I'm trying to coax them out with snacks but they're not having it.

Suffice to say that Legacy mode will take a step forwards. It's back as that traditional sports single-player experience.

When we say that there's a new innovative single-player experience, that's not something where we're saying... That new thing we're doing is something that is a whole new addition to the game. Everything that you would have expected from a Fight Night Round 5 is still there. The new game mode is something that we're also adding on top of it. It's like when you go to a furniture store and you buy a sofa set and then they give you a 56" plasma screen for free - that's a decent analogy.

Now don't mistake that: I don't want the story to get out that when you buy Fight Night Champion you get a 56" plasma screen.

We really need to shut this down. [laughs]

It's all about the total package. Fight Night is known as... It has always been a consistently high rated game, going from low 80s to the high 80s. And we're expecting and shooting to be a 90-plus Metacritic rated game when this one drops.