Alright, I’ve been waiting all year to write this blog and I finally got the green light to do it.  Our NEW Live Tournament feature is one we have been hinting at on the forums for some time now.  We’ve been talking about what we were going to be doing “differently” with Daily Tournaments and this is it…and then some.  Since you’ve all been waiting patiently (some impatiently) to hear what this feature is all about, I am going to try and go into as much detail as possible for you.  I am currently on a plane out to Los Angeles where we will be unveiling this new Live Tournament s mode to the media.  My laptop is draining battery as I type this, so let’s get crackin’…

THE BASICS
In a nutshell our new Live Tournaments feature is going to let you play in a variety of tournament types against online gamers from all over the world.  We’ve taken the concept behind our existing Daily Tournaments and blown it out to create an entirely new mode revolving around playing tournament rounds, then posting your score(s) to that tournament’s leaderboard and beating other player’s tournament scores in that tournament.  After each event the tournament purses will be distributed and your goal is to earn tournament cash to climb as high as possible on the overall money rankings leaderboard. 

Live Tournaments are broken up into 3 unique tournament types:

•    Daily Tournaments – Similar to in years past these will be 24hr long tournaments that crown a new winner each day.   You’ll play your round and submit it to the tournament leaderboard.  At the end of the day, that tournament ends and a new one begins.  Within Daily’s there will be a number of different difficult levels to play.  Each difficulty level will have its own unique settings.

•    Weekly Tournaments – These will be tournaments that last all week long.  They will start on Sunday, for example, and players can compete all week long.  In Weekly’s you’ll submit four tournament rounds.  The player with the lowest total four round score will win that week’s weekly tournament.  Like in Daily’s there will be several difficulty levels to choose from, so you’re sure to find the right competition level for your golf game.

•    Play the Pros – This tournament type will allow you to compete each week directly against the pro golfer’s scores from that week’s professional golf tournament.  So, for example, when the game ships in June, you will be able to play against Tiger and the boys at the U.S. Open at Bethpage vs. their real life scores, at the course the tournament is being played at, with live weather and as the tournament is happening!  These tournaments will start on the Thursday of that week’s pro tournament and go through the weekend.  There will only be one difficulty setting for Play the Pros, since this tournament type is meant to be the ultimate golf test.  We’ve made sure to customize and tune the settings in Play the Pros tournaments to ensure your scores will be competitive against those of the real life pro golfers.  One other unique aspect to Play the Pros tournaments is that unlike Daily and Weekly Tournaments, here, you will only be competing against the pro golfer’s scores.  So there won’t be any other online gamers to contend with.

PLAYER RATING SYSTEM
Each individual tournament within the Live Tournaments feature will have its own purse.  This is important because the main objective in Live Tournaments is the climbing the overall Money Earnings Leaderboard.  When entering tournaments you’ll have to pick the tournament you enter wisely so you match yourself up with the right competition level for you.  We’ve created a new player rating system for Live Tournaments to ensure that lower level tournaments cannot be entered by those who could run away with the leaderboard.  The object of the player rating is to match people with similar ranks so that the tournaments are competitive and fun.  You can always see your Rating at the top of the Live Tournament screens. 

TIEBREAKING
We got a lot of feedback regarding ties with our old daily tournament mode.  In the new Live Tournaments, we’ve created a unique tiebreaking system that will take care of all ties along the tournament leaderboard.  This new tiebreaking system uses a n umber of in game stats to compile a Tiebreaker Score for each player per tournament. 

The stats that make up your tiebreaker score include the following:

•    Average Number of Putts
•    Average Driving Distance
•    Longest Drive
•    Driving Accuracy
•    Greens in Regulation
•    Hole in Ones
•    Double Eagles
•    Eagles
•    Bogeys
•    Double Bogeys or Worse

The totals of all of these stats are then run through an equation and then added up to determine each player’s overall tiebreaker score.  So if there are people tied on the leaderboard with the same round score, the player with the highest tiebreaker score will get the spot.  Tiebreakers aren’t only used to break first place ties.  Everyone will be generating a tiebreaker score as they play Live Tournaments, so every spot on the leaderboard is subject to the tiebreaker score system.  One cool thing about the tiebreaker system is that it is very tunable once the game launches.  So if necessary, we’ll be able to tweak the modifiers and values you receive for each stat based on community feedback or if we think too many or too little points are being awarded for a particular stat.  This idea of tuning the mode after launch is something we carried throughout the Live Tournaments feature.  I’ll discuss more about this below.

TWEAKABLE AFTER LAUNCH
The ability for us to tune and change Live Tournament settings after the game launches was something that was extremely important for us as we designed this.  So making adjustments to the tournament settings, rules, weather, etc…is something we built into almost every aspect of Live Tournaments.  All of these tweaks can be made in real-time on our servers after you all get the game.  So if we receive feedback from gamers that certain tournaments are too hard, we can make them easier.  If people think that Play the Pros tournament is too easy, we can make it harder.  All of the settings and rules for each individual tournament are tweak-able on the fly, even some that are not exposed on the surface.  For example, we can cap the skill attributes that your golfer takes into a tournament.  This is not a setting that the player can change in game, but it’s one that we wanted to use in this new tournament mode to level the playing field.  This attributes capping system will be used in Play the Pros, for example, so that people are not able to overpower the ball or “take advantage” of any club sweet spots.

POSTING SCORES
In Live Tournaments, you will not be competing head to head against other online gamers like in normal online matches.  You’ll play each round of the tournament and when complete, you’ll sign your scorecard to post that round to an online tournament leaderboard for that particular tournament.  Certain tournaments will have posting limits that will only allow you to post a certain number of rounds.  For example, Play the Pros is capped at four total submissions.  When you have signed your scorecard and submitted those four tournament rounds you will have reached the maximum number of submissions.  Once you have reached your maximum number of tournament round submissions in each individual tournament you will only be allowed to re-submit tournament scores if you purchase a submission with your tournament earnings.  Spending these earnings to submit again once you’ve reached the limit can be a catch 22 since it will draw funds from your existing overall total earnings and this could drop you down on the money leaderboard.  But, that score you just put up may be worth the investment if it’s good enough (as long as someone doesn’t come along later and beat it later).  

This again is one of our very tunable systems.  We can tune everything from which tournaments have submission limits and what the limits are, to how much it costs per submission if you have reached your maximum number of submissions in a tournament.  We can also hard cap tournaments so that no more round submissions are allowed, period, once you have reached the submission limit.  Again, the Live Tournaments feature has been designed with tuning based on user feedback so we wanted to make sure we could make changes to as many components post-launch as possible.

Note to current Daily Tournament players - In the past people have been able to post a score to the next day’s tournament by finishing the tournament after the deadline and having their score carry over to the new daily (which often was at a higher difficulty).  Not only will splitting up the tournaments into difficulties help to solve this, but our new submission system will not let you sign your scorecard once the tournament or round has ended.

MID-ROUND UPDATES
In previous feature blogs we’ve talked about in-game leaderboard and tournament updates.  These will also be included in Live Tournaments.  So if your friend has just posted a score that takes the lead in the tournament or another player has hit a total bomb off the tee, we’ll let you know about it as you are out on the course competing.  In Play the Pros, you’ll also get these tournament updates, but they will be for the pro golfers who are out on the course.  So if you are playing the tournament at the same time as the real life golfers are, you will get these updates as they are happening in real life. 

All these updates are displayed to players using a banner that animates in at the top of the screen and displays the appropriate message for that update.  The idea here was to present these similar to the broadcast score update graphics you see on TV.

MID-ROUND LEADERBOARDS
Exposing tournament leaderboards and making them as accessible as possible was a huge priority for the Live Tournaments feature.  So we’ve created a number of places for players to view the current tournament leaderboards from within the Live Tournament game screens.  We also wanted to make sure that the updated leaderboard information was also available during your round.  Just like in our PGA TOUR Season mode, Live Tournaments will display an up to date top 5 leaderboard (as well as your current position) between each hole.  This way as other people are posting rounds while you are playing, you’ll always know the score you’re shooting for to crack into the top 5.

 
TOUR HISTORY
Above I talked about the importance of leaderboards and how we wanted to make them very accessible to people in this new feature.  The Tour History screen is one place where you can go to see a lot of our Live Tournament leaderboard information.  This screen is going to let you sort through past, present and upcoming tournaments on the schedule in all of the different tournament types (Daily, Weekly and Play the Pros).  For past and present tournaments you will also be able to select the individual tournaments and view their top 100 leaderboard (plus your position) as well as the tiebreaker details for anyone on those leaderboards.

TOUR RANKINGS  
The Tour Rankings screen is where you’ll go to see who’s ruling the roost in Live Tournaments.  This is where you will find the leaderboard for overall money earners.  You’ll also be able to filter between a number of different statistics and re-populate the leaderboards based on that filter criteria.  A cool thing about this screen is that you’ll be able to filter any of the leaderboards to get a customized view of how you match up against your online friends.

TOURNAMENT NEWS BANNER
On the main Live Tournaments HUB screen we’ve placed a news banner that will keep you up to date with everything having to do with Live Tournaments.  Like most everything else in Live Tournaments, this news banner can and will be updated after the game ships.  It’ll be our way to communicate with you, the player, things like:

•    Upcoming Tournaments
•    New Money Leaders
•    Shout-outs to Tournament Winners
•    Hints/Tips
•    New Tuning Adjustments
•    Anything else we think you’d like to hear about

TALK TO THE DEV TEAM
We’ve been stressing how important it is for us to hear from our community of gamers so that we can continue to find out what you think in order to make better games.  This next feature helps us take a huge leap forward in that area.  In the main Live Tournaments HUB screen there will, from time to time, be a “Talk to the Dev Team” button.  Activating this will bring up an on-screen keyboard so that you can send us your feedback on Live Tournaments or anything else you have on your mind.  All you do is type in the comments and hit send.

I’m sure there’s a ton of things I’ve left out of this blog, but I’m hoping that this new feature has got you excited and full of questions to ask.  I tried to keep this focused on the questions I have heard from you all on the forums and those I thought you might have regarding the details of Live Tournaments.  Please feel free to post further questions or comments below or on the forums and we can continue to discuss this feature at length.

-Mike D.

Up until now, the blogs have mainly been focusing on the new features and gameplay that will be found in Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10.  This week we thought we’d spend a little bit of time discussing some of the many graphical improvements we are making to this year’s game.  Reza Elghazi is the art/environments Producer here on the Tiger team and there is nobody better to tell you all about the improvements that he and his team have been working on this year. 

–Mike D.

Take it away Rez!

Hey gang,

Golf is probably the one sports video game where the environments are essentially the game:  you “play the course”, as opposed to simply golfing on top of it.  In Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10, anything from the thickness of the grass to a simple drop on the terrain will affect your game, just like in real life.  So to create a high-quality virtual golf course, accuracy and authenticity are fundamental.  The other caveat of a golf video game is that the smallest detail in the environment will be noticed by the player, as you spend a good portion of your time scrutinizing the course and its surroundings.

Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 environments showcase dramatic improvements, as we enhanced and revamped practically every area of the game with an utmost attention to the smallest visual details:  we now have more realistic skies, lifelike water reflections, faithful shadows, flourishing vegetation, etc. 

This year, the terrain is particularly detailed with improved texture detail and degradation that emphasizes the lushness of the grass.  Transitions between each grass type are a lot smoother especially along the edges of the rough.  Our new 3D tall grass is noticeably optimized and animates more naturally.

With the new dynamic weather feature, we are introducing new overcast lighting, striking cloudy skies, wind and rain effects that actually influence the gameplay.  Players will notice how raindrops splash on different surfaces such as grass, sand, concrete and water.

In conclusion, I think that these visual improvements not only add to the realism of our golf courses, but also help enhance the player’s overall game experience.  I now look forward to hearing from all of you and read your comments on our forums, as we publish more screenshots from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR® 10 golf courses. 

  –Reza E.

A couple weeks back we released information revealing some of the new features that will be found in Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10.  One of the features we unveiled was the new Precision Putting mechanic.  We’re really excited about this new way to putt in our game, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to expand upon the putter’s functionality a bit more.

One thing to note before I continue… The Precision Putter represents an addition to the other existing putting mechanics in the game.  The Classic Putting system of selecting individual putter lengths will still be available to players who prefer that style of putting.  3-Click will also still be available to those who prefer that mechanic.  You’ll be able to set your putting preference using the Game Options menu.

Now let’s dive into the functionality of the Precision Putter…

When you set up to take your putts in the game using the Precision Putter you’ll notice one main visual difference.  We’ve added a new on-screen Precision Putting Meter that will help you to dial in your power and read your putt’s accuracy.

A putter head graphic is used to help you set the putt’s power along the meter.  Unlike the Classic Putting, this new putter uses one fixed max distance.  There is no need to toggle through different putter distance ranges using the Precision Putter.  You’ll use this same putter for 1 foot gimmies and 65 foot bombs. 

It’ll be up to you to dial in the amount of power you think is necessary to execute the putt successfully.  To do this, you’ll use the existing putt aiming arrow that TW veterans should all be familiar with.  The aiming arrow is going to represent the spot on the green that you are trying to hit your ball to in order for it to go in the hole.  The aiming arrow not only represents the putt line you are choosing, it also is going to affect the recommended power for your putt.  As you move the arrow closer and farther away from you, while on the green, you’ll notice the yellow Power Recommendation Bar on the Precision Putting Meter moving.  This bar represents the recommended power you should use for the putt based on where you have set the aiming arrow on the green.  Remember, *you* set the aiming arrow location, so the Power Recommendation Bar is reflecting the power needed to roll the ball to the spot you have set the aiming arrow to, based on a level surface.   The Power Recommendation Bar does not take green elevation, increased green speed or ground soak into account.  The Putt Preview option is still available using this putting mechanic (based on difficulty level).  When enabled, the Putt Preview will use the aiming arrow’s location to show you a preview of the putt’s line.

 
Once you are comfortable with the location of the aiming arrow, it’s time to execute the putt.  To do this you’ll pull back and push forward using the Shot Stick.  When you begin your backswing, you’ll notice the putter head graphic begin traveling down the Precision Putting Meter.  You’ll also notice your golfer has also begun his putting backswing as well.  Take a look at the yellow line getting drawn in along the meter as you bring the putter head back.  This line represents the accuracy of your stroke.  Just like swinging all of your other clubs in-game, you’ll want to make sure this line stays in the middle of the meter for true and accurate putts. 

Once the face of the putter head graphic is within the yellow Power Recommendation Bar you have reached the power level you set with the aiming arrow.  You’ll then push forward on the Shot Stick and strike the ball.  Just like with your backswing, you’ll want to make sure you are as precise as possible when pushing forward on the Shot Stick to maintain the accuracy of your putting line.

Good Putting Stroke:

 
Bad Putting Stroke:

 
The speed that the putter head graphic travels at along the meter and the thickness of the Power Recommendation Bar are both tuned so that they become more challenging as you increased the game’s difficulty level.  So, the putter head will travel faster and the recommendation bar will get thinner as you make the game’s difficulty settings harder and harder. 

If you are looking for the ultimate putting challenge you can turn off the Precision Putting Meter entirely in the Game Options menu.  When you do this, the precision putting mechanic will still work the same way as described above, except that you will not have the aid of the Precision Putting Meter while putting.  You’ll have to do it all by feel and by reading the greens.  The ability to putt with the meter turned off got implemented into the game directly as a result of the TW Community Day feedback we received.  The guys that were here during the Community Day event gave us a bunch of great feedback on the putting and one of their suggestions was to allow the player to turn the meter off for an added challenge.  Take a peek at the video below for a look back at the feedback we received on this new putting mechanic and how it helped us to dial in the final implementation.

-Mike D.