The End is Nigh: Fight Night Round 4

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This week: Fight Night Round 4 and how a sports game can create its own storyline.

I don’t have much affection for boxing.

I hung up my gloves this week, retiring as the Greatest of All Time. Unlike most sports games, Fight Night Round 4 made it compelling to play all the way to the end of my career.

It feels more intimate than other games in the genre. We’re dealing with one sportsman as opposed to eleven – Fight Night forces you into a close relationship with your boxer of choice. It achieves this, mostly, by training sessions. On lower difficulties you can just click auto-train and enjoy reaping a fairly decent return, up to 50 per cent of the maximum potential gain, but crank the difficulty higher and opportunities for a stat boost become essential, with every possible training session demanding you flick, twiddle and rotate the right analog stick with as much efficiency as your increasingly weary thumb can make possible.

Furthering the bond with your boxer, the player’s perspective is that of the pugilist rather than the genre norm of omnipotent coach or manager. You’ll be the one receiving e-mails from your manager, hearing your coach shout out the moves to pull in training and getting advice in the corner between bouts. This is the only way to capture the sport rather than an intentional design decision, but its psychological impact on the player in plain to see: EA have been trying to incorporate a similar perspective into their other sports franchises for a few years now. Just take a glance at FIFA’s ‘Be a Pro’ mode.

Fail to put in enough work outside of championship bouts and you’ll be forced to watch your boxer repeatedly hit the canvas when you’re inside the ring. It’s a far cry from the experience of FIFA or Madden, where you view the sport from the detached perspective of distant camera angles. Fight Night leaves nothing to chance, making the player entirely culpable for their missteps and mistakes. A loss produces far more anger and frustration than it could in another sports title, and the game etches it permanently onto the screen as a reminder. In a genre that is widely perceived as multiplayer-centric, Fight Night Round 4 bucks the trend to create a compelling, and finite, single-player experience.

It even has a go at creating narrative. The career mode is a tale of rags to riches, as you lead a fighter from his first bout as a nineteen-year-old in a dingy, squalid training arena all the way to tumultuous championship belt struggles in the ritzy MGM Grand. It’s temporally astute, reminding you at the start that upon reaching your thirties you’ll quickly begin to lose the stats you’ve spent hours toiling to obtain. The experience becomes an intrinsically personal affair, far more than an endless cycle of yearly league tables. You’ll see familiar fighters, relish easy opponents and dread rematches against difficult CPU foes.

Compared to the heavily-penned storylines of other genres, Fight Night’s narrative is crafted by the player, with highlights coming from experiencing memorable bouts rather than pre-scripted events. It successfully imitates the sport it’s based on, and juxtaposes a real-life activity with a virtual career. Regardless of whether you’re a fan of boxing or not, it’s eminently satisfying to punch your way to the elusive championship belt. As a reward it might be an intangible product, but the work, the sweat, and the hours of gameplay the player has to invest is very real. By forcing you to be aware of the necessity of eventual retirement, the developers show you the end of the tale at the beginning. You play the middle of the story, and by forcing you to invest in training you’ll emerge primed and willing to fight for your own satisfying resolution.