STACK #183 Jan 2020

FEATURE GAMES

BIG NAMES, BIG PRIZES! AO Tennis 2 launches with 26 fully licensed players, including world number ones Rafael Nadal and Ash Barty. According to Ross, “We’ve got a great cross section of heroes and up- and-coming stars, and we’ll be looking to add some more as the Australian Open kicks off.”

AOTennis 2 is an extension of that, and very much a product of the community. We can’t wait to hear what they have to say about it this time around! Finally, do you have any fun stories from motion-capturing any particular players for AOTennis 2 ? Are they generally amenable to the process? It’s hard to beat the energy and excitement that Thanasi Kokkinakis brought to the studio. The minute he walked through the door and screamed, “I can’t believe I’m going to be in a video game!” we knew it was on!

We’ve implemented a wide range of presentation enhancements. In addition to the fully voiced and acted

cutscenes in career mode, there are so many more response animations while on the court – right down to being

able to break a racquet. We’ve also included some new fabric

technology, which is particularly noticeable in the women’s game. Skirts move with much more realism and feature many more details now. Finally, there’s a new lighting system in place, which makes Melbourne Park and the players really shine, no matter what time of day they’re playing! Did you do much monitoring of social media and general feedback to get ideas for possible improvements for AOTennis 2 ? We always read, log, and distribute feedback from the community, regardless of where it comes from. With AOTennis , we ended up releasing dozens of patches, on a nearly weekly basis for a while there, and that was entirely driven by player feedback.

Some people found the controls a little complicated in the original AOTennis . Have these been updated in any way? Have any provisions been made to allow simplified “pick up and play” for newcomers to the franchise – perhaps along the lines of an arcade mode? We took a new look at the difficulty settings for AOTennis 2 . On the higher settings the game has been designed to be a challenging tennis simulation for deep fans of the sport, however the lower difficulty settings are very pick-up-and-play and forgiving – it’s very hard to hit the ball out on the easiest setting, which allows more casual fans to leap in and have an almost arcade-like tennis experience with big hitting and lots of pace. There’s also a wealth of gameplay modifying sliders that people can use to adjust just about everything in the game, including the speed of the ball and player movement. This allows people to tailor the experience to their own comfort level.

• AO Tennis 2 is out Jan 9

What can we expect by way of presentation enhancements?

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