Gamers will be able to create characters for their own use

Mar 31, 2014 07:07 GMT  ·  By

The development team at EA Sports working on the new UFC video game says that the custom fighters that gamers can create on their own using the complex included editor cannot be shared with the wider community because of concerns over copyright issues that might affect the company.

Brian Hayes, who is the creative director working on the project, states that his team was interested in creating a Fighter Share feature like the one that was offered in the 2010 installment of EA Sports MMA, but was unable to do so because of legal issues.

He tells MMAJunkie that, “Nowadays, when people can make YouTube clips and share them, there’s this whole gray area where if our game allows users to make a Rocky character that’s the intellectual property of somebody else, it causes a ton of problems.”

He adds, “There is a Create-A-Fighter, and you could create you own Rocky, but when we are facilitating the sharing of content, it gets very difficult.”

It’s unclear whether EA Sports also plans to limit a gamer’s ability to show off the fighters that they have created using streaming or other forms of video or screenshots.

In the MMA title that the studio made in 2010, plenty of gamers used the custom editor to create fighters that were based on a variety of celebrities, including the likes of Harry Potter, Snoop Dogg and Bruce Lee.

This has caused some legal problems for EA Sports and the company probably wants to avoid them for its UFC title.

The simplest way to do that would have been not to include a fighter editor at all, but that would have generated a negative reaction from the player community.

EA Sports UFC is set to launch on both the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony before the end of spring, but it does not yet have an official date.

The title is only coming to next-gen consoles because it uses the new Ignite engine, which is designed to use all the extra computing power included in the devices.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship title will allow gamers to choose from a variety of carefully simulated real-world combatants, which have been motion captured using a special new tech.

The game will be able to simulate the entire experience of the sport, allowing each player to create his own custom combat style and use it to defeat a variety of other fighters.