Planes, drones, and lidar
Owen S Good, Polygon
WHAT most impresses Craig Penner, a gameplay designer on EA Sports PGA Tour, isn’t the game’s butterlike rendering of the middle of the fairway, or the slight harassment of the first cut lining it, or even the anything-goes tangle of the second cut. It’s when things get really hairy. Like, close-to-the-rope or ask-for-relief bad, almost out of bounds.
Top of the Rock.
After speaking to Penner, he said for him the Country Club comes to mind. This is the course in Brookline, Massachusetts – scene of the 2022 US Open where there are certain areas that are kind of mixed rough – heavy rough and dirt together, uneven terrain, and the artists mapped in the terrain to that. He said it’s all over the place and because you’re going through these different materials, it actually makes it true to real life.
Penner said: “But then it has this interesting effect of giving you a situation where you don’t really know, until you get up to your ball, if it’s a good lie or a bad lie.”
EA Tiburon developers flew drones and aircraft, and deployed lidar scanning from the air and on the ground, to map the terrain and get even the most subtle nuances of their greens true to life.Recently launched EA Sports PGA Tour, which comes on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, includes 30 courses at launch, the most ever on the disc in an EA Sports golf video game, with more hinted as live-service updates.
All but two of those are real-life courses, and for each of them, EA Tiburon developers flew drones and aircraft, and deployed lidar scanning from the air and on the ground, to map the terrain and get even the most subtle nuances of their greens true to life.
They’ve done this before; for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, designers spent 10 days with state-of-the-art scanning equipment to bring Augusta National Golf Course into a video game for the first time – a process that often required the closure of several holes to club members.
A decade later, the technology is more accurate, more compact, and a lot less intrusive, revealed producer Ben Ramsour said. In other words, no real-life tee times were harmed in the making of this video game.
Augusta National Golf Club.
Ramsour said: “It’s better now because we would have to bring these really heavy tripod things, and set them up, and it would take a week to do a course. But the helicopter, besides anyone hearing it, is not invasive, and we can get everything we need in 30 minutes. It’s when we’re doing the photogrammetry, and the panoramic shots, and the colour and lighting stuff, that could be seen as invasive.”
St Andrews.
Even then, in their pitch to the courses to get their participation in the game, it’s always, ‘it’s business as usual’. While some of these places are super private, with members not wanting to see a guy in an EA Sports shirt with a camera running around, the developers show up early, plan around the watering schedules, and try to be invisible.
A decade later, the technology is more accurate, more compact, and a lot less intrusive... In other words, no real-life tee times were harmed in the making of this video game.
One of the private courses where members don’t want to be bothered is Los Angeles Country Club (LACC), a super-exclusive joint up in Beverly Hills, and the site of the 2023 US Open.
Unlike Augusta National, it’s never appeared in a video game before. (No, the Los Santos Golf Club in Grand Theft Auto 5 does not count.)
EA Sports PGA Tour’s designers committed to bringing all four major championships of men’s golf, on their real-world courses, to their video game back in 2021, which makes the LA Country Club’s inclusion almost mandatory.
It won’t be in the game on release, but it will arrive as post-launch DLC before the tournament begins in mid-July. The same goes for Oak Hill’s East Course, the scene of May’s PGA Championship.
As a members-only course dating to 1911, Los Angeles Country Club is one of those bucket-list venues that Ramsour would have been calling up even if it wasn’t hosting a major this year, along with Augusta National, St Andrews, and Pebble Beach.
Southern Hills.
Of LACC, Ramsour said: “It’s in the heart of Beverly Hills, so you’ve got the buildings, you can see LA in the distance. It’s incredibly bucket-list exclusive. That one was very hard to get into the game because they don’t need the publicity of being in a video game. But they understand how we can render their course, and the level of detail that we can create.”
However, it’s not just the drones, the helicopters, and the flyover scanning that builds a course. Penner described multiple meetings with course superintendents to discuss the terrain and how the ball should play, specific to each hole there. The conversations were so detailed that Penner was marking up a yardage book under a nondisclosure agreement because the course super was giving him information that pro golfers (and analysts, and bookmakers, frankly) would love to have three months in advance.
It means, Ramsour knows exactly what the yardage is going to be, on the boards, for the US Open this year. But he’s not going to share that. He said even if Scottie Scheffler [the 2022 Masters Tournament winner] called me, and asked, confidentially, he would not share.
For him, the whole process is about having an open dialogue, to make sure they’re representing it exactly, as it’s in everyone’s best interests to be doing that.
Owen S Good, Polygon
First published on 21 February 2023 on www.polygon.com/23608264/ea-sports-pga-tour-preview-course-list-augusta-national-los-angeles-country-club.
Reprinted with kind permission of Polygon and Vox Media, LLC. All images courtesy of EA Tiburon/Electronic Arts.