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Last year proved to be one of the most progressive in UFC history. Not only did we see women fighting in The Octagon for the first time, we saw two of the sport's most iconic champions - Anderson Silva and Georges St-Pierre - lose their respective titles. Silva lost twice to Chris Weidman, with the second fight ending in a clean break of The Spider's leg, while St-Pierre vacated the title after a highly controversial win over Johny Hendricks. It feels like we're heading into a new era of MMA, and it's not something that begins and ends with the physical sport itself.It's no secret that the Undisputed series was the MMA champion over the last console generation. UFC 2009 Undisputed proved that the sport could be made into something worthy, and over two subsequent games Yuke's refined the art of takedowns and transitions. But now that EA Sports has the UFC license and Yuke's has gone back to working with the WWE, Dana White has gone from declaring war on EA to helping it build a new generation of UFC fighting games. Still, after all the trash talk that's been thrown around in the past, what was that first meeting like?
"It was totally cool", explains EA Sports UFC producer Brian Hayes. "We announced the licensing with the UFC back at E3 2012, and then literally two weeks later, Dana White, Lorenzo Feritta and some other key people came to the studio and gave a presentation to the whole team. We then gave a presentation on what our plans were and it went from there." That meeting was over one and a half years ago, and since then, Hayes and his team have put together a fighting system that feels less like an evolution of EA Sports MMA and more like a combination of Fight Night and Undisputed.
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