Now that's all well and good, but if you're anything like me, the biggest single disappointment of Fight Night Round 3 was the career mode. EA Vancouver is aware of this not-so-subtle fact and is trying to rectify the issue with Legacy Mode. It has the usual trimmings. You start a boxer's career and meld him from the ground up, starting with the obligatory amateur tournament (that can be simmed this time around). Another cool touch is being able to select the boxers that you'll be fighting against. If you've created multiple fighters you can choose to toss them in the mix or not and the same goes for the stable of real world combatants.
From there you'll need to start building popularity. You'll start at the bottom as a prospect and slowly work up the ladder of contender, champ, hall of famer, superstar and eventually become known as the greatest ever. Your popularity doesn't just hinge on whether you're winning fights. Instead it's how your fights play out. Quick and impressive KOs will likely get your more notoriety than battling it out for 12 rounds. After each fight you'll get a nice statistical breakdown of the fight. Pretty much every stat you could imagine is tallied and presented.
Just as in real life, the AI boxers will move weight classes throughout their career, just as you'll be able to. There are also individual weight class rankings and award candidates for each week and the year as a whole. Rivalries, something that FNR3 handled very poorly, will be worked in dynamically this time around. Impressive fights will be offered an instant rematch and should you continue to impress you'll develop a rivalry with a given fighter. It's designed to be much more organic than in Round 3.
When you're out of the ring, you'll be training for your next bout. In Round 4 every training game is taken straight out of the ring. That means that just about every move, from bobbing and weaving to moving around a target and punching makes it into training. There are also more training games this time around. No, weightlifting is not one of them.
And then Fight Night Round 4 was taken from me with nothing but a promise that my look at Legacy Mode only grazed the surface. No online options were talked about beyond the ability to save replays (hooray for instant replays) that you can clip up and post to EA Sports World. No other modes were laid out. No classic fights, no full roster of boxers. All I got was a small list that I'll share with everyone who made it this far.
# Mike Tyson
# Muhammad Ali
# Joe Frazier
# George Foreman
# Roy Jones
# Manny Pacquiao
# Lennox Lewis
# Sugar Ray Leonard
# Winky Wright
# Ricky Hatton
Check back to IGN.com as we reveal the full list of boxers in the coming weeks, and keep an eye out for my first hands-on impressions with Fight Night Round 4 as its summer release steadily approaches.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/961/961736p3.html
