Flow State striking, roster size, Career Mode, more

A new iteration of the UFC video game is nearing release with “EA UFC 6,” which will be available June 19 (with access on June 12 with purchase of the Ultimate Edition) on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S with a price point of $69.99.

There have been a number of overhauls to the newest version of the franchise, from an updated striking experience highlighted by “Flow State” integration, to more Career Mode elements and much more.

For more details, check below for a Q&A with MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn and “EA UFC 6” game developers Nate MacDonald, Raman Bassi and Marco Fiore.

What was the philosophy that you guys went into this game in terms of the striking that you were trying to achieve?

Striking this year, it basically got an overhaul. We really focused on the authenticity this year for striking and also, outside of authenticity, just the fun behind striking. Everyone stands up at the beginning of the round. It is what everyone interacts with. We have to, at the end of the day, make it fun, but also make it authentic. The biggest focus this year was to bring the fighters’ personalities, fighters’ movements, fighters’ blocking styles into the striking system and make it more impactful, more real.

When you’re in close range in UFC 6, it’s dangerous. It’s a lot more powerful. You can land a lot more combinations at once. You can tie different combinations together this year on UFC 6. So when you’re pressing a button on the controller, your strike comes out. The one you expect comes out. And all of that put together has made the striking just look so authentic and look like the fighters, especially because now when you’re holding block, you don’t put your hands up anymore.

“You don’t have a single block idle. You have an idle that reflects your fighter’s personality. So you’re more like you’re bracing for strikes. And then now that everyone’s running around, you hold block, rightfully so. In a fighting game, you’re always holding block. It now looks personal to the fighter. And that’s just opened up the authenticity layer of striking for our game. So that’s been the big focus. It’s authenticity and also fun at the core of it.

You guys obviously did a BETA not long ago. How have you incorporated any feedback that you got through that process into the game?

The purpose of the BETA was to obviously make sure that the game is of sound mind before we go live. So it was really a technical stability test first and foremost. But obviously, if there’s areas that showed up where maybe certain things haven’t been balanced or tuned that we were able to learn coming out of the BETA, then we’ve made those adjustments in game. So specifically when it comes to learnings from the BETA, it was figuring out where we’re having any potential issues with online connection, with any latency problems, which we were able to identify and fix.

The player experience should be significantly better for live than it was in the BETA. And then again, some balance and tuning when it comes to certain things, gameplay specific, just as far as making sure the strikes are connecting within range, contact, all that type of stuff.

The big thing that’s been changed this year is Flow State. It seems it’s been a little bit polarizing for some of the long-term players, which is kind of the case in any long running series when you introduce something new. But how have you felt about the feedback towards that? And what was the mindset and towards introducing that in this game?

Yeah, Flow State, it’s another authenticity layer. So this year, every fighter in our game has five Flow States or five perks. And those five perks give specific boosts to a Flow State meter. And the way you boost your fighter is by playing like the fighter does in real life. So if you’re Alex Pereira and you’re playing as Alex Pereira, you want to land his hook.

Every time you land his left hook, you will get a boost to your flow meter. Or you might want to lean in a certain direction and strike afterwards, something Alex Pereira does. Or maybe throw some heavy hooks on the ground. Certain things that Alex Pereira does in real life will give you a reward. And so the more you play like Alex Pereira, the quicker you’ll be able to fill up your Flow Meter and hit your flow boost. So when you fill it up, you have a moment in time, like it’s about 10 seconds usually, of being in a flow state. And what that necessarily means, it’s not a power up. It doesn’t make you invincible. It actually gives you a false sense of security.And that’s the reason for the visual too. It’s to give you an, ‘Oh my God’ moment of, ‘Hey, I feel very powerful, or my opponent thinks, ‘Holy sh*t, there’s something going on here. I’ve got to be very careful.’ It’s a mind game layer. It’s something we’ve never had in the game before.

There’s a game plan now. I’m gonna hit my flow state, you’re gonna think I’m gonna throw a hook, but I might throw an uppercut. I might throw a takedown instead. So there’s a mind game layer that we’ve added to the game where it’s player versus player’s brains playing against one another. And that’s real MMA, right?

It’s supposed to feel very powerful but also give you the false sense of security that, hey, I am in the flow, but you can get knocked out and you can get taken down. You can get your flow taken away from you just countering it. It’s a good mind game layer that we’ve added to the game this year.

People want follow-up shots on the ground after knocking out an opponent. Not every KO is a walk-off. Is that something you guys considered or will consider?

This year we’ve added so many new hit reactions. So there are new ways to react to every strike landing. There’s hit reactions every single direction that you fall in. So whether you’re getting hit from the left, the right, front, back, various directions, there’s going to be falls in each one of those directions. The KOs and the knockdowns look a lot more authentic and a lot more reactive to the trajectory of the strike coming in.

I’m not too sure about follow-up shots, but what I can tell you is the fall downs and the getting into a position where you can finish the fight on the ground is a lot faster this year. So the fighters will fall into what we call, ‘Finish the Fight Positions.’ And they’re not necessarily like full guard or half guard full position, but they’re kind of like a side control position where you can’t just throw down hammer fists or hooks right away to get the referee to come in and to stop the fight via TKO.

There are more positions like that added this year on the ground. But in terms of like speed and the quickness of how fast you do it or more punches afterwards, I’m not sure if that is the case this year.

Why was the decision made to not adjust the grappling system from previous years in this edition of the game?

There’s a lot of things that I would love to focus on this year, but we have scope and capacity. The ground game right now, with the way that we see the ground game, it is the only ground game where two players can move individually on one another in our ground game. It’s a very complicated process. It’s a competitive jiu-jitsu simulation. And putting that in an online game is not something that can be very balanced very easily.

Anytime we touch the ground game, there is a massive balance or a gameplay problem we need to solve where we can’t let one player get a major advantage over another player. And in jiu-jitsu, when certain fighters takes other fighters to the ground, it is over in a minute. A Demian Maia on top of you is a scary situation to be in, but we can’t add many positions that Demian Maia might be very good in that other fighters may not have awareness or have that position either.

There’s a massive balance issue with the ground game that anytime we add something brand new to the ground game, it’s a months, six months, seven months, a year, two-year investment on adding certain ground positions or even three new ground positions. It’s a huge investment. And this year we thought, ‘Hey, every fight starts on the feet.’ Roughly 91 or 92 percent of our fights finish on the feet. The majority of our fans play striking. The authenticity layer of striking is something we’ve always wanted to do since early iterations of our game. This is now the time to do it. We have the technology.

We have a perfect opportunity with our licensing partners at the UFC who give us access to these fighters. And so we had a perfect opportunity to kind of overhaul striking this year. And that’s where the majority of our players play. So that’s where the major focus was this year. And yeah, we hope fans appreciate the striking this year on UFC 6.

We did add knockdowns into cage position. So you do get knocked down into cage butterfly. You can get taken down into cage butterfly. You can also get up against the cage and cage butterfly and throw a guillotine chokes and triangle chokes off the cage. So there are like new ground positions, but not an overhaul to the ground game.

Could you share whether a PC version of UFC 6 is coming? And if not, what are the main barriers that would prevent it from happening?

It’s a great question. Right now we are focused on delivering the best possible UFC 6 experience on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S. We know there’s interest. We see it out there, but this UFC title has been built for console platforms and bringing it to PC the right way would require dedicated focus and effort to receive the quality performance and polish that players expect. And so if we ever bring the franchise to PC, we want to do it the right way. We don’t want it to just be a straight port because that’s not going to be the best experience for the players. We need to be able to do it dedicated, focused on what that PC experience needs to be so that we’re giving the players what they deserve in that space. And so with that, there is nothing to announce today with regards to PC.

Will there be cross play in terms of those two console systems?

There is cross play. Yes. Cross play is enabled between the two systems. We had, I mean, time, right? We had more time to be able to make it happen. Obviously we’re paying really close attention to what the community asks are. And recognizing that cross play is something that with the diversity of players that we have across both Xbox and PlayStation was something that we needed to support and made a priority for UFC 6.

What was the reason for not moving away from a star rating system in this game given the focus on fighter uniqueness?

We do have numbers in the game. There are values that you can take a look at. But the overall itself is a star. And the reason why we do that is putting a number on a fighter makes you choose the highest number. And we saw that in previous games of ours. If anyone is a 99 or a 98 or a 97, you’re picking that. And you might pick that over somebody who’s a 96 or a 95 or a 94. And what we see in the backend is, especially when you see the matchups and we see which fighter against another fighter is winning. A lot of our fighters are very balanced against one another. I don’t think there’s one fighter in our game who has over a 58 percent win percentage.So a lot of our fighters are actually very well balanced against one another.

“So the moment you put in a number, like let’s just say Jiri Prochazka is a 95 and Alex Pereira is a 96 OVR, you will pick Alex Pereira. You will see in our backend, everyone’s picking Alex Pereira. But when you put both Alex Pereira and Jiri Prochazka as five stars, because they are actually very competitive against one another, and we can see the win rates in the background are maybe 52 percent versus 50 percent win rates against one another. We wouldn’t want users to pick a fighter based off of a value that we determine. We believe that those fighters are pretty equal against one another, and it’s up to the user to decide what their fighting style is and what suits them the best and pick from there.

But if you do want the numbers, it’s there for you. It’s one button press away. You can go in and see absolutely every single value that we put in each of our attributes. And there’s a lot of the comments about whether those attributes are as what users expect them to be, because that’s the number one topic of conversation across any sports game are the attributes. But the OVR, I think, especially in a one-on-one fighting game where it’s just one fighter versus one other fighter, putting a number behind them makes, it just sets the wrong message, in my opinion. It allows maybe an incorrect fighter to be chosen for your fighting style. So we would rather just even it out. Take a look at a broad level, like five stars as anyone from a 95 OVR all the way up to 100 OVR, those are five-star fighters. And anyone from maybe like a 92 to a 95 OVR is a four and a half star fighter. And it just groups the fighters together. And it allows more choice, better fighters. When you go online, you’re not always running into the same 99 OVR Alex Pereira everywhere.

Do we know the number of the roster size for launch and how many new fighters that are added on launch that maybe weren’t in the previous game?

Yeah, I can tell you we’re bringing in over 11 new fighters from UFC 5. We got Gregory Rodrigues, Bogdan Guskov, Waldo Cortes-Acosta, Patricio Pitbull, Aiemann Zahabi, Grant Dawson, David Onama, Shamil Gaziev, Ailin Perez and Miranda Maverick. Those are the 11 fighters that we’re adding at launch. But we’re adding fighters every month. So users are going to be used to getting fighters like they did on UFC 5. We’re going to continue that on UFC 6. Every month there’ll be new fighters coming in.

We also have a Fighter Pass this year. We’re going to get legends from the UFC coming in every month as well. And we also have a super exciting expansion passes that are coming in later down the road for lives that will probably add a lot more fighters to the game as well. So there’s a lot of fighters coming in. And if users are playing UFC 5 and used to the new fighters being added every month, they’re going to get that on UFC 6, as well.

We like to treat the roster like an ongoing live service. It is a different title because obviously it’s coming over from UFC 5 to UFC 6, but the philosophy internally has been, ‘Let’s keep the roster as up to date and active as we can.’ And that’s why you would have seen on UFC 5 that we continuously added new fighters every month all the way through until effectively the last couple of months when we moved into the going public with knowing that UFC 6 was coming out. We essentially treat the roster like an ongoing live service and that won’t change for UFC 6. So where we’re gonna end up with 270 plus fighters on the roster at launch. You’ll see that increase to become 300 plus by the time we’re finished with supporting the live service on UFC 6 because of the monthly updates that will be coming in all the way through the cycle of UFC 6.

Will there be PRIDE mode, whether it’s at launch or something that’s added in the expansion pass in either winter of 2026 or summer of 2027?

There is nothing there as it relates to PRIDE. PRIDE is something that we know that our players have an interest in and they’ve talked about. I can’t speak to anything specifically around what’s coming in either of the expansion passes, but we definitely discuss PRIDE internally in terms of if and when we would be able to do something as it relates to that feature, but I don’t have anything to announce specifically around PRIDE today.

People want to know about voice chat making a return, especially with the M rating on the game.

We definitely catch that there is an interest in the feature itself. We are looking at what other tools that we are integrating right now in the game could provide us. Next to cross-play, we have enabled EA Connect, which is a widget for players to socialize and interact with each other. Right now, we are not supporting a voice chat feature, but we’re definitely discussing internally about the opportunities for doing that.

Again, as with other social features, we want to make sure we do it right in a way where if a thing like that was supported, we would be able to also moderate that because of course, like players can use it to socialize and interact with each other positively, but it can also happen like the other way around, right?

With Career Mode, people are wondering, have there been adjustments made to not having the same number of rematches as you’re going through your career and more matchup options? People are also wondering about press conference, faceoffs and things like that with Career Mode?

I’ll start with press conferences: Yes, we are aware that it’s a very highly requested feature. There is nothing we can announce about that today. The focus went a lot into trying to rebuild a narrative experience that felt more meaningful I think players have been used quite a lot around the sort of story we told with UFC 4 and 5, and we really wanted to use the legacy as an opportunity for both us to be challenged with the idea of telling a whole new story and players to enjoy that. Even if it’s contained within the scope of a prologue, it’s still meaningful and has a production quality that I believe players will perceive way superior to the story we told in UFC 5.

When it comes down to the career itself and what changed and the idea of like how many times you fight against the same fighters, I think we already communicated through a blog that you, in the main career mode, you start directly from UFC. I’ve also seen some discussions around why we went that route. I think the biggest point was that we realized a lot of players got stuck in amateur and WFA, and they could never reach UFC in time to enjoy the biggest fights, which probably led to some of the recurring fights that happened over and over, especially with unknown fighters.

I think with the idea that you start directly in UFC and the social media context that we built around it, the experience will feel way more like fresh because there are a lot of narrative layers that are added on top of the fighters you fight against, which connects very well with the social media that we built around it, which is not just the light layer that you saw in UFC 5 where some fighters would reach out to you or maybe Dana White would reach out to you, and you can make like very simple choice with very, very simple outcomes. This time around, it’s a very deep system. You can get all sorts of buffs or debuffs, and there is a lot of narrative that we tell through that.

In some instances, even our commentators, Jon Anik and Daniel Cormier, may remember some of the choices you have done and may speak about them. It’s pretty funny that I think it happens in the legacy where you do a thing that is like, it’s a very, very interesting choice that probably not many fighters would do, but then they call that out in the game, which is like, it’s pretty fun for me.

I think that we are, I think players will find out that in the meta game that they play within career mode, there is a lot more meaningful actions they can do than just focusing on their fitness, which is what we saw a lot of them doing in the previous iterations. I think now the time split between doing choices that will take time, investing in hype, or investing in fitness, it will, they will find them more meaningful because they come with dedicated buffs. So when you then get into the fight, you will have like reasons of why you may have not prioritized fitness, for example.

This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: ‘EA UFC 6’ details and Q&A: New striking, Career Mode, roster size