EA Sports PGA Tour: Behind the scenes with the full list of 30 courses

Craig Penner is a game designer who really impresses. EA Sports PGA Tour, isn’t the game’s butter-like 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. It’s like, ask-for-relief or close to the rope bad.

“The Country Club comes to mind,” Penner said, of the course in Brookline, Massachusetts, scene of the 2022 U.S. Open. “We have certain areas that are kind of mixed, rough, heavy rough and dirt together. It’s kind of uneven terrain. The artists even mapped the terrain. It’s all over the place, because you’re going through these different materials, which actually makes it true to real life.

“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,” Penner said.

EA Sports PGA TourThe launch of ‘EA Sports Golf Video Game: 30 Courses, March 24, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X will be the largest ever. Live-service updates may include more courses. The courses except two are actual-life ones. EA Tiburon developed the drones and planes for the course, as well as LIDAR scanning on the ground and in the air to accurately map the terrain.

They’ve done this before; for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12The designers worked for 10 days on Augusta National Golf Course scanning it with the most advanced scanning equipment. Sometimes, this required closing several clubs to members. Producer Ben Ramsour stated that the technology has improved over the past decade and is now more precise, compact, and less intrusive.

This means that no real-life tee times have been affected by the creation of this game.

“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,” Ramsour said. “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 color and lighting stuff, that could be seen as invasive.”

Grid View

Even then, “in my pitch to the courses” to get their participation in the game, “it’s always, ‘It’s business as usual.’ Some of these places that are super private, they don’t want to see a guy in an EA Sports shirt with a camera running around,” Ramsour said. They show up on time, work around their watering plans, and are invisible. “We’ve had people hit by golf balls,” he laughed.

One of the private courses where members don’t want to be bothered is Los Angeles Country Club, a super-exclusive joint up in Beverly Hills, and the site of the 2023 U.S. Open. Unlike Augusta, it’s never appeared in a video game before. The Los Santos Golf Club is in Grand Theft Auto 5 (Does not apply.

EA Sports PGA Tour’s designers committed to bringing all four major championships of golf, on their real-world courses, to their video game back in 2021, which makes the L.A. 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, 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, along with Augusta National, St. Andrews Links, and Pebble Beach Golf Links.

“It’s in the heart of Beverly Hills, so you’ve got the buildings, you can see L.A. in the distance,” Ramsour said of LACC. “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 fly-over scanning that builds a course. Penner described numerous meetings with the course superintendents in which he discussed the specifics of each hole and what the ball should do. Penner had to mark up a yardage record under a nondisclosure agreement because Penner knew that the course superintendent was providing him with information pros golfers, analysts and bookmakers would appreciate three months ahead of time.

“I know exactly what the yardage is going to be, on the boards, for the U.S. Open this year,” Ramsour interjected. “And I am not going to share that. Scotty Scheffler [the 2022 Masters Tournament winner]I was called by the caller and asked if it would be confidential. But I refused to share it. But having that open dialogue, to make sure we’re representing it exactly, it’s in all of our best interests to be doing that.”