EA Sports PGA Tour Course Reveal Trailer

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Planes, drones, and LIDAR: How EA Sports built the courses of its PGA Tour game
A process that shut down a course 10 years ago is much more accurate, and less invasive, today!
What most impresses Craig Penner, a gameplay designer on 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. Like, close-to-the-rope or ask-for-relief bad, almost out of bounds. The Country Club comes to miThey’ve done this before; for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, designers spent 10 days with state-of-the-art scanning equipment scanning Augusta National Golf Course into a video game for the first time, often requiring the closure of several holes to club members. A decade later, the technology is more accurate, more compact, and a lot less intrusive, producer Ben Ramsour said.

In other words, no real-life tee times were harmed in the making of this video 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.”nd,” 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. And the artists mapped in the terrain to that. It’s all over the place, because you’re going through these different materials, which actually makes it true to real life. They’ve done this before; for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12, designers spent 10 days with state-of-the-art scanning equipment scanning Augusta National Golf Course into a video game for the first time, often requiring the closure of several holes to club members. A decade later, the technology is more accurate, more compact, and a lot less intrusive, producer Ben Ramsour said.

In other words, no real-life tee times were harmed in the making of this video 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.” 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. The developers show up early, plan around the watering schedules, and try to be invisible. “We’ve had people hit by golf balls,” he laughed.

The 30 courses included at launch in EA Sports PGA Tour on March 24. Wetlands and Lighthouse Pointe are fantasy courses brought back from 2015’s Rory McIlroy PGA Tour.

Augusta National
St Andrews
Pebble Beach
The Country Club
Southern Hills
TPC Sawgrass
East Lake
Wilmington Country Club
TPC Boston
TPC Southwind
TPC Scottsdale
Whistling Straits
PGA West
Quail Hollow
Torrey Pines
Kiawah Island Ocean Course
Chambers Bay
Banff Springs
Wolf Creek
Bay Hill
Liberty National
Harbour Town
Riviera Country Club
Tara Iti
Top of the Rock
Bandon Dunes
Evian Resort
Teeth of the Dog
Wetlands
Lighthouse Pointe



“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 Tour, launching March 24 on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, will include 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.

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