The Best Fight Night Settings For Sim Boxing

The difficulty levels in the game are great for certain game modes, but they don’t work so well in all of them. If you’re choosing a quick match in Fight Now or Old School Rules, a quick scroll through the difficulty settings is all you need. But in Legacy Mode, it’s best to fight at the level that’s appropriate for the opponent you’re facing. 

That means that when you’re an amateur, you should fight at the amateur difficulty level. All professional fights then should be fought at least at the PRO difficulty level. All championship fights are at the CHAMPION difficulty setting, and any fights against a fighter considered to be one of the greatest of all time should be fought at G.O.A.T. level difficulty.

At first glance, it might seem like this makes the legacy/career mode easier. In some respects, it does; decreasing the difficulty level of the CPU diminishes the capability of the AI somewhat. But if you’re taking fights against only the best possible opponents available to you, you’ll quickly find that difficulty setting doesn’t tell the whole story of how hard your fights are going to be.

The Hardest Boxing Video Game Of All Time

By now, any fan of boxing video games is likely to have heard someone humble bragging about how they beat whatever game on max difficulty, undefeated, with one hand tied behind their back, etc., etc. (Most of the time, they’re not talking about this game.) 

A lot of that’s because in Fight Night it’s actually pretty easy to beat even G.O.A.T. level opponents-when you cherrypick opponents in legacy mode. “Difficulty,” itself, only refers to the number of calculations the CPU/AI-controlled fighter can compute in a given time period. The higher the difficulty level, the more the more calculations, and likely, the better the performance of the AI opponents.

“Difficulty” doesn’t apply to any of the career or legacy at all; it only pertains to the “skill” of the opponent while they’re in the ring with you.

But if your opponent is smaller, weaker, slower, and less experienced than you are, even the absolute highest AI ring IQ won’t amount to much. There’s only so much that more calculations can make up for.

But what if instead of putting the AI at a disadvantage against you, you put yourself at a disadvantage – against the AI?

How To Increase Difficulty In Fight Night Legacy Mode

To really test your skills, take the shortest possible recovery sessions between fights. Often, this means you’ll barely have time for 1 training session. Sometimes, you will only have time to physically recover from the previous fight and won’t get a training session at all. This adds an extra layer of challenge. The chances are high that your opponents will be training consistently. They’ll be improving their skills and stats. You’ll be living the journeyman life;  resting, fighting, and healing. Never improving, but always getting paid.

If you fight multiple times without training you’ll eventually find yourself matched up against seemingly impossible opponents. And there’s usually no secret way to beat them; once you’ve got yourself into a mess like this, you don’t really have much of a choice but to take tough fights. 

Each opponent is going to require a much different strategy. When you’re playing at settings that genuinely push you to your limits of your skills, you’ll need to learn how to adapt often in each fight. If you don’t, you’ll get knocked out. Spam doesn’t work when you’re overmatched.

Each fight, you have to learn their style, survive their power, and exploit their weaknesses. You might have to land 5 punches for every one you take in order to do any damage without getting knocked out. 1 punch taken per 5 landed might still be too much damage; in some fights, you might have to be perfect for 15 rounds-just to survive.

Skip Training Camp

By skipping training, you won’t get as strong as quickly as the competition. Not only that, you may not have the power to keep aggressive opponents honest. Instead, you’ll have to develop other techniques to survive and win. If you consistently fight the most skilled opposition available to you, you will often be at a statistical disadvantage. As you climb through the ranks, your opponents will start to consistently be more powerful, quicker, and more experienced than you.

So how do you beat an opponent that’s stronger? 

If it was easy, every body would be doing it. It’s easy to beat up a guy that’s smaller and weaker than you are. It’s much more difficult to beat up a bigger, stronger, faster person; but it can be done. It might take a long time, and some honest learning, but it can be done. If you want to get good, you’ll figure it out. 

If you always angle to fight the best as soon as possible and you don’t cherrypick low-ranked opponents, it’s actually pretty challenging to play the game at the PRO level, outside of championship fights, and GOAT matches. 

It’s also recommended that you check out the BBM Unified Rules Of Boxing For FNR4

Fight At Your True Level

By the time you get to the top ten ranked fighters in your division, you’ll consistently be fighting at big skill disadvantages. And it’s not just your stats that will lag behind the opponent; depending on your preferred control scheme, you’ll be able to feel the differences in speed, power, and endurance in a number of ways. 

A quick counterpuncher will make you hesitate to get off with your punches. It’s hard to set up big shots when very time you throw, bang, you get caught. An inside fighter with great quickness probably already has a lot of ways to get rid of the jab that you’d need to keep him at bay.Throw a straight punch from the wrong angle, bang, you get caught.

It’s a long road from unknown to contender. When you get your shot at the champ, increase the difficulty level to (at least) the championship level; at this point, you should be fighting at a statistical disadvantage, and you’ll have turned the difficulty up to the appropriate level.

What To Do If You Lose A Fight

The first thing you do after you lose a fight is save the game. Accept your loss and learn from it. There’s no shame in taking a loss if you went through the ranks too quickly to face too big of a challenge. If you’re really pushing yourself by fighting the best possible competition, what’s the point of feeling bad about a loss?

Instead, focus on what you could do better next time. You might get another shot to avenge the loss, which is sometimes better for your p4p rankings than leaving it unresolved.

Was your cornerman telling you something relevant all night, and you were just ignoring him? Were you getting picked apart by the jab? Were you getting beaten up on the inside? Was he just too strong? Too fast? Too big?

Whatever it was that you couldn’t deal with, figure out how to overcome it. This is where the real strategy of the game comes into play. You might need to train a specific aspect of your fighter if he’s physically incapable of overcoming the opponent. But if the problem isn’t with his preparation, it could be your performance.

If you can’t come up with a good gameplan and execute it, it won’t matter how perfect your training camp went. When it comes time to put the rubber to the road, you won’t be moving in the right directions. Training your character is one thing; learning how to control him is another. The best left hook of all time won’t do any damage if you don’t know how to throw it.

Maybe Train A Little

If you can’t throw a specific punch when you need to because you’re not comfortable with the controls or don’t recognize the window to throw it, you should spend some time on the heavy bag. Sharpen up your combinations and try to use every punch.

If you’re getting rocked and dropped often, chances are you need to spend some time working the maize bag. Get comfortable moving your head around more until it’s second nature to get it out of the way of incoming shots.

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