Top Spin 4 Announced

2K Games announced today that Top Spin 4 will come out the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii in 2011. It will introduce major changes from the previous game, but 2K made no mention of motion controls for the HD versions.

Top Spin 4 will retain the franchise’s dedication towards creating a deep, realistic tennis experience as opposed to Sega’s arcade-oriented Virtua Tennis series. “Top Spin 4 is shaping up to be the most realistic and exhilarating tennis game in the Top Spin franchise,” said 2K president of product development Greg Thomas. 2K also promises one of the deepest player rosters yet which will include both contemporary and classic athletes – one of which will be a pre-order bonus at GameStop.

The big changes coming to this entry are in the controls and the development behind the game.

“For this iteration, the development team is focused on delivering a bold new take on the sport of tennis,” Thomas said. Mafia II developer 2K Czech will take the reins of this entry from PAM Development – the makers of the original game and Top Spin 3.

Secondly, Top Spin 4 will introduce an all new control scheme that 2K calls innovative. Top Spin 3 also redid the franchise’s control scheme, introducing one where in each shot players had to calculate the timing of a button press, how long they hold down the button, the direction of the analog stick, and the distance of the analog stick in that direction. Critics said the results created a deeper game but also gave Top Spin 3 an unusually steep learning curve.

This new control scheme could be an effort to dampen that curve or it could be an introduction of motion controls. The Wii Motion Plus’s launch was met with a new version of Virtua Tennis as well as the debut of EA Sports Grand Slam Tennis. Virtua Tennis 4 – which also releases in 2011, will use PlayStation Move.

Both of the aforementioned franchises have focused towards accessibility and pure fun on one level or another, so it would be interesting to see if Top Spin 4 could bring a different, deeper, and more realistic spin to motion control tennis. The Wii version of Top Spin 4 will likely use the Wii Motion Plus but 2K hasn’t mentioned Move or Kinect use yet.