How'd we miss this? In a chat a couple weeks back on IGN, Fight Night Round 4 producer Brian Hayes said that remapping the face buttons to throw punches might be "an option via DLC."
His full reply:
There is no option for face button punching in the final version, but we are investigating providing the option via DLC.
Now, no one said specifically that the face-button option would be paid DLC. But one would have to wonder why EA would give this away for free.
I used the face-button option in Round 3 liberally, as it was the only way for me to get through the damned punching-dummy minigame. Withholding it as an option from Round 4, and hinting that it may come back through DLC doesn't create a lot of gamer goodwill.
In the rest of his answers, Hayes' indicates that a dedicated DLC team will also be whipping up additional boxer customizations, if not real fighters who were not included in the official roster. That's OK. But making people pay or wait for controller schemes is kind of shitty, if not unprecedented.
Fight Night Round 4 - Your Answers [IGN via Evil Avatar]