NCAA Football 10 Exclusive Interview Week #1

[superjames1992]

Quote: Originally Posted by exboxfan

I feel the same way. EA btter be holding back some secrets or 10 will be a skip year.

Don't hold your breath because they're not holding back for 2011...

If they fix pursuit angles and a few other issues, this game could be pretty good. Pursuit angles absolutely killed last year's game. I enjoyed 09 at first, but once I realized how terrible pursuit angles were, it killed the experience for me since fast guys could dominate to a ridiculous extent. EA says that they have fixed that this year (and they better not be lying to me!), so that would significantly improve the game IMO.

I can't believe that they still haven't added formation substitutions into the game, but I can live without it.

[drlw322]

Quote:

While I can't go into the details on how much dev time went into Season Showdown, I do think you bring up a valid point with your question of what made Season Showdown a feature that made it into the game this year. I’ll apologize now; this one is going to be pretty long. When looking at what will go into the next year’s version of the game, the first thing to look at is what experiences do you currently offer, and based on that, what areas are in need of an improvement/expansion. With Season Showdown, there were three main experiences we wanted to go after. One of these was the element of school pride. While not everyone is diehard for their favorite school, college football is unique in that a majority of college football fans live and die with their school. It’s something that bonds you with strangers (if you are an Oregon fan, on vacation in Florida and you see someone else wearing an Oregon hat, have you ever shouted out “Go Ducks”? Whenever you travel for a road game do you ever take note of how many other people you see at the airport/on the road/walking around town that have also traveled to support your school?). Your school is also something that partially defines who you are (how many times have you seen a flame post by someone with the logo of a rival in their sig and just think to yourself “typical”?). We are looking to replicate those same feelings through Season Showdown. Another experience we wanted to address is the quality of online play between random people. Without a doubt, the #1 thing that comes up when people talk about why they don’t like to play online games is they hate the way their opponent plays. It’s a lot easier to play like a jerk when the opponent is some faceless entity that you will never see again. While we don’t think we have found the solution that will make all online games great, by adding the sportsmanship elements the goal is to help change the culture of online games. When you are making the decision to go for it on 4th down, there is now a persistent element that may cause you to actually choose to punt. One thing we learned with Online Dynasty was that that the restart warning was a great way to keep people from quitting their CPU games and playing them over again unless they were willing to suffer the wrath of the other members of the dynasty, in a similar way, by displaying your sportsmanship, skills, and strategy ratings for a player before you enter a game with them you will be able to get a sense for how the guy plays, and hopefully, people will play better so that they don’t get branded as a jerk. The next experience is one you also mentioned which was the desire to give people an additional reason to keep playing NCAA through the entire college football season and beyond. There are a ton of great games released every year, and we have never had a feature that gives you a specific reason to keep playing months after we launch. With Season Showdown, as you are following your school in real life this is something else that can help build your excitement for that week’s game. When it’s Ohio State-Michigan week, how much more gratifying will it be for an Ohio State fan to beat a Michigan fan? When Texas and Oklahoma are getting ready to square off in Dallas, Oklahoma fans have a way to get one over on Texas before their schools ever step on the field. In addition to all of this, the goal of every game is to reach as large an audience as possible, and a feature like Season Showdown reaches out to college football fans in general as well as the NCAA community of gamers. While your sisters/girlfriends/wives might never put a controller in their hands, you can get them involved in Allies & Rivals, while your old man might own a console, he may be willing to help out his school through the Trivia Challenge, and while you might not be interested in a mode like dynasty, but still want some persistent element to your gameplay, Season Showdown is a feature that allows you to be involved as much or as little as you want to. Well, I probably went into a little too much detail here, but I thought the question deserved an in-depth response.

statement made by ea ncaa producer ben.

what gives the game replay value is a game with some depth and context. A game that plays like real football with momentum, a game that resemble what you see on Saturdays on the college football field, with refs, with fans that are animated with school pride, with broadcast excitement, pre-game entrances and introduction of star players, half time show with good depth and commentary, post game show that covers the a good game recap, a weekly show that draws you in to want to play more to see what they'll say about your team next week, more realistic gang tackles, many different catch animation not the same 4-5 that plays over and over again, better run animation and not robotic, game speed to run correctly and no speed warp, a game that plays like what you see on the college gridiron, NOT Season Showdown that brings no replay value. done with my rant.

[Michael321]

Haha, the two biggest features this year are teambuilder and season showdown. A mode where you put in fake teams and a pure stat tracking mode where your team can win a championship that nobody cares about. Congrats to the NCAA Football 10 team for having my most anticipated game every year become my least anticipated game.

[moylan1234]

since when are all schools outside of FBS fake?

[jyoung]

My most-played football game on this generation's consoles is All Pro Football 2K8, hands-down.

In fact, it's the only football game this generation I've actually liked enough to buy.

I bought it on release day and played it regularly for a full year-and-a-half before I finally got my fill of it.

As people who've played that game will tell you, it certainly wasn't the features that kept me playing it consistently during those 18 months, rather, it was the stellar gameplay.

Gameplay is what brings people in, and keeps them in, not fluff features.

Gameplay is why people still play games like Tecmo Bowl and NHL '94 over the modern sports titles with their fancy graphics and feature sets.

And sadly, I have a feeling that gameplay will be an area that NCAA 10, like NCAA 09, still needs lots of improvement to before the stockpile of features they keep adding onto actually amounts to something more than fluff that's trying to hide the broken gameplay.

[AC IS ART]

Quote: Originally Posted by blackscorpion11

**Remember this** Ncaa 2008 was heavily criticized for too many interceptions... next thing you know Ncaa 2009 has "wide open gameplay " with no defense...

False according to Ben "just because we're wide open this year doesn't mean the defense is just garbage"(1: 13)


More NCAA Football 09 News & Previews



And that very same designer plays like a cheeseball http://www.gamespot.com/ps3/sports/n...ideos;title;18 (At 4:05)


How can we really believe anything they say when it comes to the improvements in 10'? We were lied to once why not again this year? And how can you ever expect a realistic representation of football when you have designers who play just like the little kids we play in 09' lobbies?





Yet even after that rant...I will still buy this game...

[superjames1992]

New "features" are what make the casual fan buy the game (and most people who buy the game are casual fans). New features are great for marketing and great for selling the game.

Us hardcore gamers may not like it, but it is what it is. EA's job is not to make us happy by making a fine game. Their sole goal is to make a profit, not to appease the hardcore base.

[Bodizzy]

I know a lot of guys are stoked about Teambuilder, but aside from just tinkering around with it, I can't grasp how it's a top priority for people. And Season Showdown??? A group of guys got up for work every day and clocked in at EA and ******* constructed Season Showdown, but did not give us formation subs? Lord have mercy.