NCAA Football 10 Exclusive Interview Week #1

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.