Digital Sportspage Blog

For those that don’t know, the patch for NCAA Football 2008 for the XBox 360 is out. After playing for most of an afternoon, here are the changes that I’ve observed:

One of the major issues in NCAA 2008 was the psychic secondary play and the number of interceptions (especially by the user, but also by the CPU) in the game. One of the clear ways they have dealt with this is by decreasing the catching ability of the CPU secondary. I’ve seen many clear instances of passes being thrown directly at the secondary where the defender simply dropped the ball. My first estimate is that the number of actual interception from “interceptable” passes has dropped 25-50%.

A second way they’ve dealt with this is altering defensive awareness. One thing that plagued NCAA 2008 was the “psychic interception”, where someone playing zone with their back to the ball magically turns around at the moment the ball is about to arrive and makes the interception. I haven’t seen any examples of this behavior in the game. However, if a defender guarding a receiver with their back to the ball, they will still unrealistically jump in the air, turn, and bat down the pass. My hope is that in NCAA 2009 they program an animation where the player, if face guarding, “follows the eyes” of the receiver, puts their hands up, and hopes to deflect the pass before making the tackle.

Finally, the patch has definitely changed quarterback control, in two clear ways. First, it is much easier to throw a lob pass and put touch on the ball. This makes for some pretty major changes in gameplay. Previously, the most effective defense was blitzing with tight man coverage. Even if a receiver had a defender beat on a fly route, the computer could defend the pass because of the difficulty in lobbing the ball over the defender (well, that and the psychic defense). Defenders will still make that jump for the ball, but being able to lob the ball makes it easier to beat this defense. Second, quarterback accuracy seems to have been decreased a little. It’s not a big difference, but I’ve seen a few more overthrows than I remember in the past. It’ll take more play to see if this is an actual change or not…but right now, there seems to be a difference.

One other difference, unrelated to gameplay, is that you have more time to select plays in the huddle.

However, with these changes, there are still some major problems in gameplay. There are no changes (that I’m aware of so far) that address defensive option AI. (These problems are laid out in detail here; but in short, defenders won’t change from their man/zone assignments until a runner crosses the line of scrimmage, leading to exaggerated gains in the option game.) So far, I haven’t had a problem with excessive fumbles. However, there are still plenty of faux-fumbles, where the player hits the ground, fumbles, and then the play is reviewed and invariably overturned.

At first look, even though option AI has not been fixed, the passing game is improved and the game is worth revisiting.

Update:Part two of my NCAA 08 patch impressions can be found here.