Digital Sportspage Blog

After about 6-8 games of NCAA 09, here is a basic outline of the major problems in NCAA 09 (in order), and some possible root causes:

• Extremely poor pass defense, which boils down to four major components:
  • Defenders giving entirely too much space to receivers, regardless of coverage, and even on Heisman. This is especially true for any sort of crossing route.
  • The neutered pass rush. This seems to be caused by suction blocking, and by the increased number of pancake blocks in non-pancake situations.
  • Horrible pursuit angles, making moderate gains big plays.
  • Hyper-accurate quarterbacks.

• The horrific punt and kickoff return defense. This also seems to boil down to three major components:
  • Poor pursuit angles.
  • Blocking/pancaking the kicking team is too easy.
  • (Specific to kickoffs) Hard-coded AI where the players near the sideline on the kicking team don’t begin cutting in towards the return man until they are at risk of being out of the play. (More on this in a later post.)

• Poor sideline recognition. I’m not sure why this is, since these problems were rarer in earlier versions of NCAA.

• Odd CPU passing patterns, with the computer neglecting the deep pass and often making strange, easily deflectable lob passes to wide receivers running towards the sidelines.

• The litany of slider issues.

• Default kicking power/accuracy. (I would love an automatic, percentage based option for field goals. For an example, see the ability to shoot free throws strictly using the player’s free throw rating in College Hoops and NBA 2K8.)

• Senseless aggression and poor play calling on 4th down. (A new problem, based on an attempt to improve the game.)

• The “ghost juke”

• Poor time management. (Always an issue with the NCAA series.)

• Lack of realistic penalties (not only in frequency, but calling penalties that actually happen, like blocks in the back and consistent pass interference calls.)

• The roster editing bug.

Feel free to add other major problems in the comments/forums, but I believe these are the problems that should (and can) be addressed with patches and/or in future versions of NCAA. I believe that many of these problems were caused by the developers not paying attention, or not having the time, to look at the ramifications of some of the changes in gameplay. Specifically, increasing the differential in speed between different players, increasing blocking power, and a few minor issues seem to be major factors for the big gameplay issues.

Tonight, I’m going to run some tests, looking at how changes in how player speed ratings are used in the game may be the reason for both the poor pass defense, terrible pursuit angles, and the far too easy return game.