Digital Sportspage Blog

I decided to go back to playing the NCAA demo, primarily because in the demo, I didn’t remember noticing a lot of the gameplay issues that are problematic in the retail version on NCAA 09 (passing on steroids, broken special teams, horrible pursuit angles, etc.). So I played about five games of the demo, and noted the differences between the demo and the retail version.

In short, most of the gameplay problems that plague the retail version were not in the demo. It seems that a lot of the gameplay issues are due to late changes to increase “wide open” gameplay (increased blocking power, changes in return AI, and increased player speed differentials) that led directly to problems in the return game, passing, and pursuit angles. Since these changes were late, it is likely that Tiburon didn’t have the time to address them. However, my guess is that gameplay can be substantially improved in a patch, simply by reverting to some of the gameplay parameters and AI in the demo.

Here are my observations of the differences between the demo and retail version (warning, long post ahead):

1) The AI was changed for the kicking team on kick returns. In the demo, the outside players start to come in towards the returner around when the returner catches the ball. In the retail release, the outside player remains outside until they get around 5-10 yards from being parallel with the returner.

2) Blocking on kick returns, punt returns, and possibly in the actual game was made much more effective. On kick returns in the retail version, a player on the kicking team will often be engaged with a blocker on the receiving team and end up being continuously blocked for several seconds, leading to huge lanes on kick returns. On punt returns, the gunners and other players are often easily blocked out of the play, leading to huge returns. Playing the demo, both kick and punt returns were much more realistic. In a few recent games, I had punt returns of 2, 3, and 10 yards. In two cases, the gunners evaded their blockers and limited my returner to a short game. In the third case, both gunners were blocked, allowing me to advance about 10 yards…but there I met a wall of three unblocked players on the punt team. The punts in the demo were much better than the punts in the actual, retail version.

It also seems like blocking for the offense is also significantly more effective in the retail version compared to the demo version. In five games of the demo, I only saw a very small number of pancake blocks, something that seems to occur with more regularity in the retail game.

3) Kick length on field goals. In one of my demo games as Ohio State, I had a chance to win if I kicked a 52-yard field goal. I expected it to be easy, considering that 55-yard field goals are easily makeable in the game. The kick was at maximum power, straight, and ended up being short by about 2 yards. I’m not sure if I would have ever seen that in the retail version (I’ve seen longer FGs from Army’s kicker, who has the same kick power rating).

4) No noticeable issues with either terrible pursuit angles or sideline glitches. Having played about 10-15 games on the demo total (both before and after retail release), I never saw CPU defenders take a terrible angle as seen in the retail version, and I never saw the strange sideline logic where players seem to run out of bounds without reason.

5) This is subjective, and can’t be tested since the demo doesn’t have replay mode. However it feels like the speed difference between players is toned down in the demo when compared to the retail version.

This is important, since my current hypothesis is that the change in the player speed differential (discussed by Bill Harris, and noted by the NCAA devs in this thread) is the cause of the terrible pursuit angle problem. From an earlier blog post:

I also believe that the speed issue is what is also causes players to take such poor angles. In a perfect world, a defender should take an angle where he basically runs the shortest distance possible, in a straight line, to meet the ball carrier. It seems like defenders take their initial pursuit angles based on their NCAA 08 speed. However, as they close in on the ball carrier, the defender notices that he’s taking an angle that would put him behind the ball carrier, and adjusts his angle to take into account his new position. However, each time he recalculates his angle, he is a little bit more behind, until he just takes himself out of the play. It seems like this pursuit angle/speed problem is a bigger factor in the open field, and seems to cause greater problems on long passes and special teams.

This problem is more evident when playing with faster teams…so you’re more likely to see this when playing with Florida, West Virginia, etc. compared to mid-level squads.

So based on all of that, here is what I think. When the demo was built, the gameplay was much more solid (or “sim-style”). Sometime between the demo and the retail build, someone at Tiburon decided to make gameplay changes such that the game was now more “wide open”. These changes likely happened sometime between the demo build and the retail version, so they were likely relatively late in the game’s development.

This did make for a more offensive game. However, what it also did was make the gameplay much worse by a) essentially breaking special teams with a combination of increased blocking power and changes to kicking team coverage patterns and b) making passing far too easy with a combination of too powerful pass blocking combined with the increased speed differential between players at different positions. Furthermore, I believe that the changes to player speed differences may have been late in the game’s development, and that the knock-on effects of this are the terrible pursuit angles and poor sideline judgment.

The good news is that these things could be easily fixed in a patch by reverting to the parameters used in the demo. Specifically, this includes a) decreasing blocking power, b) reverting to the old kick coverage patterns, c) decreasing blocking power to be more realistic and d) changing player speed ratings such that the differences between players aren’t as exaggerated as they are in the retail version. This should be an easy fix. The big question is whether the higher-ups at Tiburon, who seems to have made a late decision to move to this “wide-open” version in the first place, will do so. One possible solution is to leave the more “wide-open” play style for Varsity mode, and change to the demo parameters for All-American and Heisman mode. This would allow fans of both styles of gameplay (more arcade and more sim) to enjoy the game.