NHL 10 - SLIDER DEPENDANT GAMEPLAY? - Dazraz's Blog

Dazraz's Blog

NHL 10 - SLIDER DEPENDANT GAMEPLAY?

Posted on August 31, 2010 at 07:22 PM.

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First of all I want to state that I am in no way condemning sliders in sports games. In fact slider adjustment has been one of the most important additions in creating realistic sport simulations by allowing players to make adjustments based on their skill set & their personal preferences.

However, what happens when slider adjustments overinfluence the way a game plays out?

This is a problem I find with NHL 10. I find that, depending on the slider settings used, I will consistently have a similar number of Goals, Penalties, Shots on Goal & Save Percentages game in & game out irrespective of the teams playing. I must add that I play all my games offline against the same 3 friends or the CPU. On that note it could be argued that because I am regularly playing the same opponents I am getting similar results. However I also Play NBA 2K10 & MLB the Show 10 with the same friends & the experience is completely different.

Without making any alterations to the sliders I can play a game of NBA 2K10 where my friend & I will both struggle to score 80 points each where in the next game we will both score over 100. Similarly with The Show. A game with 4 or 5 runs can be immediately followed by a game where both teams score over 10 runs. It seems that both NBA 2K10 & The show do a much better job of discerning between slider settings & the abilities of the competing teams.

One of the things that make sport so popular is the element of the unknown. If a game plays out based solely on slider settings then that element is lost.

Maybe developers need to change their approach to sliders. If, for instance, you have a slider ranging from say 1 to 10, rather than setting that slider at a single value such as 7, why not have the option to set a range of 6 to 8. That way the CPU could randomly set the value for each game based on the range you've selected thus adding more of a random element to each game. This could certainly be beneficial to such things as penalties. As it stands at the moment penalties will either never be called or always be called depending on the slider setting. This just isn't realistic.

NHL 10 isn't the only game with this issue. Both Madden & NCAA suffer in a similar way particularly in regards to QB completion percentages & penalties.

What are your experiences & what do you thing can be changed to improve this area of gaming?