NCAA 10 Impressions and '11 Wishlist - ddsmith3's Blog

ddsmith3's Blog

NCAA 10 Impressions and '11 Wishlist

Posted on July 20, 2009 at 05:48 AM.

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First of all, I want to say I've been a player of the NCAA series since "BILL WALSH COLLEGE FOOTBALL '94" when Penn State was State College and there were no licenses. Granted, I was 10 years old, and I haven't owned every years installment, but I haven't missed many. I've also been a HUGE college football fan for as far back as I remember, so I think I have the right to give my opinion on what works and what doesn't in these games.

So far, my experience with NCAA 10 has been pretty positive. I think the gameplay is a major step up from 09, and I'm a big fan of all the new features like Teambuilder, Season Showdown and even Road to Glory (even though I agree with many people who've said that it's essentially just "Campus Legend with a new coat of paint" the highlights and commentary do add a lot to the experience, but I'm only half a season into it.) There are a few things I take issue with though. Let's start with the things that I think EA could realistically pull off fairly easily, and just don't do for unknown reasons. The biggest thing that falls into this category for me is the inability to give a player that I'm editing or creating any jersey number I want. I've said this 1000 times by now, but every college roster in the country has at least two players that wear the same jersey number. Granted, I understand that you wouldn't want two offensive or defensive starters to have the same number, but if one is on offense and one is on defense, or if it's just a backup, I don't understand why they don't allow this. But it seems I'm the only one that complains about that, so I'll move on. Listening to this weeks Utopia podcast, cdj mentioned that the crowd never gets louder on breakaway plays. I agree that it needs this as well, and it makes no sense why they don't do it. Seems it would be easy. Some people have also mentioned individual team entrances for teams like Miami and Michigan that have them. That would be awesome too, but, as I recall, they tried this in last-gen, I think it was '04 or '05, and they couldn't do it for just certain teams so every team entered from a tunnel in the corner of the stadium, even if, like Kansas State, the stadium didn't have such a tunnel. And I think it was that game too where Miami had the smoke as they came out, which was cool. I'm sure by now they have the ability to do separate animations for individual teams that have entrances like that, and I think they should. Several atmospheric elements like that could be added, but I think we will be seeing a lot of advancement in this area in the future, since it seems to be one of the most, if not the most requested elements by players in the forums I've been to.
Another thing I'd like to see is more activities in Road to Glory. In '07 or '08 on the PS2, you could pick a major at the beginning of the mode, and you took tests like every other week based on that major, which determined your GPA rather than just being able to "Go to the Library" and boost it. I liked the challenge involved in that, and I think it should be brought back. They also had a Spring Game in this version, and I think it was in both Campus Legend and Dynasty Mode. This really added to the realism and gave you a chance to see the skills of your players in a game situation before your actual first game. Pretty simple to bring it back I would think.
Now some of the more unrealistic things that would be nice to have. In the old games they had players get in trouble and universities get sanctioned by the NCAA for discipline issues. It's a realistic element that should be in the game, but it was so underdeveloped before and you really had no control over anything. It seemed very random and therefore was pretty annoying. I'm not sure if it could be made any better, but if you had little notes when recruiting that told you if a player had discipline issues, maybe if there was even a discipline rating in the attributes (and the old game may have had this). Then you would need a way, such as suspensions (which the old game had) or conferences between the coach and player or the player and other teammates. Maybe if a Leadership attribute was added as well and the players with good leadership could pair with the undisciplined players and try to help them, maybe though a conversation tree like in some RPG's, or maybe that's all too in depth. I just know I personally would find it more engrossing and realistic.
There's a lot more I'd like to see, and I have a lot of ideas how they could work together with the developers of Madden to increase the compatibility of the games as far as draft classes and legend/road to glory imports are concerned, but I'll save that for another day.