Quote:
Originally Posted by Antmeister71
Ok....I am eagerly awaiting for someone to post something good or bad and I see nothing. There is only a screenshot of someone's first game and 1 person having problems with the PDS system not working. Other than that, it has been pretty quiet.
With that many people in that forum, I thought at least half of them were buying it at this time. So where is the frickin feedback. And wow, the game is only 100 megabytes. Isn't that odd for a 3D game? Or have I been out of the loop for a while?
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Hey,
First time poster, long time lurker. Figured I'd register and chime in just to get some impressions into this thread. I don't really know much about football; FOF2004 taught me everything I know. I love text sims and FOF2004 is no different, even if I don't really know the actual sport that well. I can give some basic impressions, but I don't know if I'll be able to handle any in depth football questions that you guys might have.
First Impressions:
The interface is laid out like an EA Sports game in that it feels very hard to get around in the main menus. It's definitely not a spreadsheet game like FOF in the sense that it's not that intuitive sorting and getting stats as easily as in FOF. Columns can be sorted by selecting from a menu which isn't as handy as just clicking on the column you want to sort. From the looks of it, all the important stats are there, they just aren't as easily accessed as they are in FOF
The quick play basically lets you pick two teams, stadium, weather conditions, and you're set. Flip the coin and you're off, playing with a bunch of players who look kinda funny. You can choose plays and the players seem to simply follow the lines on the play diagram that have been laid out for them in the Play Design System. I haven't really played around with it much, but it doesn't feel like the players have that much intelligence behind their movements. A kick return play (there is only 1 in the playbook that came with the game) always ends up with about a 10 yard return every. Single. Time. Not much variation there.
The league setup is very frustrating. It comes with a league preloaded with 4 teams per division and 4 divisions... All the players are fake and all the numbers that the players are rated in appear to be rather similar between players of the same position. Haven't really played around with it much to see how a 95 Pass accuracy differs from my two other QBs that have a 92 and a 89 but all players seem to have rather high ratings considering my third stringer appears he could start.
Speaking of frustrating, the league draft that I did first upon loading the league was over 49 rounds (not sure the exact number cuz I was AFK for most of it) where every team picks tons of players and it takes forever. Kind of weird too, since my team already had a full roster... I set my team on auto and walked away for 25 minutes. I came back to run training camp and didn't really do much except hit the "Run Training Camp" button cuz all I really wanted to do was play a league game. That function took 5 minutes to run. Finally I was able to play a game. I hit the play button from the schedule screen and was told that my roster had too many active players on it. Ok, well yes, of course it would, the auto-draft just put 50 some odd players on my team! I wasn't going to select each individual player, go into their profile and cut them so I put my team on computer control and simmed the first league game for my New York team.
Now simming takes 30-90 seconds as the computer basically plays the game play by play on a box score screen. That was fine. My team won their first league game by 34-10 or so... had over 650 yards total, 480 passing. I changed them back to human control and looked for the button that would sim the rest of the week's games automatically... but it doesn't exist. So I had to sim all 7 other games manually. That doesn't sound like much, but when it takes each game a minute or two to complete, you just spent 5-10 minutes trying to get to your second week. I'm the kinda guy who likes simming 4 or 5 FOF seasons in a night... By this point I'd spent 50 minutes trying to get to play my first league game. I was getting frustrated...
Finally I got to play my first league game. I hit the play button and went to the game. First thing I realized was that my New York team was not under my control. I had set their control to Human but I still had to select the team before the game to control them. (Much the same way you choose your team in madden before the game by moving your controller to the appropriate slot) As a result, I was controlling the home team Cleveland because I had assumed that choosing "Human Control" from the league menu would auto-select my New York team for me. Quit Game, restart, choose New York, play. Finally!
The game played basically the same as quick play. You pick a play without knowing what the other team has on the field or anything like that; basically, you're in the dark as to what play you choose, especially as the defender. At least in Madden and FOF, you see how many RBs or TEs or WRs are on the field so you can kind of pick an informed defense. Not here though! No such information. No big deal anyways cuz as offence I soon noticed that any runs up the middle were quickly stuffed, but a sweep around to the right always got me about 8-12 yards. Also, the same throw play from the shotgun formation to my primary receiver always got me 20-30 yards except for 2 times when the pass was defended or misthrown. Weird thing was, when I tried to change up the formation for fun, the same receiver was always the one receiving the pass resulting in the one receiver having over 200 yards in the first quarter. I couldn't figure out how to involve my other players even when the QB threw to other areas on the field.. it always seemed that the same guys caught the ball.
Defense was frustrating cuz, like I said before, you have no idea what the other team has on the field. Basically, I stuck to my basic 4-3 on downs 1 and 2 and went to the nickel zone for 3rd down and kept the opponent to 3 points in the 1st half. My lack of football knowledge didn't seem to matter which was kind of nice from a selfish ego kind of perspective.
Ok, so there are a few niggles... I do feel that the players basically follow the lines they are given from the PDS system which means that even if a huge hole opens up, my smashmouth runner is going to follow his same route every single time and ignore the huge hole that would give him 50 or 60 yards down the field. I haven't tested this and this may not be the case, but that's my initial impression. The real fun with this game will be, I believe, making plays and seeing how they turn out. The only problem is that to be fair, you'd prolly have to make a counter play for the AI to use so that you don't rip them open every single time... Just speculation on my part... I don't know for sure
The speed of players is weird too. They start off so damned slow and take forever to pick up speed. The best plays to make in the PDS will prolly take advantage of this fact by having a fast receiver outrun his coverage because he gets a better jump. The animations are ok... serviceable but definitely not average. Some of the tackles are ghost tackles where the Dman takes down a blocker and they both go to the ground and the ball carrier who is within 2 or 3 yards also goes down. Frustrating
So, I got bored halfway through my league game. I was winning 17-3 with over 300 yards passing and 80 yards rushing. I spent almost an hour trying to play a stupid league game and it bored the crud outta me. Madden '06 is way more fun and the plays seem more real. Like I stated before, the PDS system is where the real fun will lie, but not knowing anything much about Football, I don't know how much mileage I will get... It really depends on what fixes Winter and Matrix make and how quickly they get around to it. Also, real rosters and playbooks would really add interest for me, but I don't really wanna waste my time making those up. Someone will add those in the future, no doubt, and I'm looking forward to it.
Final Comments:
I've played FOF2004 steadily since I bought it more than a year ago and I've never deleted NHL EHM from my hard drive since it was released 2 years ago. Maximum Football won't be staying around long for me as it currently stands, but if they fix it up nicely over the next 3 years or so, I might give it another shot. $45 Canadian is kind of steep for this product in its current state but there is definite room for improvement if the will of the developers is there. Right now the career mode is just time consuming and not really worth it for me given the lack of depth and complexity in the default game. PDS and editors work well tho from the 5 seconds I looked at them... at least the game's customizable. Don't get me wrong, it has some potential there, and I don't HATE it like some FOF people simply because it's not FOF. I'm just initially disappointed in that it could have been so much more; it's where Madden was 10 years ago with a snappy playmaking system but I kind of knew that before I bought it. Guess I just needed to blow some money on a new game, you know?
Hope that helps a bit.
