Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 Impressions (PS3, 360)

[DivotMaker]

Can't recall seeing that here....however, I am out of the country and nowhere near my 360....

[therizing02]

I picked up this game last week after reading this entire thread. It's the first time I've bought a golf game since Links 2004.

I never bought TW because I always thought that it was too easy after watching a friend of mine shoot a 58 in TW06. Add the silly explosions, ball trail, ridiculous costumes, and this game was for children only IMO.

TW 10 is a step in the right direction. After a playing EVERYDAY for the last week, my best round has been a 68 at Hazeltine. The difficulty is there and the game is a pretty good representation of the sport. The Club tuner is a nice addition provided you can win enough challenges to unlock the expert clubs. Oh that's right, I can buy them if I want to.

Unfortunately, I see no reason to keep the game because other than the Tour Challenge, there isn't one playable gameplay mode because of the unrealistic scores.

PGA Tour season is a joke at best. CPU simulation scores are ridiculous. Players shooting 60-62 at Torrey Pines with 30mph winds? C'mon.

I tried an online tournament but quit after I saw the leader shot a 50 at Doral. Arcade game?

Am I missing something here? TW 08 on the PC is starting sound like a better option. Sad but true.

[daviv]

I borrowed this from the library (PS3) and it's the best golf game I've ever played. I have a short attention span with games and actually made it through a full 18 hole course. Shot +19 over par but was hitting birdies near the end. This game is a definite buy for me in the future. I can see myself playing this a couple of times a day to kill a bit of time.

[Piner]

I finally have had a chance to play Tiger Woods 10 for the XBox 360. Below are my “Pros” and “Cons”.


Pros

Golf engine is very good.
Courses are beautiful.
New putting mechanism is outstanding. You really feel like you did something if you sink a long one. Great work on this EA!
Tournament atmosphere is really good. The expanded crowds, roars from around the course, grandstands, dynamic updates, and leaderboards are all big plus. I finally feel like I am playing in a golf tournament. I would like to see on course caddies that provided the wind and distance info though.

Cons

The computer generated scores for your CPU opponents in offline mode are a GAMEKILLER for me. I enjoy offline, career mode only and when the tournaments winners are always being around 20 to 30 under par it really destroys the immersion factor. This just ridiculous. In addition, if that is not bad enough, there are a long list of players right behind the leader with -19, -18, -17, etc. Golf tournaments simply don't play out that way. I'm not looking to win each tournament. But I would like to see the Final Results leaderboard that looked something similar to this:

1.Tiger Woods -9
2.Jim Furyk -8
3.Kenny Perry -6
4.Phil Mickelson -5
Sergio Garcia -5
Zach Johnson -5
5.Anthony Kim -3
6.Steve Stricker -1
7.Ernie Els E
8.Boo Weekly E
9.J.B. Holmes E
10.Stewart Cink E

This is a realistic looking leaderboard. No crazy scores at the top, no long list of dozens of players with under par tournaments scores. Imagine if they did something like this Madden offline franchise mode. You play your season game and win 24-17, but all the other games in the NFL that week had scores like:

Denver 72 Pittsburgh 64 Dallas 62
Oakland 24 Baltimore 56 Washington 49



You get the idea. It would just be unbalanced. It puzzles me how EA continues to struggle with this seemingly simple problem to solve. At the very least they could fix this problem by simply creating a slightly differently random number generation algorithm that capped the best scores at around -15 and the worst scores at around +10. They could make it even more realistic by “weighting” randomly generated scores by the CPU players skill level and the course difficulty to yield a score. Every other game in EA Sports' line makes a pretty decent effort at emulating the season aspect of their sports, Madden, NCAA Football, NBA Live, NHL, etc, with the exception of Tiger Woods games. EA can't decide if they want to have Tiger Woods an arcade game or a simulation game. Imagine playing Madden football and having to unlock NFL stadiums. More poor design decisions by EA sports. If it is broken, please fix it!!


Commentators and their commentary is a straight up F-. Why are earth do you dump McCord and Feherty. They had good commentary, know something about golf, and you already had a ton of previously recorded material. Dumb move EA. Quite often change is a bad thing. If it isn't broken, don't fix it!!!

Charging 600 Microsoft points for a single course it just a big ripoff. What makes matters worse is that you can't even use the course in offline season mode. This is just lame.

I don't want to end this post without offering what I believe are some constructive suggestions to make this years game more playable and to improve next years game.

1.Please release at patch for Tiger Woods 10 (Xbox 360/PS3) to address the offline CPU scores.

2.Provide a “Career Editor” in Tiger Woods 11. This “Career Editor” could be just like the one they had in their PC version of Tiger Woods 06. This tool would allow the user to create a custom PGA tour season, by selecting venues, naming tournaments, pin positions, purses, etc.

3.Now I don't know how feasible this would be but I would at least like to float this idea. Create an online “Course Editor”, similar to what the NCAA 10 football team did with their TeamBuilder idea. With this online “Course Editor” the user community could create an unlimited number of golf courses that could be downloaded to Xbox Live/PSN. The Tiger Woods community would have a large number of courses to play on their Xbox 360's and PS3's.

4.Use the same Teambuilder idea to allow us to create our own shirts, pants, hats, etc. We could then create golf outfits with the real sponsors, logos, etc.

[dave374]

Great post Piner.

[baa7]

Quote: Originally Posted by Piner

It puzzles me how EA continues to struggle with this seemingly simple problem to solve. Please release at patch for Tiger Woods 10 (Xbox 360/PS3) to address the offline CPU scores.

Great post. As for the CPU scoring, I don't believe it's a problem EA struggles with. Rather, it's intentionally programmed that way. Just look at the game design. With auto-leveling and no attribute cap, the intention is to build up your golfer so you're hitting 400 yard drives and shooting birdies on every hole. Anyone who maxes out their golfer is going to need the CPU to shoot -30 or they'll win every tourney by a dozen strokes.

Divotmaker for example has said he's won almost every tourney in his offline career. No doubt EA programmed CPU scoring for that crowd, and not the barely-able-to-break-par club of which I'm a member. Don't expect a patch, in other words.

[dave374]

Quote: Originally Posted by baa7

Divotmaker for example has said he's won almost every tourney in his offline career. No doubt EA programmed CPU scoring for that crowd, and not the barely-able-to-break-par club of which I'm a member. Don't expect a patch, in other words.

It's too bad, because they address this issue in the Wii version with a slider.

[DivotMaker]

Quote: Originally Posted by dave374

It's too bad, because they address this issue in the Wii version with a slider.

Evidently not according to the feedback from Wii users like Seymour S......