Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 12: The Masters Demo Available Now, Post Impressions Here

[Seymour Scagnetti]

Quote: Originally Posted by ShivasIrons

Seymour, .. I'd rather have the aiming marker, but I can live without it. The center of the screen is where one is aimed. The caddy does take into account wind, if you elect to follow his recommendations. I've even noticed the caddy applying fade and draw to counter-act wind on shots. As far as distance to the pin, it's easily figured by looking at the gps figures given to the front and back of the green and then counting the squares on the green grid. Playing with Tiger, the green grid is 1 yard for each square. A little more work, but I can live with it. As far as elevation, I agree you can't really tell in this game like you can in real life. But, what is going to happen with the hardcore crowd is that they'll have notes for each hole/shot where there is elevation change. You can get the elevation change playing another difficulty level, and the easiest way will likely be to use practice mode and move your ball around to get elevation change info. Now, this all seems like a lot more work, but I'm sure there will be plenty of hardcore players with this info at their fingertips. It just seems a little ridiculous to have to do all that.

It's not a little ridiculous, it's alot ridiculous. There may be a hardcore crowd who will do this but only the ones who don't have a job and are playing 16 hours a day.

And it's simply a workaround because of EA's screw up with the caddie. And again that was not EA's intention to make it that hard for the hardcore gamer. This as well as the exclusion of actual carrying distances was solely implemented to make it easier for the hardcore crowd. EA somehow thought thta having a caddie would be appluaded by the hardcore gamer as making it seem more realistic without foressing that it made it much more arcadish.

It's just makes it glaringly apparent that none of the devs are serious golf gamers because a serious golf gamer would have demanded that the true aim of last year remain in the game and the caddie be permenantly disabled.

[ShivasIrons]

Agreed. There really seems to be a lack of a voice for the "sim style" player at EA. They just really don't understand it. I thought they were moving in the right direction with TW11 True Aim, but they really screwed it up in 12.

I don't think they come out with any serious patch, either. Hope I'm wrong. But, why patch it when so many are going to buy it anyway because of Augusta. There's no money to be made in patching the game. They'll likely just go on to making next year's game, as they'll want to come up with some new genius feature to make $60 or more again off everyone next year.

[JayhawkerStL]

Quote: Originally Posted by DivotMaker

Jayhawker, Fired up the demo in TOUR Pro with TrueAim on. You have to set these up in the Game Options menu before you play any round in the demo. When using TrueAim in TOUR Pro, you get a shot line per the caddy's recommendation, but if you hit the D pad and select a custom shot, all you get is a cursor showing your distance potential of your club as well as the elevation from the tee. From the fairway, you get the same, but you also get a landing circle for each club. In Tournament mode, you get NONE of these features. Hope this helps.

I'm going to try it out again. But this has me worried:

Quote:

In TW12, you can aim while zoomed out. In fact, if you click on the LS a few times when zoomed out you get even more zoom and you get to see a small area where you are aimed. You can adjust your aim from this super-zoomed view. You can change clubs while zoomed and the view automatically changes for that club.

In particular the bolded part. That's the kind of hand-holding that will ruin TrueAim for. It really demolishes the notion of using TrueAim in a competitive sense, since your opponents can easily use more information than you might be willing to use yourself.

The lack of elevation is just flat out silly. It's especially silly when the elevation is a factor for the advice the caddy gives you. So if you disable the caddy, why not allow me to use the elevation information to judge my own shot?

And the use of carrying distance was the perfect way to provide context for the skill of my golfer currently, but still force me to craft my shot using loft, fade, and draw to account for speed of the fairway/green and what kind of action I hope to get when the ball lands.

I am not a hardcore player by any stretch. So getting the information TrueAim provided in TW 11 felt like the perfect balance. What keeps being described is a system that has taken away crucial bit in a way to force a guy to use the caddy, which provides way too much.

[JayhawkerStL]

Quote: Originally Posted by ShivasIrons

Agreed. There really seems to be a lack of a voice for the "sim style" player at EA. They just really don't understand it. I thought they were moving in the right direction with TW11 True Aim, but they really screwed it up in 12. I don't think they come out with any serious patch, either. Hope I'm wrong. But, why patch it when so many are going to buy it anyway because of Augusta. There's no money to be made in patching the game. They'll likely just go on to making next year's game, as they'll want to come up with some new genius feature to make $60 or more again off everyone next year.

Do understand that the "sim style" player appears to represent a tiny percentage of th market EA hopes to capture. I think our concerns a genuine, but so are EA's when it comes to attracting more people to the game.

They can lose the sim style player completely, but increase their sales substantially. Look at the first few pages of this thread. Look at the forums over at EA. There are ton of folks completely digging these changes. I can't blame EA for catering to them. But they want to play sports games the way they play action games. they want to be indestructible heroes that dominate their environment.

It just would have been nice if EA just left the TrueAim mode from TW 11 in for those of us that latched on to it. The fact is, I won't take a slight downgrade from what we had last year. I not only invested $60 in the game, but bought most of the courses. I'm not going to play a game I like a little less when I can just sit out the year and continue on with TW 11 and try to get more value out of the money I have invested in it.

There are just too many reasons to to skip a year. I thought TW 10 was great, and I hated upgrading to TW 11 and buying curses all over again. But TrueAim made it so worth the money. In my opinion, a golf game is not really a legitimate yearly purchase anyway. So waiting two to three years for the next game is reasonable.

[ShivasIrons]

Jayhawker, ... I think what Divotmaker was trying to say was that in True Aim in TW11 you could zoom out and the camera view given to you will allow you to see where you are aimed. Then, you can take off the zoom and go back to the tee and adjust your aim from the tee or change clubs. Then, you could zoom in again to see where you are aimed. By going through this process several times, he states it's "exactly" the same as Tournament Mode in 12.

However, it's not the same, and it's far from realistic to adjust aiming while zoomed out. And, applying all the adjustments like loft, draw, fade, while zoomed out in 12, results in moving your aimed landing area in real time. None of this could be done in 11.

Like I said, these differences are most easily seen if you try applying fade or draw. In 12, you can do it while zoomed out in real time. Your zoomed out landing area changes as you apply draw or fade. In 11, you can only adjust your fade or draw from the tee, and it changes nothing when you zoom out. You see the same view zoomed out in 11 whether you put max fade or max draw. It's more realistic in this manner, imho. You don't get to zoom out to see almost exactly where your ball will land with draw or fade applied. You just hope you get it right from the tee.

[ShivasIrons]

I hear what your saying on skipping a year. I would if it wasn't for the new courses, esp Augusta, Atlanta Athletic Club and Royal Melbourne.

I hope I will learn to like the game. If not, I'm not likely to buy most of the DLC. I figure I'll just pop in TW11 to play those courses, as they're about the same.

An EA developer posted at that forum that about 13-14 percent of the rounds in TW11 were on Tour Pro and True Aim. That's not a small amount, and these people are likely their more hardcore customers. One would think that one difficulty level out of four could be devoted to them.

[callmetaternuts]

The problem is they exaggerated what the caddie does in the game as opposed to what he does in real life. Watch any PGA Tour event (live or TV) and when you hear them talk (player and caddie) they discuss wind, elevation, distance to front of hazard/green, carry distance of hazard, or distance to back and recommend a club. That's it. They don't walk up to the green and say this will end up here. The caddie's are overpowered.

I've played with a caddie a ton and had my brother caddie for me in 2 tournaments. It's helpful information, but means nothing if you don;t hit the right shot, which is on the player to set up, not the caddy (Read this EA and get a clue)

[DivotMaker]

Shivas,

Are personal attacks the only thing you can fall back on when someone does not agree with you. Unfreakingbelievable......