Golf Club Architect Released On Steam Early Access

[Freakywwe]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...lub_Architect/

Anybody give this a shot yet? I loved Sid Myers SimGolf back in the day and been waiting for a modern take on it for awhile. Gonna pick it up later and post some thoughts here

[Cusefan]

I'll be following this.

[Freakywwe]

So I picked this up late last night (25% off for EA release so figured I'd get it while it's cheap)

Overall, it's pretty much what I expected. A more modern take on SimGolf. There's not much going on in EA (tbf, I only checked out Sandbox mode. There is a "Scenario" mode, which is probably more career oriented), you're limited to "small" courses right now so I don't think you could create more then 9 holes very intuitively right now, but the mechanics of building the courses is super easy to learn, and I think once some more people get their hands on it, you'll see some really unique courses and designs. Easy to learn, hard to master is the perfect description for it.

If anyone has played SimGolf, you'll understand the mechanics of how you "play" golf. You're golfer has a set of skills that go up to 20. You start a round and select where you want your shot. You don't control your golfers shots, it's all based on their attributes. So you can tell your golfer to shoot a dart in the middle of the fairway, but there's no reason they can't shank it straight right 20 feet, depending on their skill set. Overall, there's not much going on here right now. Just play a round of golf and compare scores. Your golfer gets skill points for certain tasks (Hitting it in the fairway, playing X number of holes etc) that can then be used to level up.

I'll need to look at this a bit further, didn't get much time to look into it but according to the steam page you can setup and host tournaments or even challenge other golfers to rounds. Not sure if that's limited to Scenario mode or is available in Sandbox but it definitely sounds like something a bit more to do with your golfer. I would think the next logical step would be creating stuff like yearly tournaments (The game tracks the calendar in real time, so you could setup a yearly tournament that always went the second weekend of April, for example). With a system like that, you could create club championships or even tournaments limited to high/low handicap golfers. Tons of room to add to this mechanic, IMO.

The other part of the "game", that really at this point is more of a "Concept" then actually implemented, is course management. When your not golfing, you are effectively acting as the ranger. You can see a list of tee times and the respective golfer that should be there, and you can follow them along their rounds. Really like this feature. Each golfer is unique and has their own likes/dislikes of what they want on a course. (Some golfers will only specifically book early tee times, some guys specifically only book late to avoid the crowds. Different opinions on each holes etc).

One that stood out to me was I tried making a really short (35 yd) Par 3. Virtually every golfer refused to play it with some comment about how it's not a real golf hole. Basically creates a little "world" around your course and even tracks the history so you could review it and determine who your "Club Pro" is and challenge them.

Currently, the only option I see when right clicking a golfer it to evict them off the course (Not sure if this has much of a use in scenario mode, in sandbox it doesn't do much other then kick them off the course). I would love to see an expansion later that would allow groups of golfers (Currently, each tee time is just a single. The idea that you could open up/close the course by combining a threesome with a lone single or splitting up a group of 5/6 to speed up the course), or the ability to hold up a group to let a faster group play through. This might be a very niche thing that only I'm thinking of but the thought of managing a course better then my local muni so that people aren't waiting 10 minutes to shoot their shots sounds really satisfying lol

I guess I'll give a quick shout out to the "Golfpedia" tutorial system. Not really a tutorial by the traditional sense, but does include some quality information about designing golf courses and how best to use not only the elements the game gives you, but the natural elements of the land to create fun and challenging courses. Should help some new people out who have no idea where to start when designing a course and I can appreciate it's addition in an Early Access title.

Overall, I'm content with my purchase. If they continue to build upon this (And doing some quick Googling shows they were very active during Pre-Alpha, which is a good sign), this is shaping up to be the successor to SimGolf I've been waiting a decade for