NCAA Football 11 Review - jkra0512's Blog

jkra0512's Blog

NCAA Football 11 Review

Posted on August 4, 2010 at 12:05 PM.

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As read from my new official blog:

"For the last few years EA has bombed on creating a realistic iteration of NCAA football. They instead rehashed terrible ideas while keeping good features on the cutting room floor. All sports game are complex to make and I'm grateful for even having the opportunity to use my Fighting Irish of Notre Dame every year to beat up on USC.

However, when promises are broken, good features subtracted, and nothing substantially new is added to whet the appetite the series started giving many gamers a stale taste in their mouths. There are only so many times we can say, "they are at least heading in the right direction."

Luckily this year the men and women over at EA have brought us a game that finally peeks its head around the corner and is heading towards the goal line. This year the biggest addition is not a gameplay mode or some gimmicky mascot game, instead it's the Locomotion system.

This new system is revolutionizing the way momentum is portrayed in a football game. No longer are defensive backs stopping on a dime or running backs making insane cuts, now players are slightly penalized for making a wrong cut by zapping their speed and acceleration while making the cut. While this seems like a small change it has really made the game more fluid and realistic in the sense that players move like they should.

Graphically the game got an upgrade, not quite Madden good, but good in their own way. This year's edition has team-specific entrances to the give the player a better sense of what it's like to come out of the tunnel. But, the game still suffers from the atrociously monotone Brad Nessler in the booth, who is badly in need of a shot of adrenaline. Kirk Heirbstriet isn't all that bad but EA needs to re-think who they have as a play-by-play man, don't even think of putting Brent Musberger up there either!

Recruiting has been revamped this year by giving players less control but a more logical approach to the recruitment of prospects. Gone are the days of mindlessly going through each recruit, finding two "Very High" and "Most" pitches, inviting them to your school and focusing on those three pitches, and hammering them until they signed. No, this year EA introduces a system where each conversation is split into ten minute increments and the conversation is computer-generated.

For instance, if I recruited Player A for 40 minutes, I am given four topics to speak to the recruit about. These topics are randomly generated unless I've impressed the prospect enough to get a Coach's Choice in which I can pick the topic, within that same phone call. Recruiting is much more difficult this year and is slightly unfair, as my one play through dynasty (All-American recruiting difficulty) saw Texas and Ohio State signing about 90 percent of the 5-star recruits. Sure, they sign many 5-star recruits but the wealth certainly wasn't shared.

With all the goodness EA has put into this game, they're still plagued with bugs and glitches, like every other game. One bug in particular has hurt the dynasty mode in where the incoming freshman start off low (which is good) but the progression makes them into a 85 ovr player on the top end. This means if you take a dynasty into the sixth and seventh year many teams that are 90+ will become 80+ and all the non-BCS schools ratings decrease as well. This ties into how big-BCS schools get the majority of 5-star prospects, so the disparity between teams becomes larger and larger.

Overall, this game is very good and with great communities out there like OperationSports.com constantly giving us sliders, rosters, hints, and tips there are endless hours to be had with this game. The developers from EA seem more readily available to fix the bugs with patches and tuner sets, which is borrowed from the NHL series. I recommend this game to any college football fan and gamer."

Comments

# 1 Beastly Wayz @ Aug 4

I agree about the decrease in Overall Team Ratings, although it is not necessarily about the 5 star recruits, it is really about the awareness the recruit has. I have noticed that the awareness does not raise, and it does effect game-play also. A Safety who is a 90 overall just stands around because of his awareness rating. Please EA Patch this issue, fix it, or does anyone have any suggestions about how to fix this issue. It is destroying my dynasty...

# 2 jkra0512 @ Aug 4

I see that too and agree it's a dynasty killer!