This afternoon, the first developer chat for NCAA Football 11 featured devs Ben Haumiller & Russ Kiniry taking questions from the community on features announced in previous blogs.
Some of the highlights:
Q: Hey guys! With formation subs, can we substitute across positions? IE: Can a player put a tackle in at TE to create an unbalanced line? Thanks!
EA_Russ_Kiniry: Yes. You can do any changes that are currently available in the Depth Charts.
Q: I think its great that we got formation subs back, but why was the decision made to leave them off of the playcall screen?
EA_Ben_Haumiller: We decided to set this up the same way we did on PS2. We would rather have guys setting up their formation subs before they head in game for a dynasty or in the pause menu during the game rather than rushing to set your formation subs before a play. If you need to make a quick change from the playcall you can still use packages.
Q: Will we be able to Sub players such as gunners on special teams?
EA_Ben_Haumiller: Yes. you will be able to edit any position on any special teams formation.
At its party after the Game Developers Conference today, EA Sports executives said that user research is helping to refine the way the company makes its games. The big advantage is that about 76 percent of the 6 million buyers of the NFL Madden 10 football game are playing online, compared to only 36 percent in 2006. About 82 percent of the NCAA Football fans are playing online. The online connection allows EA to collect tons of data about the collective game play patterns among the fans.
The data helps the game designers make decisions. One feature in the game allowed players to do something cool, but it worked only 23 percent of the time. That meant it was too hard. Another feature, the hit stick, lets a player try to hit a rival hard to knock to the ball out of the other player’s hands. It works about 46 percent of the time, with 518.9 million attempts succeeding out of 1.135 billion tries.
EA also found that game had gotten far too complex, said Jeremey Strauser, Executive Producer of Madden NFL 11. Of 330 plays for every team, the average player of the game used about 13 plays. The average game is also too long at 63 minutes. And the worst thing about that is the actual game action time in those games is about 17 minutes. The rest of the time is spent picking plays or maneuvering the user interface. So the new theme for Madden 11 this year is “simpler, quicker, and deeper,” Strauser said.
I joined the NCAA Football team last summer once "10" was out the door. As the Executive Producer for the game, I'm completely dedicated to the NCAA Football franchise. And it's been a great experience working with a very talented Tiburon Studio team putting together this year's product. Before officially taking the helm I had a number of weeks to prepare and transition from my old gig. The previous NCAA Football 10 team was still wrapping things up so it gave me time to do a lot of research. I spoke to everyone on the team, reviewed our metrics, read the game reviews, forums posts, blogs, the love letters, the hate mail, and even watched a few poignant YouTube videos created by our most passionate fans. And while it's clear we did get a lot of things right, we also recognize we have some work to do to take this game from good to great.
So I'm using my first blog opportunity to set the stage for what you're going to be hearing about over the coming weeks and months as we roll towards launch this July. No major announcements here, but I did want to outline our approach to NCAA Football 11. It comes down to three key elements:
EA Sports has posted the first NCAA Football 11 video blog at their official website.
The first video blog of the year features developers Ben Haumiller & Russ Kiniry discussing some of the already known features coming to the game: Formation Subs, Auto Save & Auto Load Rosters. No gameplay footage is shown.
The three-part video series has Haumiller & Kiniry discussing last week's first NCAA Football 11 blogs. This leads up to Wednesday's live chat with the two game developers.
In the video, Haumiller & Kiniry state that new info will come on the game each week as well as a look behind the scenes at the development team.
It’s been a long handful of months as we’ve been building the game while listening and reading everyone’s feedback from anywhere we could find. I’ve been waiting to start diving into all the improvements and new stuff we’ve been working on here at Tiburon.
Well let’s dive right in, even though we are releasing these details a little later then we would have liked:
New Equipment
Part of keeping things authentic on the field is what equipment each player is wearing. And frankly part of the fun for me is making sure my players I create or recruit all have the look to match the player, for example I love having Visors on my number one running back.
Well this year we added some new equipment to help keep your players looking how you feel they should:
· New Revolution Speed Helmet
· A few new facemasks for the different helmet styles in the game
· Some injury gear
o Knee Brace
o Ankle Brace
o Elbow Brace
o Elbow Guard
· New sleeve lengths
o 3 Quarters Sleeve
o Half Sleeve
· Towels
· Hand Warmers
Also we added the ability to set Left and Right Sleeve separate, so if you want one sleeve to be team color and full length and the other to be half length and black you can do that.
Continue on to read Russ' thoughts on the additions of Single Bowl Week Season, Dynamic Conference Logos, & Helmet Numbers During Game-play.
The first live chat with NCAA Football 11 developers Ben Haumiller & Russ Kiniry will be next Wednesday (March 10) from 4-5 PM ET. The chat will provide an opportunity to discuss the game information discussed in the first NCAA 11 blog.
This afternoon, the first developer chat for NCAA Football 11 featured devs Ben Haumiller & Russ Kiniry taking questions from the community on features announced in previous blogs.
At its party after the Game Developers Conference today, EA Sports executives said that user research is helping to refine the way the company makes its games. The big advantage is that about 76 percent of the 6 million buyers of the NFL Madden 10 football game are playing online, compared to only 36 percent in 2006. About 82 percent of the NCAA Football fans are playing online. The online connection allows EA to collect tons of data about the collective game play patterns among the fans.
