Preview: NCAA Football 10 Impressions (Xbox 360, PS3)
June 18th, 2009 | Written by Chris Selogy | Topic: PlayStation 3, Previews, Xbox 360
Another year passes and another NCAA Football game from EA Sports and Tiburon. We got our hands on the NCAA Football 10 demo to see if it fixes the issues that plagued NCAA Football 09 while adding a lot of new things that will make this an enticing upgrade over NCAA Football 09.
The most noticeable thing about the NCAA Football 10 demo is that much of the inherent gameplay and visual issues have been fixed from what the demo shows us. The animations in 09 were a bit rough around the edges, which has been polished quite a bit with quite a few more new animations added in that add a bit more variety to the branching animations for tackles on both sides of the ball. Like last year, it’s not too hard to break out of tackles if you know how to counter the defender that’s coming after you, though now the defenders have new animations that allow for some more punisher tackle attempts that can put the ball carrier on his back as easily as he can break the tackle attempt.
The demo features a full game at 2 minute quarters and it really feels like NCAA Football 10 does reach the potential that NCAA Football 09 had but was plagued with some big bugs and an overall lack of polish to the gameplay. Quarterbacks feel like they have a lot more control to the ability to throw bullet passes or lobs, so it was easy to throw too much of a bullet that would be impossible for the receiver to get in front of in time. The wide receiver/defensive back battle to catch each pass feels more intimate now rather than just feeling like two AI bots running into each other as the ball nears the receiver, so lobs are a bit scarier now as it’s harder to for your receivers to get away from good defenders. Blockers seem to play quite a bit better in the sense of setting up holes for running backs and doing as much as they can to protect the quarterbacks. That is why the added ability for the controller to rumble when a defender has broken the block and is headed for the quarterback is both informative and frightening when you’re still waiting for receivers to get open.
The past few years of NCAA Football have had the ability to modify your gameplan, but only when timeouts were called. NCAA Football 10 now fleshes out this idea by letting you modify eleven different elements of the gameplan to be aggressive, neutral, or play it safe for each element, like having the option to tell your players to focus on stripping the ball from the carrier with a higher risk of being called for facemasking. These kinds of additions change up the gameplay quite a bit as you see your players reacting to plays exactly as you tell them to for a better way to play up to the strengths or weaknesses of the team that you’re playing. The gameplan can be changed at any point in time by pressing the left trigger while picking a play or after timeouts are called. Other additions to the pre-play portion of the gameplay include the option to have your defenders focus on a specific receiver or running back that the last few Maddens have had.
There have been some new additions to the core controls for defensive play that help fix some key issues that NCAA Football has had for a while. You’re now able to let the AI take over for your player if you’re not great with coverage or pass rushing by holding down the A button (Xbox 360) or X button (PS3) so you can see how the play is unfolding and takeover whenever you want by letting go of that button. Cameras for the career mode have not been all that great, which is what the new player lock option looks to solve by letting you press the left stick in to go into player lock mode with a special camera designed for whatever position you’re currently on.
Speaking of the career mode, the Campus Legend mode has been renamed as the Road to Glory mode and seems to have been revamped with more focus on your trek from high school star to college football legend. Erin Andrews, sideline reporter for ESPN and now NCAA Football 10, is your personal reporter here as she follows your career in what seems like the Sportscenter-style recaps that NFL 2K5 offered during the dynasty mode, though with a focus on you and your team. Kirk Herbstreit will appear from time to time as she asks him about your accomplishments throughout your career. The arbitrary score that you earned in the career mode depending on what you do each game and year will now be able to be compared against other gamers to see who really is the best college player ever.
NCAA Football 10’s dynasty mode has some new features being added this year that adds more customization that has been missing so far this generation. Conferences can now be customized so you can mold things to the way you wish them to be. To add to that, the new Team Builder feature is basically your old-fashioned Create-A-Team feature that also features a web-based tool so that you can create your team before it comes out and share it with others if you think others will want it. Recruiting doesn’t see much improvement, though you can now tell recruits why they shouldn’t choose the other school as one of the topics to discuss on the phone. Online dynasty mode returns with all of the same improvements as the offline version, though it seems like EA’s finally using their EA Sports World website to allow you to access your online dynasties from the computer.
Another interesting addition to NCAA Football 10 is the new Season Showdown mode, which is pretty much NCAA Football’s version of the metagame that UEFA EURO 2008 featured. The metagame used the performances of players to tally up points for their team and then feature standings to show who is the best team, which added a cool new dimension to what the wins and losses you racked up personally meant for your team’s reputation. In NCAA Football 10, not only will the way your play games online or offline help or hurt your team’s standings in the game, EA has a neat trivia game on the NCAA Football website that also ties into the Season Showdown standings to add another way for you to help your team when away from your console. Until the season starts, Season Showdown standings are being tallied until opening day to decide the starting rankings and for each week during the season, teams are facing each other as they do in the real world and the winner is decided by who has more credits in at least three of the five categories. EA seems to be going all out on the community features for this mode as they will be doing podcasts about the latest happenings with polls, controversies, and all that that culminates with a 32 team tournament to decide the season champion before they start all over again for the next season.
NCAA Football 10 does feature a lot of visual tweaks that make it a visible step up from 09, which also includes a few new things that have been missing. Though it may not be much of an improvement, there are indeed nets behind the goal posts so that there is a logical reason for why footballs stop when they go through the posts. Marching bands are now on the field to do all of the classic formations like Script Ohio and the demo even features the EA Sports logo being formed by band members that transforms into the words “NCAA 10 DEMO,” which adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game.
New formations have been added that not only include the big formations like the Wildcat formation, but also new team-specific formations that haven’t been in previous NCAA Football games. The presentation has been improved quite a bit as the score display on the bottom of the screen looks more like it belongs on a television broadcast along with the coach cam, which shows the play you’re about to run or a bluff play if you’re with a friend, now goes way above the field so it looks a bit more like the playbook so you can have a more clear view of how the play should unfold.
It didn’t seem like a lot of new things were being added to NCAA Football 10 before starting this preview, but the research showed that there are a lot of big and small things being added that should make for a marked improvement over last year’s game. Season Showdown seems like a great community feature that exploits the intense amount of passion and emotion that college sports evokes and turns it into what could be a very compelling metagame mode. Better integration of the game’s features into the EA Sports World will be a nice way to further evolve what they started last year with the ability to upload screenshots and videos to the website to share with your friends. You can try out the game right now with the demo that is out on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 before you get the chance to buy the game in stores when it is released on July 14.
Another year passes and another NCAA Football game from EA Sports and Tiburon. We got our hands on the NCAA Football 10 demo to see if it fixes the issues that plagued NCAA Football 09 while adding a lot of new things that will make this an enticing upgrade over NCAA Football 09.
The most noticeable thing about the NCAA Football 10 demo is that much of the inherent gameplay and visual issues have been fixed from what the demo shows us. The animations in 09 were a bit rough around the edges, which has been polished quite a bit with quite a few more new animations added in that add a bit more variety to the branching animations for tackles on both sides of the ball. Like last year, it’s not too hard to break out of tackles if you know how to counter the defender that’s coming after you, though now the defenders have new animations that allow for some more punisher tackle attempts that can put the ball carrier on his back as easily as he can break the tackle attempt.
The demo features a full game at 2 minute quarters and it really feels like NCAA Football 10 does reach the potential that NCAA Football 09 had but was plagued with some big bugs and an overall lack of polish to the gameplay. Quarterbacks feel like they have a lot more control to the ability to throw bullet passes or lobs, so it was easy to throw too much of a bullet that would be impossible for the receiver to get in front of in time. The wide receiver/defensive back battle to catch each pass feels more intimate now rather than just feeling like two AI bots running into each other as the ball nears the receiver, so lobs are a bit scarier now as it’s harder to for your receivers to get away from good defenders. Blockers seem to play quite a bit better in the sense of setting up holes for running backs and doing as much as they can to protect the quarterbacks. That is why the added ability for the controller to rumble when a defender has broken the block and is headed for the quarterback is both informative and frightening when you’re still waiting for receivers to get open.
The past few years of NCAA Football have had the ability to modify your gameplan, but only when timeouts were called. NCAA Football 10 now fleshes out this idea by letting you modify eleven different elements of the gameplan to be aggressive, neutral, or play it safe for each element, like having the option to tell your players to focus on stripping the ball from the carrier with a higher risk of being called for facemasking. These kinds of additions change up the gameplay quite a bit as you see your players reacting to plays exactly as you tell them to for a better way to play up to the strengths or weaknesses of the team that you’re playing. The gameplan can be changed at any point in time by pressing the left trigger while picking a play or after timeouts are called. Other additions to the pre-play portion of the gameplay include the option to have your defenders focus on a specific receiver or running back that the last few Maddens have had.
There have been some new additions to the core controls for defensive play that help fix some key issues that NCAA Football has had for a while. You’re now able to let the AI take over for your player if you’re not great with coverage or pass rushing by holding down the A button (Xbox 360) or X button (PS3) so you can see how the play is unfolding and takeover whenever you want by letting go of that button. Cameras for the career mode have not been all that great, which is what the new player lock option looks to solve by letting you press the left stick in to go into player lock mode with a special camera designed for whatever position you’re currently on.
Speaking of the career mode, the Campus Legend mode has been renamed as the Road to Glory mode and seems to have been revamped with more focus on your trek from high school star to college football legend. Erin Andrews, sideline reporter for ESPN and now NCAA Football 10, is your personal reporter here as she follows your career in what seems like the Sportscenter-style recaps that NFL 2K5 offered during the dynasty mode, though with a focus on you and your team. Kirk Herbstreit will appear from time to time as she asks him about your accomplishments throughout your career. The arbitrary score that you earned in the career mode depending on what you do each game and year will now be able to be compared against other gamers to see who really is the best college player ever.
NCAA Football 10’s dynasty mode has some new features being added this year that adds more customization that has been missing so far this generation. Conferences can now be customized so you can mold things to the way you wish them to be. To add to that, the new Team Builder feature is basically your old-fashioned Create-A-Team feature that also features a web-based tool (http://www.easportsworld.com/en_US/ncaafootball/create_a_school) so that you can create your team before it comes out and share it with others if you think others will want it. Recruiting doesn’t see much improvement, though you can now tell recruits why they shouldn’t choose the other school as one of the topics to discuss on the phone. Online dynasty mode returns with all of the same improvements as the offline version, though it seems like EA’s finally using their EA Sports World website (http://www.easportsworld.com/en_US/onlinedynasty) to allow you to access your online dynasties from the computer.
Another interesting addition to NCAA Football 10 is the new Season Showdown mode, which is pretty much NCAA Football’s version of the metagame that UEFA EURO 2008 featured. The metagame used the performances of players to tally up points for their team and then feature standings to show who is the best team, which added a cool new dimension to what the wins and losses you racked up personally meant for your team’s reputation. In NCAA Football 10, not only will the way your play games online or offline help or hurt your team’s standings in the game, EA has a neat trivia game (http://ncaafootball.easports.com/showdown.action) on the NCAA Football website that also ties into the Season Showdown standings to add another way for you to help your team when away from your console. Until the season starts, Season Showdown standings are being tallied until opening day to decide the starting rankings and for each week during the season, teams are facing each other as they do in the real world and the winner is decided by who has more credits in at least three of the five categories. EA seems to be going all out on the community features for this mode as they will be doing podcasts about the latest happenings with polls, controversies, and all that that culminates with a 32 team tournament to decide the season champion before they start all over again for the next season.
NCAA Football 10 does feature a lot of visual tweaks that make it a visible step up from 09, which also includes a few new things that have been missing. Though it may not be much of an improvement, there are indeed nets behind the goal posts so that there is a logical reason for why footballs stop when they go through the posts. Marching bands are now on the field to do all of the classic formations like Script Ohio and the demo even features the EA Sports logo being formed by band members that transforms into the words “NCAA 10 DEMO,” which adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game.
New formations have been added that not only include the big formations like the Wildcat formation, but also new team-specific formations that haven’t been in previous NCAA Football games. The presentation has been improved quite a bit as the score display on the bottom of the screen looks more like it belongs on a television broadcast along with the coach cam, which shows the play you’re about to run or a bluff play if you’re with a friend, now goes way above the field so it looks a bit more like the playbook so you can have a more clear view of how the play should unfold.
It didn’t seem like a lot of new things were being added to NCAA Football 10 before starting this preview, but the research showed that there are a lot of big and small things being added that should make for a marked improvement over last year’s game. Season Showdown seems like a great community feature that exploits the intense amount of passion and emotion that college sports evokes and turns it into what could be a very compelling metagame mode. Better integration of the game’s features into the EA Sports World will be a nice way to further evolve what they started last year with the ability to upload screenshots and videos to the website to share with your friends.
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Comment by Coll. Fantasy Fball on the June 19th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
This is a really thorough review – thanks. I was hoping to get my hands on this game this year, but I am a recent Wii convert and will not be able to play. Have you heard any news about them putting a version out on the Wii this year?
Comment by Richard Kuklinski on the July 2nd, 2009 at 4:58 am
this isn't a wii type game dumb ass. nintendo uses fake asian characters