As the conferences are being shaken up to change the future of the NCAA, the virtual landscape remains steady as NCAA Football 11 nears its release. The team at Tiburon is putting in a lot of effort this year to fix a lot of the things that fans have been wanting for years, which should at least make this year’s game the one to watch. We got our hands on the new demo to see how much these changes will affect how the game itself plays out.

The first thing you’ll notice when you see NCAA Football 11 is that the engine has received a big upgrade to make the game look noticeably better. The players now look like they’re on a similar level with those that are in Madden, though without the extra touches due to not being the headlining football game. Another addition that adds to the better visuals is the new Locomotion engine that gives players a more natural style of movement than the robotic movements you’re probably used to seeing since the series’ PS2 days.

One would hope that Locomotion would bring in a new set of animations to NCAA Football 11 to spice up the end results of each play, but that’s not really the case. It feels like you just have a better way to get to those similar styles of tackles and attempts to shake tackles, though we do like that the game’s engine has been upgraded with Madden ProTak system that allows defenders to dynamically grab onto the ball carrier to create big scrums to stop them in their tracks. The AI for offensive and defensive players is supposed to have been redone to make them more reliable and realistic, which is hard to judge in the demo with two minute quarters.

NCAA Football 11 will control very similarly to last year’s game, so it’s pretty much the visual output that has been upgraded without the controls being fine tuned alongside it. The main change is that you can hold the B button down and use the left analog stick to quickly switch between players on defense rather than playing the same button-mashing game that football games have required for nearly two decades now.

The Gameplan feature that was introduced in NCAA Football 10 returns, although you might not know it’s there if you’re not actively looking for it. For those that don’t know what Gameplan is, it allowed you to set how you want your AI players to behave in different parts of the game. Rather than popping up during the opening kickoff and every timeout along with being visible on the play-calling screen, it is only available on the play-calling screen and even then you might not have access to it depending on how you pick your plays. It’s almost like the developers hate this feature now and it has been buried on the practice squad until everybody forgets about it.

Speaking of play-calling, that part of NCAA Football 11 has been reworked to be more like the traditional horizontal, three-play system in previous generations than the rectangular, four-play style that Madden and NCAA have used for most of this generation. Asking the Coach for suggestions seems to work a lot better in the admittedly limited demo, which constantly suggested going for it on fourth down last year and now offers a better range of plays for each play and situation. If you run into a no-huddle offense, you’re now able to pick a play when the offense is doing its no-huddle thing so you don’t have to rely on the same handful of plays that you could audible into.

Though the demo tries to show off the new focus on accurately representing the many offensive systems and styles that populate the NCAA Football 11, it’s hard to tell with the four available games since it feels like this feature is easier to understand its significance during a season. The demo offers match-ups between pro style offenses, multiple look offenses, and spread offenses, which the personnel of those teams make a bigger impact than the play books for one-off games. A bigger deal is seeing a no-huddle offense in action and how you have a better chance to stop them with the changes in play-calling that were mentioned above. The demo offers these match-ups: Miami at Ohio State, Oklahoma at Texas, Florida at Florida State, and Missouri at Clemson. The reason you might want to try out each match-up in the demo is that you unlock Nike Pro Combat uniforms for each team that will carry over to the full game if you log in to the EA network first, though these uniforms can be quite a departure from the original uniforms fans have come to identify with these teams.

Presentation is another big focus for NCAA Football 11 with the developers making a point to make the pre-game and HUD look more like what you see on an ESPN broadcast. Before the College Gameday set appears, you get to see special team entrances for many of the teams that have notable entrances in the game that are nice a few times before you skip them to get to the coin toss. When the College Gameday set appears, you’ll notice that you do not hear the soothing voice of Lee Corso, which is because he’s no longer a part of the game. The announcing duo is now Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler, the latter of which was always named before each game in the past few years before never being heard from again during the broadcast. The commentary feels a bit better without Corso’s stagnating comments, but it is still not particularly fresh compared to the notable games in that field.

A lot of the big additions and changes that Tiburon has made to NCAA Football 11 are to things that the demo cannot show. The game will now feature auto-saving and auto-loading of rosters to remove the need to constantly save for fear of losing any important data along with making sure that you have the correct rosters loaded when starting a new dynasty or Road to Glory player. Those may be small things, but they’ve gone unnoticed for years now that can make simple things more time-consuming than they needed to be.

They’ve also made quite a few changes to the dynasty and online dynasty in NCAA Football 11 to flesh out similarly small features that have been lacking for a few years. Formation subs can now be set in-game or between games so that your special players can be in the right spots without having to make those changes in each game. The bowl season has been shrunk down into one week so you don’t have to mess with skipping through three weeks to get to your game or having to wait more time for everybody to play their bowl games in an online dynasty.

The process of recruiting in your dynasty in NCAA Football 11 should be a bit of a nicer experience with the changes they’ve made to that part of the mode. Phone calls to potential recruits is less like a sterile list of areas to touch on and more like an actual conversation where you can bring up specific topics that looks more natural than the typical call experience in terms of the user interface design. The player ratings for those recruits and every player in the dynasty have been revamped so that you don’t see a ton of 99-rated players, much like the way that Madden shook up their player ratings for Madden 10. The list of top recruits has been expanded to the top 150 players with more criteria being weighed so that the top players are more likely to be the most desirable players for you to recruit. Then the logic that recruits use to set their top schools and to ultimately make their final choose of which school they will sign with has been revamped along with a difficulty slider to let you set how much of a challenge you want recruiting to be.

The final major upgrade for the online dynasty in NCAA Football 11 is the new web portal and upgraded news system that should make it easier to see the latest news without going to a secondary place to get it. Dynasty Wire replaces the current news system to give them a more interesting purpose since you can comment on those stories from the website or console to be a more active participant in the dynasty. Weekly Updates give you the more detailed recap of what happened that week for each team from their games and in recruiting. Your game recaps are set up to take five photos automatically to share with everyone, along with the option to add five more photos, five highlight videos, and even add your own recap to the story through the web portal for your dynasty. Outside of the basic articles that the game will create each week, you can use the website to create your own stories for everyone to read with the new StoryBuilder tools that can even be published to Facebook and Twitter for more options to share your stories.

The new demo for NCAA Football 11 does a good job of showing what you can expect out of the game itself, it seems like Tiburon has put a lot of work into fixing a lot of things players have been wanting for years and fleshing out some parts of the dynasty and online dynasty experience to make those modes much better than before. You can now download the demo from Xbox Live and PlayStation Network and if you like what you see, you can get the game when it arrives on store shelves on July 13.

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About This Author: Chris Selogy

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