GREAT ARTICLE ON ALL PRO

[minelevation]

http://sensiblecoasters.wordpress.co...-football-2k9/



Today I will cover All-Pro Football 2k9. Tomorrow we’ll revisit Madden. To close out the week, I’ll cover NCAA and Backbreaker Football.
EA Sports’ exclusive license has killed off football gaming! It sure looked like that last year until 2K Sports announced they would be resurrecting NFL 2k5 will a few legends and labeling it All-Pro Football.

As 2007 winds down, we are in the cusp of seeing four games on the next-gen consoles in 2008. No one could have expected this when the exclusive license was announced.
Strange as this might sound, EA’s exclusive license with the NFL might be the best thing to happen to the football genre. It forces competitors to take considerable risks to compete with Madden. If we had the usual NFL 2k8 versus Madden 08 fight this year, sure they would both be considerably better due to direct competition but they wouldn’t have been forced to think outside the normal process of updating rosters and offering one or two big changes.

I talked about the problems of football games last week so today, I’m going to talk about what APF did right and what 2K Sports could do to improve the game.I think 2k8 did a lot right with the engine but that was due to ESPN NFL 2k5 doing a lot of things right for its day. I can’t emphasize this enough, building a strong game engine will always lead to having a strong game. That’s certainly the case because the on-field engine only needs slight tweaking and the general yearly improvements.
Overall the game was balanced extremely well considering this was the first time players with numberless ratings was seen in a game. Guys like Earl Campbell were beasts that caused slight unbalances in the gameplay but getting the feel for legends like Mr. Cambell is an accomplishment in of itself. For next year, if 2k9 is going to have the same system with generic players and legends, then gold legends could be brought down a bit in their overall ability, while generics and bronze players could be a little better.


The attribute system was a revolutionary idea that should have received more praise than it did. Credit to the game engine where the differences in gold, silver and bronze players, stood out. It was very noticeable how some of the attributes made the same class of player feel. A gold QB with a rocket arm could power his way up and down the field while the precision QB was surgeon-like is his passing game. For next year, they need to expand their attributes model, offering more categories and possibly more levels. They should also add bad attributes to capture the weaknesses of even the greatest NFL legends.


Finally, and this might be a first in football games, 2k8 could improve the responsiveness of the controls. After extended playtime you could get used to the but they were not as fluid as NFL 2k5.Most of 2k8’s problems as mentioned surrounded the lack of features. I think only a radical overhaul of 2k8’s feature set is going to make this game feel next gen.

APF could learn a lot from another poorly licensed game. Winning Eleven or Pro Evolution Soccer, has never offered gamers fully licensed leagues, teams and players. Because its gameplay was sublime, it gained enough of a following to rival FIFA’s sales numbers. If you don’t follow soccer games, FIFA was the Madden of the soccer world. It sold incredibly well but was made to appeal to casual gamers. It created an atmosphere in Europe and the US, that allowed a sim game to be successful.


That is the situation we are in now. There is a market for people wanting more than a casual football game.Without question, APF 2k9 needs to be made without trying to please the NFL so they have a chance of getting the use of NFL license. A game that sells poorly but appeases the NFL does not stand a chance of regaining the use of the professional license. The NFL wants exposure for its own product and to do that it needs Madden’s iconic stature not All-Pro Football’s gameplay.

Fans of APF have been clamoring for a fully customizable game within the same framework of APF 2k8. I believe this is a woeful unimaginative idea to compete with Madden that will only lead to marginal success. 2K Sports has the answer sitting in front of them but will they see it?APF 2k9 needs to take the gloves off and create a game of the unofficial history of the NFL. The idea to play as football legends was brilliant but it was poorly executed. I’m sorry but picking 11 legends with a side of scrubs is lame-*** with a capital “***”.

2K Sports has already laid the groundwork for this happening. The use of legends, amended with historical downloads through 2K Share could create the most revolutionary game we’ve seen since NFL 2k on the Dreamcast. And the producer’s of APF wouldn’t need to do anything more than create the framework for this happening.

Here’s how to do it. APF would offer users the ability to create unlimited amount of players, teams, leagues and draft classes, with a easy to use and quickly to produce, editor. For the graphical side of the game, the editor would also allow for uniform and logo creation (without the ability to create NFL logos). And it would have a decent stadium creator.

APF would introduce a franchise model with the standard fare of player growth, salary caps, retirements and hall of fame inductions.
Over night this game would have instant appeal. Let’s say you want to replay the career of Troy Aikman and relive the glory days of the 1990’s Cowboys. This would be the only game that would let you do that because you could get on 2K Share, find a career file for the ‘Boys, and play season after season with them. 2K Share would also allow users to create any football universe they wanted by allowing for the ability of single team downloads to create the ultimate football season. Imagine a league with ‘85 Bears, the ‘72 Dolphins and the ‘08 Pats in the same conference.

Within months of the game’s release, the community could churn out hundreds of franchise, team, and draft files. The amazing thing is this would be available to anyone with the game — never needing an Xport or USB flash drive. Access to 2K Share would create a football universe unseen in any sports game before.


So in closing, the future of APF 2k9 lies in 2K Sports ability to break away from the mentality of creating NFL 2k5 with legends. I believe only a game that asks the editing community to be an integral part of the game, will succeed commercially. The gameplay has always been stellar so now it’s time to provide the framework for an game with franchise options, drafts, editable leagues and let them fill in a football universe. For only they would spend hours getting the 4th String RB of the 71 Giants right.

[SageInfinite]

Good read. I agree with everything stated.

[gta95]

Pretty good read. I'm excited for next year.

[BSherrod]

Quote: Originally Posted by gta95

Pretty good read. I'm excited for next year.

I hope there is a next year. Realistically I think that EA will use the legend licenses in Madden somehow.

One of the things I enjoyed about APF2K8 was the team building, among my friends in the dorm we could pick out own teams and go head to head against each other and that was amazing fun. I hope they don't stray to far away from that.

[RogueHominid]

I thought this was a solid article as well, though I am a bit reserved about the completely unlimited customization element. I actually like the fact that you can't have a team full of legends, but perhaps I am in the minority here.

I have always been a franchise guy in the past, but I think that APF has given us a viable, and at least for me, fulfilling path for the future of football gaming: a great game engine backed by an incredibly innovative method of distinguishing players from one another and the prospect of nearly limitless combinations of players. I love tweaking my teams and seeing what kinds of combinations I can win with.

While I know this opinion is probably a minority one, I've said before that we all know that putting in a franchise, progression, etc., is much harder than it sounds--which game has ever done that well? There always seems to be a bug with drafting, with progression, etc. And for that matter, how many of us can say that we play through more than a couple of seasons of a franchise as it is (and how many of us actually play all the games, for that matter)?

Given the financial status of T2, I'm sure they can't just go out and buy another 300 legends for next year's game, but I would be 100% behind an expanded legends set and some game play tweaks, and I'd pay full price for it just because APF actually feels like real football to me and I think that's worth the price.

[tcv]

I agree with most of this article as well. Does APF really need to pay for the rights to legends if the game is fully customizable? I don't think so. If APF worked on just tweaking gameplay and improved graphics while giving the option of full customization this game would be a huge success. Let the community take care of the rosters and the player ratings. Take an approach very similar to the old Winning Eleven soccer series. They had no licenses, but the game was superior to FIFA. With the addition of the 2k Share, the roster updates would be easy and beneficial to the game.
It would also be a heck of lot cheaper than paying for the rights to all those legends.

[totalownership]

I thought I read somewhere that the cost for the Legends was extremely low compared to what they would have paid for the NFL license. Something like one tenth. I'm very interested in what they laid out for the licenses though.

One thing never mentioned in articles like these is who you deal with "unlimited customization" when it comes to online play. You have to have some kind of "points" system where you are only allowed a certain amount of points per team. For instance , you're allowed 500 points. To create a superman gold player it's going to cost you 100 points in attributes. Thereby leaving you 400 for the rest of your squad. While some other guy could take those same 100 points and create 5 solid silver guys with a specific few abilities each. How you go about implementing it is the question though.

[catcatch22]

The problem is people don't want to play football, they want to play NFL.