Yearly incompetent programming

[Aranor]

You have these games like NCAA and madden football that most people have to wait two to three months just to start a dynasty because they have to wait for the developers to fix the bugs they fail to catch year after year.
I doubt you see these glaring problems all the time when playing FIFA or basketball by either maker. Even games like resident evil, which is much more complex than football, don't have these constant glaring problems that hardly ever are addressed. It just amazes me that these games with so many bugs continue to be released

[steelersfan77]

I think the football games were built on very poor foundations. There's a good chance your house will buckle and collapse if the foundation is poorly constructed.

I look for a better future in football gaming once other companies get involved.

EA isn't changing and they've clearly displayed that this Gen. Just the way it is.

[Buckeye Country]

This is 2 years in a row that I haven't even started a dynasty yet because the game is broken!

[Herky]

The problem is that they have been using the same code for years. Until a new engine is released, NCAA won't change much. Also, when they are adding to old code, there is greater chance for problems to arise because you are basically laying new code on top of old code.

[Aranor]

Hence incompetent programming. Programmers should know this and not engage in this type of practice year in year out.

[Herky]

Quote: Originally Posted by Aranor

Hence incompetent programming. Programmers should know this and not engage in this type of practice year in year out.

I don't blame the programmers. NCAA isn't coded from scratch each year. The problem stems from the people at the top. They decide what goes in and what comes out each year.

When a programmer works on a project that has been developed before, he or she cannot control how framework is, only what goes into it. They aren't going to start over and re-code the entire game unless a new engine comes out.

I'm pretty sure they are using the same code going back to 2008 at least. That isn't the programmers choice. They work with what they are told to. It's not uncommon in the software world to re-use old code or build upon code already there. I think NCAA has some big problems, but it's not broken. Some of the logic should and could be fixed by a patch/tuner, but the programmers can't do that until they are told to.

It all goes back to the people at the top. Testing is something else that doesn't happened very often by EA. Even the best programmers in the world need QA to re-check things because coding is not easy.

[coogrfan]

Quote: Originally Posted by steelersfan77

I think the football games were built on very poor foundations. There's a good chance your house will buckle and collapse if the foundation is poorly constructed.

This. EA's decision to build an "all-new football engine" for the next-gen consoles was, in hindsight, disastrously wrong. One can't help but wonder where the Madden/NCAA series might be today if EA had decided to utilize the approach VC used for NBA 2k6 (360): a direct port of the last gen version with spruced up graphics. The result was a title that proved to be one of the best of the 360 launch titles and a solid foundation for future development.

[CM Hooe]

The thing is though, Tiburon did internal research of their own engines and determined that those in place on the PS2 / XBOX were not going to be ideal going forward. That decision surely wasn't made in a vacuum and it surely wasn't made lightly, as it involved investing a ton of money into new tech.

It's easy for us to say "Tiburon should have stuck with their old tech" using only 2K's work as a basis, but we aren't privy to the technical reasoning behind why Tiburon decided to throw everything out. I think we've been seeing returns on it since the M10 / NCAA 10 games, however, and in particular M13 was a huge leap forward for Tiburon IMO that NCAA should hope to replicate next July.