Re: Madden NFL 10 Blog: Customization
That is a good point you have. Now that I read your comment, I am kind of bothered by this as well. Realism is what I am going for. The last thing I want is a 12 yr old kid "Chees-en" me online. I feel the same way as well in reference from stirring away from "Speed" being a dominate attribute.
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</OI am also interpreting this the same as you are now that you pointed this out. Online (All-pro) is the default setting. This 0-100 compression slider makes me think.....
<V</V
I hope IAN or some-one from EA responds to your comment.<O</O
Good point<O</O
I think some of you are missing my point a little about the speed differential slider.
It looks like it would work just fine the way Ian showed it in this blog section (below) from March 9th. In that blog it looks like we would have "realistic speed" at the All Pro and All Madden levels.
In this new blog the speed differential slider says as follows...
- Full 0-100 slider that compresses the range of speeds between players
- Skill levels will change this value by default
The problem I'm having here is that what if now all of a sudden we won't have realistic speeds anymore at All Pro, and All Madden levels of difficulty. It says "0-100 range of compression".......does this mean when we play online that we won't be playing at sim speeds because we will probably be playing on All Pro...??? Where on the slider is "sim speed"...??? Why would anyone want to compress the speed differential beyond what is real...???
If the slider worked like it sounded like it would on March 9th, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Playing at sim speeds on All Pro and All Madden is fine. It's the new 0-100 range that is bothering me.
I think the game could work just fine without any speed differential slider at all. IMO the speed differential needs to come only in the form of player ratings.... not a slider. It's only my opinion, but I think the differential should remain constant in the game, no matter the diff. level.
I don't know why so many of you accept this. Why would you want a player who should run 40 yds in 4.9 sec. run it in 5.6 sec. instead, just to give you an advantage with your speedy players........???.......It's fake. Young players playing on low difficulty levels will all be playing with the Titans, and running Chris Johnson on Pitch Left / Pitch Right, all day. It's going to make those young players rely on speed more than ever. I thought we were headed in the other direction by making speed not be such a dominating attribute....???
I copied the section from that March 9th blog for you to look at below. Sorry this post took up so much space.
-- Ratings Changes --
After Donny re-rated every player in the speed rating, and we had tuned our speed curves to truly make our game showcase the differences between the players, we were feeling pretty damn good. Being that speed was our biggest concern though, we wanted to check our sanity and tested some different player ratings and how fast each player (in a specific rating range) ran 40 yards in our game. These results will probably surprise you...they sure did us:
D'oh! Looks like we went a little too far! I think we can all agree that we won't be seeing too many folks running a 7.8 second 40 yard dash (video game developers might have those times, but not NFL athletes). This immediately brings to light the very real clash that can exist between fun and realism in sports games. We thought we were dead on - we thought the game felt great, was fun to play, and was really showcasing the differences between players. But when you look at the numbers, it is obvious that doing something that you feel makes the game more fun to play can differ quite greatly from a full realistic simulation. So what do we do? Well, first, we can't break our mantra...again, we're all for realism and authenticity in Madden NFL 10. But also we realize that we're making a game for millions of people, most of which are focused on a fun yet competitive experience, and many of them could probably care less about realistic 40 times. So what's our solution? Read on...
Within minutes of seeing these results, we knew right away that we needed to be able to tune the "speed difference" independently, and tune it per skill level. So our engineers built a nice system for us where we can compress this range however much we see fit, and also set the defaults for each skill level as well. You will see below that a good way to make Pro and Rookie difficulties a little easier is to spreads the ranges of speeds out, while on All-Pro / All-Madden we want to emulate real life as much as possible. We want you to boot up and say hello to Sundays in the NFL.
These numbers are very subject to change, but here's an example of the speed ranges based on the skill level:
NOTE: To be ultra clear, this is NOT the scale we use to determine the speed rating of a player! This showcases how fast a player runs 40 yards currently in our game based on the rating that he is given. Donny determines the actual speed ratings of the players based on many different factors...not just the 40 time of a player.
We also realized that you, the loyal Madden gamer, may not agree with these numbers. Many may believe that speeds should always be a constant, and difficulty should be handled in other ways (I sort of straddle that line myself). But to address everyone's concerns, we just went ahead and exposed our tuning values into a "speed differential" slider into gameplay settings. If you want to play on Pro mode but want all of the players to have more realistic speeds, you can do so. If you want to play on All-Madden but want the really fast players to truly feel faster than everyone else, you can do that as well. That way hopefully everyone can be happy.
How Realistic Player Speeds Affect Gameplay: Overall Gameplay + 10
It looks like it would work just fine the way Ian showed it in this blog section (below) from March 9th. In that blog it looks like we would have "realistic speed" at the All Pro and All Madden levels.
In this new blog the speed differential slider says as follows...
- Full 0-100 slider that compresses the range of speeds between players
- Skill levels will change this value by default
The problem I'm having here is that what if now all of a sudden we won't have realistic speeds anymore at All Pro, and All Madden levels of difficulty. It says "0-100 range of compression".......does this mean when we play online that we won't be playing at sim speeds because we will probably be playing on All Pro...??? Where on the slider is "sim speed"...??? Why would anyone want to compress the speed differential beyond what is real...???
If the slider worked like it sounded like it would on March 9th, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Playing at sim speeds on All Pro and All Madden is fine. It's the new 0-100 range that is bothering me.
I think the game could work just fine without any speed differential slider at all. IMO the speed differential needs to come only in the form of player ratings.... not a slider. It's only my opinion, but I think the differential should remain constant in the game, no matter the diff. level.
I don't know why so many of you accept this. Why would you want a player who should run 40 yds in 4.9 sec. run it in 5.6 sec. instead, just to give you an advantage with your speedy players........???.......It's fake. Young players playing on low difficulty levels will all be playing with the Titans, and running Chris Johnson on Pitch Left / Pitch Right, all day. It's going to make those young players rely on speed more than ever. I thought we were headed in the other direction by making speed not be such a dominating attribute....???
I copied the section from that March 9th blog for you to look at below. Sorry this post took up so much space.
-- Ratings Changes --
After Donny re-rated every player in the speed rating, and we had tuned our speed curves to truly make our game showcase the differences between the players, we were feeling pretty damn good. Being that speed was our biggest concern though, we wanted to check our sanity and tested some different player ratings and how fast each player (in a specific rating range) ran 40 yards in our game. These results will probably surprise you...they sure did us:
D'oh! Looks like we went a little too far! I think we can all agree that we won't be seeing too many folks running a 7.8 second 40 yard dash (video game developers might have those times, but not NFL athletes). This immediately brings to light the very real clash that can exist between fun and realism in sports games. We thought we were dead on - we thought the game felt great, was fun to play, and was really showcasing the differences between players. But when you look at the numbers, it is obvious that doing something that you feel makes the game more fun to play can differ quite greatly from a full realistic simulation. So what do we do? Well, first, we can't break our mantra...again, we're all for realism and authenticity in Madden NFL 10. But also we realize that we're making a game for millions of people, most of which are focused on a fun yet competitive experience, and many of them could probably care less about realistic 40 times. So what's our solution? Read on...
Within minutes of seeing these results, we knew right away that we needed to be able to tune the "speed difference" independently, and tune it per skill level. So our engineers built a nice system for us where we can compress this range however much we see fit, and also set the defaults for each skill level as well. You will see below that a good way to make Pro and Rookie difficulties a little easier is to spreads the ranges of speeds out, while on All-Pro / All-Madden we want to emulate real life as much as possible. We want you to boot up and say hello to Sundays in the NFL.
These numbers are very subject to change, but here's an example of the speed ranges based on the skill level:
NOTE: To be ultra clear, this is NOT the scale we use to determine the speed rating of a player! This showcases how fast a player runs 40 yards currently in our game based on the rating that he is given. Donny determines the actual speed ratings of the players based on many different factors...not just the 40 time of a player.
We also realized that you, the loyal Madden gamer, may not agree with these numbers. Many may believe that speeds should always be a constant, and difficulty should be handled in other ways (I sort of straddle that line myself). But to address everyone's concerns, we just went ahead and exposed our tuning values into a "speed differential" slider into gameplay settings. If you want to play on Pro mode but want all of the players to have more realistic speeds, you can do so. If you want to play on All-Madden but want the really fast players to truly feel faster than everyone else, you can do that as well. That way hopefully everyone can be happy.
How Realistic Player Speeds Affect Gameplay: Overall Gameplay + 10
That is a good point you have. Now that I read your comment, I am kind of bothered by this as well. Realism is what I am going for. The last thing I want is a 12 yr old kid "Chees-en" me online. I feel the same way as well in reference from stirring away from "Speed" being a dominate attribute.
<O
</OI am also interpreting this the same as you are now that you pointed this out. Online (All-pro) is the default setting. This 0-100 compression slider makes me think..... <V
</VI hope IAN or some-one from EA responds to your comment.<O
</OGood point<O
</O
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