12-22-2010, 05:55 PM
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#1
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Rookie
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"Zone defence is broken" (Long (and actually thought through, I hope))
I keep reading a lot of posts saying things along the lines of "zone defence is broken". And after playing this game a lot, I'm inclined to agree.
In real life, the skill against man coverage is to identify a favourable match-up, and then the receiver making a play on the ball. Timing, and the QB-WR relationship in general, are the keys here.
However the aim against zone coverage is to find the "soft spot in the zone"; essentially to throw it to where the defence isn't. This requires a quick identification of the defence, and then the ability to deliver the ball to the correct spot.
Now when this is translated to a video game, man coverage becomes an exercise in tapping the receivers button and then watching/user-catching your way to a completion. Which is not badly represented in madden: if you correctly identify the best match-up the game does a good job of realistic outcomes, and with minimal slider tweaking, you can get man-coverage to play VERY realistically in my opinion.
Against zone coverage however, things start to come apart in the video game world. You can fling the ball around endlessly and pick apart zone defences with ease. The problem is, putting the slider difficulty up doesn't really help matters - the defence is now able to stop you, but only by making ridiculous plays (or cheating as some people put it). Things like unrealistically high and well-timed jumps by the D-line, defenders in zones sliding rapidly across the turf to swat the ball down, defenders reacting as soon as you press the button on your controller rather than when the animation actually plays in the game and WR dropping an insanely high number of accurate passes. All this leads to a pretty unsatisfactory, or downright annoying, experience.
The reason this is is because, with the camera angle as it is, it is unbelievably easy to read a zone defence. And that, simply put, is why I don't foresee this problem ever being solved without, at the very least, the camera angle being significantly lowered. That way you at least include some of the elements that make zone defence hard to beat in real life. Because I firmly believe that any NFL QB could tear apart a defence if he was able to read it from such an elevated position.
Interested to here your thoughts on this.
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