NCAA Football 08 Interview

[Steve_OS]

We have just posted our interview Ben Haumilller, Assistant Producer and Ian Cummings, Associate Producer of NCAA Football 08.

Operation Sports: "We keep hearing about the “new and deeper recruiting”. Can you give us some detailed information on this?"

Ben/Ian: "This year recruiting will be much more in-depth. The entire year’s recruiting database is available to you at the start of each year as you truly recruit year round. The new telephone mechanic allows you to interact with the prospects as you learn how the prospect feels about each of the 14 different pitches compared to how your school rates in those pitches. If the recruit isn’t really feeling what you have to offer you can attempt to sway his opinion of the pitch. You can assign activities for on-campus visits as well as decide what you are going to talk to a recruit about when you are on an in-home visit. For the first time you can recruit a player without offering them a scholarship, and get on the spot commitments if a scholarship is offered to a recruit that is interested enough. We have implemented a new search engine that allows you to filter through the prospect database to find the players that best fit the needs of your program. Additionally, you can make promises to recruits in order to help seal the deal and get a commitment. The better you are at keeping promises the more weight they will carry, and you will unlock more promises to use. However, if you are not a man of your word players will transfer and your promises will not be as effective."

[theaub]

And I guess that screen answers the question if Tray Blackmon's in the game.

[mdgoalie37]

Operation Sports: Have any changes been made in the kicking game?

Ben/Ian: The main changes with kicking come from tuning. Last year poorly rated kickers were pretty much spot-on accurate, all the time, even with the sliders adjusted. We scaled this down much more for college to more accurately reflect the difficulty of the game, and also tuned the effect the sliders have on gameplay. You’ll definitely see a lot of variance from kickers with lower ratings where – they don’t just kick down the middle. You may even see a missed PAT every now and then!

Sweet!!!

[BezO]

Very soft questions. Seems like only questions that could be answered positively were asked.

Good info though.

[rudyjuly2]

Quote: Originally Posted by BezO

Very soft questions. Seems like only questions that could be answered positively were asked. Good info though.

I think all of the gaming sites put together a list of questions and EA answered some of them and sent the responses back out. That's why many sites won't get many questions answered and the ones that do are all the same across the web it seems.

[Steve_OS]

Quote: Originally Posted by BezO

Very soft questions. Seems like only questions that could be answered positively were asked. Good info though.

The questions were submitted by our readers, over 50 submitted, some from the Forums, some via email. It's up to EA to answer the ones they feel like answering. If you had some hard questions, you should have asked when the opportunity presented itself a few weeks ago. Of course, it may have been asked, EA just decided not to answer it, nothing I can do about that. I'm just glad they answered what they could, any information is better than none, at this point. Right?

[BezO]

Quote: Originally Posted by Steve_OS

...It's up to EA to answer the ones they feel like answering.

Ahhhh. That's all I needed to hear. So pardon me. I'm sure the questions were great. Participation was soft.

I did submit a few questions, none of which were answered.

And yes, some info is better than none. There's some good stuff in there.


Thanks.

[grunt]

Good interview. 7/17/07. Nuff said.