NCAA Football 10 Dynasty Issues.

I have been pretty good this football season. I have only purchased three annuals, I have not visited a single forum, and I have only stopped by a few sites to look for news, notes, and impressions on NCAA Football 10. What I have seen so far as not been too outstanding.

Bill Abner of The Nut and the Feisty Weasel has a great write-up called NCAA 10: How Important is Dynasty Mode? And How Can EA Fix It?

Currently, progression works like this — kids come in inside a certain ratings range depending on their star value during recruiting. Then, each off season, everyone gets better by anywhere from 3 to 12 points (or so). So basically every team’s players get better each season and in a few years your Dynasty is littered with 90+ rated players on damn near every school.

It’s a player ratings orgasm. In one preseason top 25 poll 20 teams were rated at least an “A” overall. It’s bonkers.

It represents real college football like my daughter’s soccer games represent Fifa. It’s technically soccer.

Not so good. At a minimum I want the simulation aspects of dynasty and franchise modes to produce realistic statistics. Some abnormalities are ok, as long as they are consistent. I want to gameplay experience to be fun, believable, and at the same time I do not want to see the CPU do spectacular things that I could never manager (i.e. cheat).

Another good article is at Dubious Quality by Bill Harris titled NCAA 10 (360): A Brown, Gelatinous Mass That Is Only Vaguely Shaped Like A Football. Because sliders were not working, which seems oddly reminiscent of last year’s release, while waiting for a patch to fix the problem, Mr. Harris did some very detailed work on player progression.

The summarized version: there were 14 players in the entire game (any position) with an overall rating of 95 or higher on the default rosters. After five years, there were 75! Also, there were an additional 112 players with overall ratings of 90-94, and after five years, there were 270.

That’s kind of a shitty mess, really, and some positions are just mind-boggling. There were originally two centers at 95+ and 8 more from 90-94, but after five years, there were 18 at 95+ and 36 from 90-94!

You either enjoy this type of stuff or you don’t. I love looking inside the numbers, so this is a great read. Unlike Mr. Harris, for the first time in a long time, I am not going to run up to the ball and hope that Lucy will not pull it away from me at the last minute. No thanks. As I previously wrote, this year I am going to pass on NCAA Football 10.

Share

Leave a Reply