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Originally Posted by tazdevil20 |
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As someone who has been writing software for a living, we have certain mantras. Things like "that's impossible", "it can't be done", "it's too hard", etc. etc, are not permitted. That's a crock. It just takes work and effort and a lot of time. It's not a business for the 9 to 5er who takes 2 hour lunches and 5 weeks vacation. Nothing is impossible. In fact, we know it isn't, because the older generation football games were much better than what we have now (yes, both Madden and 2k). Whatever they did to the code on next gen, they must have really screwed the pooch. There are less "tools" and the player interaction is still laughable. It's 2012 and we still have synchronized player models moving in unison, we have 11 defenders reacting to the ball the second it's released from the QB's hand and we still don't have the actual penalties, challenge system, pass trajectory, etc. etc. that we should. Then you can even go into the other problems. How come I can't practice with my online franchise roster? How hard would it be to enable the user to export his online franchise roster file to play unranked games with it from within his online franchise community? I bet it would take a developer 2 hours to write that code, yet we still can't do it.
You have to wonder sometimes why things are so hard. Usually in software, when it's really hard to extend something or add to it, it means it was designed wrong in the first place. You write code to be extensible and maintainable. You write a lot of generic code that is reusable elsewhere, so you don't have to keep re-writing things or make changes in multiple places when the code changes. It's clear that not a lot of this was done on this generation for this product.
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Nice post... While I don't write software, I have a decade of user support experience. I'm sure you'll agree that the USER is always the wildcard. The USER may press the wrong button, but still wants the right thing to happen and will be frustrated when it doesn't even if it's his fault.
That said, you said that building code properly takes effort and time. No doubt, the effort is there but how much can you really do within a 9-month cycle - especially when support for the previous title continues after the title release. As odd as it sounds, it makes me nostalgic about the days when there was no after-release support, patches, updates, or online communities to rail against the game...
IMO, in the history of console video games, only 3 fall into the category of "GOOD." Super Tecmo Bowl, Madden, and NFL2K - in chronological order. The rest of the pro football gaming choices have ranged from ABYSMAL to barely passable. This speaks to the difficulty of producing a football game...
That said, what we have now as a NG football product is a casualty of the first 3 years of NG Madden. Those 1st 3 versions were horrid and it took 3 more years to get back to a 0 point. Madden 12 may have been in our hands years earlier had it not been for the scramble to reverse the course and correct the "Ortiz" years... In essence, the pooch was screwed and the code was built wrong and we are suffering because the game tried to go in a different direction from Madden '06-'08. We're 3 years behind where we ought to be.
Later