The point I was trying to make is that if you’re gonna try to do a half-assed job and then sell it to college basketball fans (especially UK fans) you’re gonna hear about it.
Anyway, to get back to the original topic, I haven’t heard anything else from Sega about it just yet. I just wonder if the NFL will reconsider this deal before too much longer.
The Spy feature in 2K5 is actually a contentious debate. It simply does not work, yet many people in effect put their fingers in their ears shouting “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when it gets brought up. Oh, hey, look, you linked to the actual thread I’m referring to. I’m in that thread, I might point out, on page 7. If you read the last two pages of that thread, you see a lot of posters saying “it doesn’t work, it never has, why is this still being debated?”
It basically comes down to this: ESPN put a feature into the game and called it QB Spy. Unfortunately, this feature bears no resemblance to what “QB Spy” actually means in the context of NFL football. A real Spy feature, which is necessary to counteract the unbalanced QB Scramble feature, would sure be great, but sadly does not exist. Here’s a hint: in the NFL, when a player is assigned to Spy, he has no other pass defense responsibilities at all. In ESPN, a Spy still has man coverage (or zone) pass defense responsibilities, so he is not truly Spying the QB.
The scramble issue is easy to demonstrate. Try calling any pass play, drop back two steps, hold down the scramble trigger and run directly at the linemen. Even without really trying to avoid the DL, you bounce off pretty much all the linemen and get past the line untouched. No defenders in man coverage are able to see the QB, so basically the QB goes untouched until he gets to the safeties, getting an easy 8 yards per attempt. This works with remarkable consistency against most defenses.
No, just a single franchise. In our franchise, I control the Giants, one buddy controls the Jets, and a third guy controls the Steelers. We all do trades, drafts, depth charts, etc for our respective teams. We play against each other. (In fact, I customized the franchise so we’re all in the same division, the AFC East.) In Giants vs Jets games, the third guy sits out. But in a Giants vs Raiders game, for example, my buddies cooperatively control the Raiders against my Giants. Now does it make more sense? (We get together once a week at a buddy’s house to play. Currently, it is Friday Nights, which is why I virtually never post on Fridays.)
As for how to coordinate, we take turns. During the season, we allow one trade per week, and whomever has the worst record goes first, and the best record goes last. In the offseason, say for signing Free Agents, whomever posted the worst record the year before goes first and picks one guy, then the next guy, and whomever finished the best goes last, continuing indefinitely in that order until nobody wants any more free agents.
Madden has allowed this since day one. ESPN has never allowed multiplayer franchises until the 2K5 version. They touted it as a big advancement. They put almost no thought into it, though, because you can’t control the off teams. In my example, against the Raiders, instead of my two buddies controlling the Raiders, Visual Concepts apparently expects my buddies to sit there doing nothing for an hour while they watch me play against the computer. WTF? I am amazed at how ludicrous this is, and how pathetic their attempt at multiplayer franchise was.
The multiplayer franchise is unbelievably fun, especally if you design your own playbooks. Endless bragging rights are at stake, and you can implement your very own football philosophy, both with the gameplan and the personnel decisions. We have tons of games, but nothing comes with the fun of Madden franchise. We are currently all 3-1, and we each went 1-1 against each other. The competition is great, but can’t exist in ESPN without workarounds that are major pains in the ass.
We still would play 2K5 except for the Scrambling issue and the player development issue, which is an afterthought to Visual Concepts, whereas in Madden, player development is one of their highest priorities. (One year we got through 7 seasons in a franchise.)
I guess I haven’t noticed the scrambling issue because I usually play with either the Rams or the Colts, neither of which have a particularly mobile QB. If my XBox wasn’t already packed, I’d break it out and try to duplicate the problem.
As for QB Spying, I’m typically not too active on defense unless I’m controlling a pass rusher, so I haven’t tried to spy.
As for the multiplayer franchise thing, I can understand why not being able to control a non-player team would be bad, but I can also understand why it’s not part of the setup. After all, it’s a CPU team, so it seems reasonable that the average person wouldn’t be bothered by not having the opportunity to take over control.
I’m not talking about single player franchises. If I were, I’d agree totally. Multiplayer franchises, however, were touted as one of their big new features. Can you think of any multiplayer franchise setup where it would be cool if you couldn’t play as the off teams? The only one I can think of is if you have 32 guys controlling all 32 teams.
The whole point of multiplayer is to have multiple players actually playing the game. The only thing I can think of is that VC assumed that multiplayer franchises would be played by guys who never got together in real life except to give each other copies of the franchise after each had played their game for the week. But isn’t there another whole feature to handle that, namely online play?
I bet I know what they were thinking. “If they can control the CPU teams, then they’ll sandbag them to get stats to unlock VIP Crib points, and we can’t have them cheaters getting all the cool stuff in our awesome Cribs feature, so we won’t let them control the CPU teams.” Nobody on staff apparently had enough insight to bring up the fact that the multiplayer franchise in the game only allows for singleplayer action, and how that might be a problem.
Now if Madden would just put pass interference back into the game, and give us controller config 3 back, I’d be a happy guy. Stupidity is not confined to the good folks at Visual Concepts by a long shot…