Month: May 2024

Travis Hunter, the two-way player at receiver and defensive back for Colorado and one of three stars on the cover… Continue reading EA Sports College Football 25 preview: Come for the pageantry, stay for the gameplay
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Travis Hunter, the two-way player at receiver and defensive back for Colorado and one of three stars on the cover of College Football 25, spoke for a lot of gamers when he was asked what he thought of all the presentational elements and pizzazz put into the game that EA Sports invited him to play down at its Orlando, Fla. studio last week.

What’d you think of Folsom Field? Did the crowd sound the same? Did it feel the same? How about Ralphie the Buffalo running out? Hunter had a rather blithe, but nonetheless true answer.

“I was just trying to get to the gameplay,” he shrugged.

He simply buttoned through all the tradition and the pageantry that EA Sports had worked almost three years to build, and has spent a lot of time marketing to draw a crowd back to its first collegiate football video game in more than a decade.

And it’s totally OK. I’ll echo his sentiments. As much as the little fanfares — and in a game comprising 134 universities, there are thousands — are charming to anyone who gives any sentimental rip about college life, this game is still gonna live or die on how well it plays, like all video games do. And after a couple of hours on the sticks, I can give a confident thumbs up that it’ll be worthwhile, and distinct from its Madden NFL cousin, even if it borrows some core gameplay elements that the pro football version will show when it launches a month later.

For starters, players are getting a great spread of playbooks exemplary of collegiate football’s experimental approach to the game. The classic triple-option is joined by modern exponents such as Wake Forest’s long (or slow) run-pass option mesh, in addition to the usual spread-the-field, fire-drill nonsense.

All of this is supported by a gameplay engine that is smarter at contextualizing running behavior, allowing users quicker moves and cutbacks against blocking without triggering special moves on a face button or the right stick. Contextual running behavior — “getting skinny” when passing through the middle of the line-of-scrimmage battle, for example — is mainly applied to forward movement. Lateral motion, such as jukes and spins, are still on the user to execute to fake a tackler and continue on their way.

The best example I can give of this, I accidentally called a reverse pitch in one of my first three plays and was astonished to see an 8 yard gain out of a mistake play. Slow-to-develop plays, particularly behind the line of scrimmage, have long been a weakness in player-vs-CPU games like Madden NFL, which shares a core gameplay engine with College Football 25. But here, my split end had the ball before I even knew what was going on, much less the AI defense, and I still gaffed North Carolina for a 15-yard run by outrunning the coverage and picking a straight lane once I came around end. Go State!

That leads me to a second point: Madden NFL players are very familiar with the gratuitous stumble play, whereby someone is hit from the side, and his momentum stops, he stumbles into a long and unrecoverable animation, and while ostensibly still on his feet and capable of recovering, he’s slowed enough that someone else from the defense comes in to finish the job easily, as if he should have been tackled at the point where he was hit.

It’s not necessarily the case in College Football 25. If you want to take a runner out of the play, you have to hit him square, because recoveries and continuation from anything other than a full wrap-up tackle are now much more viable under the new engine they have running — and much more of which will be revealed when we get to Madden NFL 25 later. But for the version of football that lends itself to the option run, this is going to become very important.

Of course, execution will depend on how well a player reads the defense, and the positions that commit to one outcome of the play, and how to switch to the other outcome once they do. I haven’t run a true triple-option play, much less drawn back to pass in it, since NCAA Football 14 more than a decade ago, simply because the NFL does not play that style of football.

College Football 25 picks up where NCAA 14 left off

College Football 25 will be mainly supported by two persistent modes familiar to players of the old NCAA series: Dynasty, which is the control-everything coach career, and Road to Glory, which is a single-player mode akin to Madden’s Superstar.

Players of the original NCAA Football series will find mostly everything intact with Dynasty, in terms of the ability to alter conference alignments before beginning a playthrough, as well as the “coaching carousel” journey through it, which attempts to simulate the real-life forces of coaches leaving their schools — whether because they’re just that good and get plucked by bigger programs, or they fail expectations and get canned by the athletics office.

The difference in College Football 25 is that coaches will have to manage the “transfer portal” as ones do in real life. This means keeping stars happy, or shopping for them in the open market. It will add an additional wrinkle to what was already a unique personnel management system — based on AI players choosing a team, rather than a team choosing them. Coaches will be obligated to make promises to star players to keep them happy; fail those promises — especially if it concerns playing time — and they are likely to leave.

Transferring schools will be available to players in Road to Glory, the single-player career mode where one builds a superstar and a narrative of achievements for him. The limiting factor there is “coach trust,” a concept borrowed from the defunct NCAA Football series. Coach Trust does a number of things, beginning with creating a “position battle” for starter at your role, against the AI. From there it opens up the playbook and the ability to call more plays from it, or audible to different ones at the line of scrimmage. Moving schools inevitably resets that Coach Trust meter, forcing players to work more to get back on the field.

Created players in Road To Glory will not go through a high school playoff preamble, as they did in NCAA Football 14. However, the TeamBuilder web-based tool that supported that part of the mode will return, allowing players to create FCS (formerly Division I-AA) teams, fictitious teams, and other teams, and bring them to the ranks of major college football.

What is ‘Campus IQ’?

College Football 25 goes forth under a fan service mission that strives to attend to all 134 universities who participate in the Football Bowl Subdivision of the NCAA’s 1-A classification — basically, every school in major football. Campus IQ is a philosophy, more than it is a system or a set of assets. Basically, if your school plays at the top flight of college football, you can expect to hear its fight song, see its traditions observed, and view your home stadium, at minimum.

From there, it gets a little more sophisticated. Some schools have special days, like Penn State’s white-outs covering both bowls of Beaver Stadium. Others coordinate home games by section, advising fans to wear alternating colors according to the sections where they sit. These will be reflected in the game, along with any alternate uniforms and helmets the teams wear for such games.

Campus IQ also manifests itself in the pregame ceremonies, such as Ralphie the Buffalo’s run-out (mentioned above) but also players at Florida and Boston College rubbing their schools’ totems before they take the field, or Clemson running down the hill after touching Howard’s Rock.

The College Football 25 development team took it as a special mission to introduce all of these deeply personal features, said Rob Jones, the game’s senior production director.

“If a team like Insomniac making Spider Man 2 can actually rebuild all New York City, and make you feel like you’re going through New York,” he said, “then why can’t we replicate every single school faithfully so that people feel like we know them, and that we care as much about their school as we care about our own, right?”

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Christian McLeod joined EA Sports as a designer for its college football game in 2011. Ben Haumiller, a producer on… Continue reading The bones of a dead NCAA Football series rise again with College Football 25
The post The bones of a dead NCAA Football series rise again with College Football 25 appeared first on ReadWrite.

Christian McLeod joined EA Sports as a designer for its college football game in 2011. Ben Haumiller, a producer on the old NCAA series, goes back even further, now in his 25th year with the studio and principal designer for the forthcoming EA Sports College Football 25.

Both of them survived Sept. 26, 2013, the day the old NCAA Football series was cancelled after 20 years. Electronic Arts had chosen to settle — at a $30 million cost — several lawsuits brought against collegiate sports licensors that had used athletes’ likenesses and images, if not their names, without permission. That meant the end of a 20-year-run for a death-and-taxes, ship-it-every-year licensed sports video game series, one of the most stable jobs any developer could hope for in an industry turbulent by nature.

That day, an ashen Cam Weber, EA Sports’ group president for American football, delivered the news in a meeting hall at the old EA Tiburon headquarters in Maitland, Fla. Some developers would find a lifeboat working on EA Sports’ Madden NFL series, but many others got the long table in an empty conference room, and a lonely last walk to the parking deck.

If only to keep up their courage, McLeod and Haumiller still held on to their work in the old NCAA series, as a token of faith that some day they’d get to work on it again.

“Ben and I almost had a pet project, on the side, where we had all of our old designs,” McLeod told me. “They were just in this repository that, every time we moved to new shared drives, we’d move them with us. Then we’d take them to Google Drive. It was just super important for us to hold onto that flame, just in case the game ever did come back, so we did have that jump start.

“We were obviously saddened, but I think we always believed that at some point, it would come back,” McLeod said, “so we had to just hang on to this.”

After landmark rulings in U.S. courts, and fundamental changes the NCAA was practically forced to accept with regard to its athletes’ rights, particularly the right to earn money from their own fame and athletic performance, “This” comes back July 19 as the reborn EA Sports College Football 25. It’s the heir to the first video game series that studio EA Tiburon (today EA Orlando) developed entirely for EA Sports.

As much as college football fans have pined for its return, as giddy as they have been at all the teasers and reveals, they should know the game’s developers have had an even greater, more spine-tingling, getting-the-band-back-together, heist-movie feeling returning to work on the greatest love of their professional lives.

“I’m a true believer,” said Haumiller, a guy who, as a rookie QA tester for EA, drove his car to New Orleans and slept in it there on the faith his Florida State Seminoles would win the national championship at the Sugar Bowl that year. (And they did.)

“I always knew this was coming back,” Haumiller said. “I didn’t know when, but I was gonna be prepared for it whenever it did. So I kept everything.”

Haumiller joked with me that he actually had to keep everything as his entire email history was subject to discovery in the ongoing lawsuits that eventually ensnared the old NCAA Football series.

But the old work has indeed proven useful. College Football 25 code, and visuals, are all rebuilt from scratch — there’s no way assets from two console generations ago would be serviceable on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. But concepts, spreadsheets, and some methodologies from the old game were still able to give developers, if not a head start, at least a nudge off the line to building the kind of game they could only dream of when it was canceled a decade ago.

“I can pull up final rankings of stadiums [by home field advantage] from every game that I’ve worked on since we’ve had that feature in,” Haumiller said. And indeed that feature is in College Football 25, where tougher home fields will cause tremendous problems for visiting teams and younger players unless they stick to a rigid script. That disruptive feature dates to NCAA 05, by the way.

“There was code that was helpful, but nothing was copy-and-paste,” McLeod said. “We knew we would have to rebuild. But I know we had a lot of systems in Dynasty [mode] that we knew what the logic needed to be. So we’re almost getting a head start and a jump start at some of our designs, which was extremely exciting. And then we brought in some ringers, like [programming engineer] Felix Rivero, who had worked on Dynasty in the past, and they were able to, without missing a beat, go and code that into the new codebase, in the new engine, but using a lot of that same logic that we had in the past.”

“I think you get the idea, oh, ’Let’s do everything new,’ right?’” Haumiller said, considering that College Football’s development stretches back to 2020. “But let’s save ourselves the trouble, and keep some of these things that we can that are good. We also have a mixture of a team. We have guys from the old game, and brand new people of well, and a number of people who had left the company and came back to work on this game.”

For Haumiller, even though developing the multi-season Dynasty — the franchise’s signature, multi-season, build-a-champion-from-nothing mode — was a rebuilt from the ground project, the sense of deja vu crept in the longer the features baked.

College Football 25 is ‘an old friend coming back’

“Being back in Dynasty again, it was deja vu of like, building out schedules, and all these other sorts of pieces, like how quickly the muscle memory came back,” he said, “of all the things you did for a decade, to recreate this because there’s so much new in this game. But we also wanted to make sure that it felt like an old friend coming back in a way.”

College Football 25 is, for McLeod, Haumiller, and their colleagues, another dream come true in that it’s been a chance to build a sports video game on a true multi-year development cycle, instead of against the breakneck year-to-year pace that most licensed sports video games must rigidly follow.

“You look at NCAA 14, and NCAA 14 was a culmination of 20 years of design, and passion, and love, and we were able to recreate much of that in, you know, just over two years, which is what we’re pretty excited about,” McLeod said. But, “as we were green lighting this project, we did research, and the world has changed in the last 10 years. The way people consume college football — college football has grown in the last 10 years. And it was important for us to provide an experience that harkens back to what was there in the past, but we also wanted to modernize a lot.

“So, we could always use more time, but I think this was the perfect amount of time to deliver what we wanted,” McLeod said.

Featured image via EA Sports

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