First time player/demo-er here, with some questions/feedback. I recently played the demo of DDS CFB and CBB. I'm a bigger college football fan, so I'd prefer to buy that one. But right now there are aspects of the game that I'm not quite grasping. Hope yall can help.
Where I’m coming from: Maybe it’d be helpful, as a new person, to provide my perspective. I started playing EA’s NCAA game back in 01 and played various iterations until around 2012. Around 2017, I picked up OOTP and loved it, playing pretty consistently until the past year. Grew up a huge baseball fan, since 00 been much more of a big college football fan. Also played a lot Simcity, as I am a sim-game fan as well.
I played the demo last week and really liked it. I thought the recruiting was solid and realistic. Started a season as UGA and got back to back top 5 classes. Played another season as NC State and my class was ranked around 25th. All very reasonable, and fun to put together.
My biggest challenge was the week-to-week gameplay and game planning. I just wasn’t sure what the various gameplay adjustments would do. I think I was expecting something like a manual like OOTP has. I found a couple guides and some videos (the recruiting walk-through was very helpful), but not much that helped me understand the pros and cons of various strategies. For example, when selecting Man vs Zone on the gameplay screen, I am not sure what the benefits are of each, or if my players are better at one or the other. If they have high skill, does that translate to high coverage abilities for both man and zone? What about ‘Align Man Coverage’? What does that do for me? I get that it affects where they line up, but what are the pros and cons of doing that? I like the tooltips for some of the other settings and think there needs to be more, or a more robust docs or manual section online. That’s one of the best features of OOTP. I remember poring through their manual before I even bought the game. As a fellow developer, I can definitely understand that docs aren't the fun part to produce, but I think it would be very helpful.
I also feel like game-planning and game reports/grades need more detail. I can’t remember exactly, because I played some sandbox and some normal, how much info you get on a team before you play them, but it felt like it wasn’t enough. IIRC, in normal, non-sandbox, gameplay, I could only look at their roster and see their season stats, and whatever little info was provided in the preview email. IRL, teams would be able to at least view the depth chart of a team, and would likely also have info about what kind of offense and defense they run. DDS: CBB has nice pregame reports. It seems like game-planning appropriately is a big deal, so we need more info with which to do it.
Similarly, it feels like there isn’t enough post-game feedback, but this is generally more difficult in football anyway. You can’t just look at a box score IRL to see who won or lost; its all about game flow, key plays, situations. So does that info exist and I just need to be better directed to it? Or does it need to be added? I ask because UGA going 7-5 seems unrealistic. I think my offensive balance/focus was off, and paid more attention to game planning in yr 2, and improved to 9-3, but still, UGA is a top 5 team with top 5 prestige; 9-3 is a disappointing year. Looking at my time with NC State, I think we went 7-5 in my first year, then dropped to 4-8 with our only wins over pretty sorry teams (after a solid recruiting class where we plugged some major gaps). We lost to anyone worth a darn. I look back at some of the grades and notice that our effort in most games was a C. My QB’s effort was also a C most games. Should this have been a focus area for me, focusing on improving effort? I’m not asking the devs to give away the algorithm so that everyone goes 12-0, but I do think more guidance can be offered. I have a hard time envisioning any world in which UGA (or Bama, or OSU, etc.), goes 7-5 right now. CPU-controlled top teams have realistic results so there is clearly something I’m doing wrong.
Also, on some more minor aspects, I wasn't sure where to view which players actually decided to Transfer to my school? I also find the ratings progression UI difficult to read. Could it also be shown in a table format? I didn't really understand why some of my players got such steep drop-offs after training, but I didn't get to tinker with it too much in the demo.
I think that's enough for now. Per /u/Ruthlan23's recent post, success is definitely possible and I want to achieve it. I think I just need a nudge (or two)
Thanks all!