EA Sports Going the Sim Route?
Gamers may not have a choice in who makes their NFL games in the wake of Electronic Arts’ five-year exclusive rights deal with the league, but they still have a choice when it comes to the style of gameplay. The publisher is already well known for its traditional simluation football Madden series and the arcade-styled Street franchise, but today the company introduced a third pillar for release next year: the strategy-centric sim NFL Head Coach (working title).
Departing from the traditional sports sim game in a couple key ways, NFL Head Coach will not only bring 3D graphics to the traditionally static and spreadsheet-based genre, but also it will also appear on consoles. EA has announced that Head Coach is in development at EA Tiburon for a spring 2006 release on the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC. It also appears that EA is making a conscious effort to make the game more accessible than the average sports strategy title, beyond just giving it a coat of polygonal paint and releasing it for new platforms.
“NFL Head Coach is an entirely new football experience that every level of football gamer can play,” according to EA Tiburon executive producer Dale Jackson. “It provides the strategy that the hardcore fan will demand, but with very easy-to-use controls and assistance for more-casual fans. Football will no longer be intimidating for the casual user.”
Players will take control of every facet of the coaching position, pushing pencils, running practices, and donning the headset each Sunday. From developing and executing a team strategy to building a winning organization year in and year out, players will have to excel at it all to become a coaching legend.
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Am I allowed to be skeptical about this? The fact that it’s also going to be on the consoles scares me into thinking it will have a console GUI and for a deep sim…that ain’t gonna work. We’ll see.
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:21 pm
“Am I allowed to be skeptical about this?”
You are kidding, aren’t you? How could anyone be skeptical about an EASports game?
December 24th, 2005 at 1:10 am
I’ve been looking forward to NFL Head Coach for a while now, actually.
December 24th, 2005 at 5:40 am
SI Games are already developing a port of their Football Manager 2006 for the xbox 360, and if anyone can do sims, it’s them.
I would have thought that anything without a HD is going to struggle, though.