AI AI AI
Just to follow up on my Franchise thoughts from yesterday. Bill Harris and I are perhaps two of the biggest ‘franchise’ guys around in that …we actually play them. Bill has tested franchise modes in games for years to an incredible degree and I guess I have never understood why a company didn’t just hire someone like Bill –someone to come in and simply do nothing but test and help design a game’s franchise mode. One guy. That’s all you’d need. Someone with a load of experience who can spot stupid shit within ten minutes. This isn’t small details here folks.
I recall when 3DO tried to hire “DangerZ”, creator of that ultimate High Heat editor. So that idea isn’t too far fetched. You NEED someone with a critical eye to see things…and make sure that they get fixed. That is, if in fact franchise modes are worth fixing.
It all goes back to player progression. Without this…any franchise mode is doomed to failure or at best mediocrity. You have to have players age, progress, decline, and retire within the realm of possibility otherwise the whole thing just breaks down. You need sleeper draft picks — the 4th round pick that ends up an All Pro. The 3-Star Recruit that ends up being an All-American (AJ Hawk) — even the 2-star recruit that does the same (Pats RB Maroney was a 2 star throwaway recruit who went to Minnesota. Could that EVERhappen in NCAA 08?). Conversely, you need the 5 star recruit that ends up busting and not living up to the hype — the Buckeyes have a kid, a great kid who everyone on the team loves, who was a 5-star can’t miss prospect who is now a Junior and only plays on special teams. It happens. You need to have kids fail to meet expectations. It’s this level of variety that makes franchise/dynasty modes fun. It’s the WHOLE POINT.
You also need to ditch every piece of design inside a franchise mode that isn’t fun and is just feature creep tedium. That includes staff hirings, assigning a friggin practice schedule, training modes, yadda yadda. Don’t make these things overly complicated. Every “Owner mode” needs to be canned. Stat.
But you also need a sharp AI both on the field and off, particularly draft AI which is still horrendous in most games (Madden being the King of Crap here.) Now, a lot of people equate AI to players using smart behavior. That’s part of it, but the area of AI programming that continues to go ignored — game planning.
Playing games against the AI in most games is still staggeringly predictable because the teams always play the same. I don’t mean teams playing to their “style.” That’s a great thing and one of the best features in NBA 2K8, but PLANNING. The AI needs to start looking at personnel. It needs to see that I have no running game but an All Pro level WR and must try and take away my biggest threat.
It needs to see that my basketball team relies almost 100% on low post play, and plan accordingly. It needs to double team. It needs to put 8 men in the box if it knows it has no run defense to speak of and I’m going to hit them with with an All American tailback. It needs to run a zone when it knows I have no perimeter game. It needs to see who my weak defenders are and expose them mercilessly.
“If you can run the ball you can bring up the safety and it opens up the passing game.”
“If you can make them fear the three pointer you can open up the middle by extending the defense.”
Basic stuff. Stuff you learn in middle school. I still don’t see this in today’s games when playing against the AI. And until the AI starts to plan around its players and plan against mine, we’re still going to be playing predictable games. I think it’s time the games took that next step.
October 19th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Good points about the game planning AI. I haven’t played enough to know if it really works. (I mean how can you tell for sure?) But supposedly NHL 08 does this. There’s an AI learning slider that when you start a season supposedly not only reflects the AI’s ability to adapt to what you do in-game, but what you do across several games. My inclination is that this slider does in fact work, as I’ve seen a lot of people who play on Pro note that there season starts off very easy, but gets progressively more difficult as the AI appears to adapt to their play style. (Damn, but NHL 08 is a great game this year.)
October 19th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Regarding the busts and gems..totally agree with you and Bowl Bound does a good job of this over at Grey Dog Software. Arlie did a fantastic job coding it in.
October 19th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
why don’t they?
easy - no one plays franchise - ok maybe 3% of their sales are to franchise guys - granted a bunch of people clamor for franchse, like me, but then never play more than a season or two. if you think about it, to have franchise work and have it matter, you’re going to have to play more than 2 seasons (for the most part) so you get multiple offseasons. playing 3 plus seasons on a console game requires a lot of time unless you’re a simmer. but if you’re a simmer, you probably shouldn’t be looking towards console games to get your fix. I wouldn’t recommend 2k7 or the show for simmers - they should be all over ootp (unless of course they want real players), or pure sim, mogul etc. But I sure would recommend it to single season or 2 season players.
so why spend money on resources for something that so few people are going to use?
October 19th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
That’s the question I’m asking.
How many people play it? If it’s so few, why is it there at all? They DO put a fair amount of resources into these modes, though. Is that all $$ wasted?
So — if they are going to add that stuff, and it has been in these games now for going on 8 years, where is the pride in the work to fix the stuff that’s broken? I recall Neil talking to us on the old blog about how he worked his ass off to get player progression down in MLB 2K5 when he worked on that game for Kush (I think it was 2k5). Fixing this stuff would not require a full team of programmers.
NCAA ‘08 fixed its progression model, which Bill Harris proved this year. NCAA w/o a Dyntasy mode would go over like a lead balloon, right?
Are college games the exception to the rule?
Are football games the exception since it’s only a 16 game schedule? Is it less important in a baseball game? What about the people who love say..the Reds. What’s the reason to buy a baseball game right now other than trying to build the Reds into a winner?
I don’t have the answers here. Just posing the questions. I wish I knew how many people played franchise modes and for those that do how many play them for 2+ seasons, and if they DON”T it is because they get bored with the game..or because franchise modes in these games sorta…suck?
October 19th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
i think you’re right that college is the exception - it’s the only game i’ve ever played more than 2 seasons in - not sure why that’s the case though.
i haven’t played franchise in madden because, quite frankly, it’s depressing as hell to take over any Browns team over the past 10 years.
October 19th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
I can so relate to that
October 19th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
There are a few reasons I can think of why franchise modes suck.
One is that EA doesn’t hire people specifically for working on franchise mode, that I have seen. They hire more general-purpose people and shift them to franchise mode as needed. So you might have a guy that’s good at organizing menus but isn’t so great at coming up with formulae for player progression.
Next, refinement doesn’t sell. Very few people (percentagewise) will notice the difference between a mediocre and an excellent franchise mode, and even fewer will change their purchase decision based on a nebulous “our franchise mode is better this year.” On the other hand, a list of feature additions is more likely to sell people on the game (hence the feature creep). Refinement doesn’t review well, either. 90% of reviewers won’t notice AI and franchise mode improvements (or flaws, for that matter), but they certainly will complain if they feel the game hasn’t added enough new features.
In addition, franchise mode is simply not a high priority for most consumers (or reviewers) and therefore gets short shrift in terms of resources.
Finally, there is not much time to perform the iteration and testing necessary to balance player progression, drafting, etc. Not only is the development cycle short, but a great of the time, the game is broken in some way that prevents those systems from working well enough to allow balancing. With ESPN MLB (I didn’t work with Kush or do anything on future 2k sports games), I had the benefit of working on the previous franchise mode iterations and knew that we would need new tools to test and balance these systems rapidly. Having these tools, which allowed me to do things like simulating 20 seasons’ worth of progression and aging in a matter of seconds, were vital in coming up with a decent balance. I am guessing that EA hasn’t created anything like that.
To sum up, there really isn’t any reason for EA to make better franchise modes because it would not improve either their reviews or their sales. As a result, they don’t hire the right people; they don’t put a lot of time/money into it; they don’t set their quality bar high; and what work they do put into it is focused on “back of the box” features that sound cool on paper but aren’t actually fun.
October 19th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
Thanks Neil.
What happened there? Why was that your Swan Song?