Launch Day Update Posted by
Ben Haumiller at 15:28PM on Friday, July, 08, 2011
Hey Everyone, Ben Haumiller here and since we are just a few short days away from Tuesday’s launch I wanted to give you the low down on the launch day title update as well as give an update on the new Week Advance Anywhere feature for Online Dynasty. The update has already been approved by both Sony and Microsoft so the first time you pop that disc in the tray you will get the prompt for the update as long as you are online.
Before I get into the details of what’s in the update, I first wanted to talk about why an update is available on launch day. With the timing of the development cycles for NCAA and Madden we always reach a deadline where we can no longer take updates from the central gameplay team. Once we reach that point our focus is 100% on getting the game ready to submit to Sony and Microsoft so that we can meet our street date and get the game on the shelves. While all of this is going on the gameplay guys are still hard at work as they are driving towards Madden’s deadline. A lot of our launch day update is comprised of the tuning and bug fixing that was done after our cutoff date. This allows us to provide you with a gameplay experience that has received an extended development cycle as we are able to reap the benefits of Madden’s later release date.
Also, the feedback we received from you in the community based on your impressions when playing the demo played a part in determining what made it into this update. A number of issues that were brought up through the demo are addressed in this update, and there are others we are continuing to look into for future updates.
Now that I’ve had a chance to talk about why the update exists, let’s get to the goods and go into what’s in that update:
The first update I’ll mention is 100% the result of you in the community making your voice heard about a feature you wanted to see added. With the update you will now be able to edit rosters from inside of Dynasty mode. Plus, in Online Dynasty the commissioner will have the ability to edit rosters. It’s almost unheard of to have a new feature added during a title update as we tend to focus more on updates to what already exists in the game, but we wanted to take the opportunity to show you guys our appreciation for being such a dedicated, hardcore fan base.
In Dynasty mode, many of you expressed frustration over CPU controlled teams over signing players at certain positions in future years. This is an issue we fixed early in the cycle for NCAA Football 12, but as can sometimes be the case in software development, a fix to one bug can introduce a bug or revert a fix somewhere else. Unfortunately that was the case with this issue as we reached the end of the development cycle. In this update, position maximum caps have been instituted to prevent the CPU from being able to over sign at a position.
Fixing exploits and issues that can cause one person to grieve another in an online game are major things we look to address in updates. We were able to identify a number of those issues and include them in this update. Here are the exploits and the potential online grieve we have addressed:
- Fixed an exploit involving manual direction changes for receivers that was allowing for “jetpack catches
