ootball fandom reached its off-season fever pitch this past weekend during the NFL draft, and EA Sports added to the festivities with an event unveiling NCAA Football 08. Last year marked the coming out party for the uber-popular football franchise on a next-gen platform. While the Xbox 360 version scored well, it wasn’t as well received as its feature-rich, current-gen cousins. The culprit was easy to spot—many of the game modes that made NCAA Football 07 great on the Xbox and PS2 were blatantly left out of the Xbox 360 title. This year, EA hopes to correct this problem for good.
“We realize that many people skipped the next-gen version of the game in favor of the current-gen games,” says Ian Cummings, gameplay producer for NCAA Football 08. “This year, our goal is to win over those current-gen fans.”
NCAA Football 08 won’t accomplish this with a bevy of new gameplay features or drastically enhanced graphics. Instead, the development team is focused on revising the little things that made the next-gen gameplay feel stale. The new dynamic controls promise to put you in command of your players at all times; no longer will you suffer the whims of the animation system. EA Tiburon has developed a new branching animation system that gives the players more responsiveness. Perhaps most important is the new sideline awareness, which will prevent receivers from making poor decisions while catching the ball along the sidelines. For the past few years we’ve all watched our tailback helplessly spin out of bounds; hopefully playing at the mercy of lengthy animations will now be a thing of the past.
To improve the running system, EA Tiburon borrowed some technology from the FIFA franchise, which offers much more control than the clumsy old NCAA and Madden systems. Now players pin their feet to the ground to shift their body weight, redirecting their motion at the turn of a dime. The result is more responsive running backs and wide receivers. This is especially noticeable after the catch on hooks and slants. No longer can cornerbacks simply engulf your receiver; with a quick twitch of your left analog stick you can avoid the defender and break toward open field.
Other major on-field innovations include gang tackling, mid-air collisions, the re-introduction of hurdling, and double-team blocking. In fact, the entire blocking system has been rebuilt to create more realistic gameplay in the trenches. The Hit Stick has also received an upgrade, as it now allows you to choose which kind of tackle you wish to make. If you want to clothesline a shifty runner, aim the right analog stick in the direction of the player and press it high. If it makes more sense to tackle a bruising runner at his legs, you can aim downward to go low.
The build we played was in its Alpha stage, so the game had its fair share of hindrances, most notably an overabundance of fumbles, dropped passes, chugging animations, and system crashes. The jerky animations at the beginning and end of each play made it hard for us to judge the highly-touted 60 frames per second upgrade, so we will reserve judgment until we see a more stable build.
Fans of the create-a-school mode will be disappointed by its exclusion, but the Campus Legend mode makes its next-gen debut. You will start off as a high-school phenom playing in the state championship game. Lead your team to victory with a legendary performance and you will be rewarded with tenders from many powerhouse schools. EA wouldn’t reveal any details about the dynasty or online modes, but look for more information as we move closer to campus kickoff in mid July.