EA Sports’ college football franchise “NCAA Football” has never really been an easy game to fairly assess.
Each year, it makes a little bit of progress. The game gets better with each new title. But in the big picture, a lot of key things were missing from last year’s game.
You’ll find them in this year’s newest edition, “NCAA Football 12.”
Not much needed to change from a gameplay standpoint — “NCAA Football 11” was as good as it gets and made the title one you could easily keep playing for a whole year without losing much interest.
But tweaks to gameplay aren’t what will keep college football fans addicted to “NCAA Football 12.” For the first time in a few years, EA Sports brought some much-needed innovation to its dynasty and “Road to Glory” career modes.
The biggest change for dynasty mode is the addition of offensive and defensive coordinators. You can now start off as an OC or DC at a non-BCS school and work your way up to a big-time coaching gig.
You could take over as a real coach, too, and see what head coaching jobs you can land as Carl Pelini. I’m currently working to revive Shawn Watson’s career as the offensive coordinator at Louisville.
What makes such advancement possible is a well-done offseason coaching carousel. Suppose Bo leaves Nebraska for Ohio State — calm down, it’s just a hypothetical — and the Huskers need a new head coach.
Nebraska would then consider up to six candidates. If Kansas coach Turner Gill lands the job, then Kansas would have to fill its opening. The carousel keeps spinning until all the jobs are taken, and the effects are far-reaching.
The coaching changes make a difference, too. If Georgia Tech’s offensive coordinator gets a head coaching job elsewhere, he’s bringing his wishbone option attack with him. Same goes for defensive coordinators and their preference for 4-3 or 3-4 schemes.
Another crucial add-in for this year’s game was an ability to fully customize conferences, and “NCAA 12” offers that in dynasty mode. Now gamers can match whatever crazy changes happen in real life. You can create 16-team super conferences, easily bump the Big 12 back to 12 teams or even rename the Legends and Leaders divisions.
If you’re easily bored by dynasties, you really didn’t have many other long-term options in previous games. The next-gen version of “Road to Glory” got stale quickly and went completely unchanged in last year’s game.
But it finally got a facelift in “NCAA 12.” You can now play 12-game high school seasons in addition to your state playoffs. You can import TeamBuilder uniforms to recreate your high school and its stadium.
You can play both sides of the ball in high school, and you actually get recruited and have to make tough choices on which programs you prefer. Scholarship offers are earned, not handed out freely.
Once you do get to school, your improvement isn’t based on dumb decisions like hitting the books vs. weight lifting. It’s more along the lines of the “NBA 2K” series, in which you earn points and use them to upgrade your ratings.
Your player also moves up from being the freshman backup to the team captain as the years go by, and you get more involved in playcalling as your coach’s trust in your player increases. Touches like this are exactly what the career mode has been missing for too many years.
As for the gameplay, offense was just a tad too easy in last year’s game. That certainly isn’t the case in “NCAA 12.”
Zone defense has been perfected this year, making passing over the middle tougher than ever, and tackling is smoother and more realistic than in past years.
That’s frustrating at first, but hang in there. A lot of your favorite plays from last year’s game may have been rendered ineffective, but it’s ultimately a major improvement. Offensive playcalling is finally a chess match, and even average defenses are no longer punching bags.
Are there problems with the game? Yes, of course.
The zone defense is at times too good, and the best teams in the game have frustratingly suffocating defensive lines. The game demands a little adjustment time, to be sure, but it’s a much-needed challenge.
Are Nebraska’s rosters in the game maddeningly inaccurate? Most definitely. Too many departed players like Cody Green and Dontrayevous Robinson were left on the team while key freshmen like Bubba Starling, Todd Peat and Ameer Abdullah were left out.
The in-game commentary from Brad Nessler and Kirk Herbstreit is as boring as usual, though game presentation did get a nice boost with more authentic team entrances and the addition of life-like animals for Georgia, Texas, LSU, Colorado and other schools.
There’s small glitches in the gameplay, but most of them – like quarterback fumbles on sacks being ruled incompletions – will already be fixed with a downloadable update that comes out Tuesday.
EA has for the most part essentially made its “NCAA Football” games hard to nit-pick. Frequent game and gameplay tuning updates in the coming months will take care of its minor flaws just as was the case last year.
I tried to find mistakes like those when playing over the past week. It wasn’t easy. The gameplay is very good. The dynasty and career mode options are impressive. The game’s flaws are few and far between.
Add it all together and it’s clear that this year — finally — “NCAA Football 12” took a serious leap forward.