And The New Patch Will BE? (Read 82 times)

[M3 Commish]

This was found over at OS ... coming from the lead designer himself.

An engineer and myself started investigating our first "feature" to patch, and the winner is....

....drum roll....








Accelerated Clock!


(I can just picture mdgoalie37 falling out of his chair right now)



*DISCLAIMER* This in no way means we will get to this feature...there's a lot of stuff we have to figure out, and the patch process takes like 6 weeks to get done anyway, but we wanted everyone to know we are at least trying. This feature seemed to be the least risky (and the most wanted) while still allowing us to test feature additions (new addition to a screen, new in-game functionality).

I hope to have a more in-depth update next week on how feasible it's going to end up being.

Ian Cummings

This is awesome! I think Rob Fetter who wrote up the most recent article on the Top 3 Features NOT in Madden NFL 09, he said, "Accelerated clock allows you to play a ball control style of play, which for the most part isn’t seen much in Madden. Sure you could watch the clock run down every play you have the ball, but that’s so much time and effort wasted that it would make it impossible to enjoy the games. For teams that have great defenses and not much offense it’s key for you to keep an opposing team’s offense off the field. If you’re the Bears playing against the Colts you want Manning off the field for as long as possible. By adding an accelerated clock it allows this to happen in a realistic way. You can run the ball in an attempt to keep the clock moving and save your defense from being shredded by an untouchable offense. It helps to give teams fewer possessions, and give great defenses a much better chance to win games just as we see in the NFL."

EA is definitely showing some concern over what 'we the gamers' want in our games. Nice to see.

[Headhunter316]

nice

[Fetter21]

That's awesome to hear that EA is actually listening to people this year. I know this isn't the first thing that they've fixed because of people making legitimate cases or pointing out errors, so hats off to EA for stepping up and giving gamers what they want.

For people confused on what Accelerated clock is here's a brief explanation.

Accelerated clock affects the game because when you are passing the ball more the clock is stopped because of incomplete passes, if you're a team that has a great defense most of the time you run the ball more to keep the clock running and to give the other teams offense less chances to score. What accelerated clock does is it runs the play clock down to 20 seconds every time you are breaking the huddle, so much like the NFL you take a little while to call the play vs. in a game where you might call it in 5 seconds, so it lets another 15 seconds run off the play clock, and game clock so that you can more realistically simulate the actual game experience and speed of play.

[xz PRoD1gY zx]

Fetter thank you for explaining it, I was so confused on exactly what it was.. lol Seems like a nice feature can't wait for this.

[Molarman]

That certainly works for me, because I never have any offense to speak of, lol. I definitely rely on ball control to keep games close.