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EA Teambuilder Massive Upgrades Planned...


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...for the cancelled College Football 15 game. From Kotaku:

What was going on with NCAA/College Football 15? Howell says he and Luhr had, for a time, been working for a few years on a customization suite for the series that he believes would have gotten the greenlight in the coming title, which was to be developed for both the current console generation and the next generation. Howell, who speaks admiringly of Minecraft, Terraria and other games with a heavy modification culture, said the idea was to turn the game over to fans, on the faith they know best what they most enjoy.

Not only would that have entailed an overhaul of the existing customizerTeamBuilder, which deals with single teamsthe vision extended to things like stadium construction, layer editing for uniforms, and even "D&D" like settings within the game's dynasty mode. For example, creating stories and occurrences elsewhere in the season, like a backup coming out of nowhere when a star performer goes down to injury, or a prestige team suffering a losing streak that upends the rankings at the end of the year.

It's unclear how much of this was actually being prepared for next year's game. Howell cautioned that the customization was at a big picture stage, though he and Luhr had design documents dozens of pages thick laying out these features. If College Football 15 could have shipped, with them, the depth of customizationand the ability to share uniforms, complex logos and user-built stadiacould have soothed the sting of conferences like the Pac-12 and Big Ten pulling their trademarks from the series, and a big programbelieved to be Ohio Stateexiting it altogether.

"I was talking to my mom a week ago saying, 'I cannot tell you how excited I am for this game,'" Howell said. "I've always known, and believed, that users now are creating things that you (as a designer) could never possibly imagine. So we need to put the game in their hands. We're not big enough to give them everything they want. If we gave them the actual parts of our game and its assetsyeah, it's a huge liability that someone could make something better than we're making. But that's not the point of it."

Howell said the customization focus, conceivably a lifeboat in a future where no NCAA school licenses its appearance in a video game, was not ramped up as a response to the litigation. "This was started way before any of these lawsuits," he said. Still, there's always been an idealist streak in his conversations with me, and I question whether EA Sports itself would be willing to give such control over to its fans. Where's the money in that?

"There are actually pricing models that worked with this," he said, "I'm not a huge fan of microtransactions, but there are. Look at Forza, or any game that allows user-generated content. Sometimes it's fun to pay a buck for somethingor to pay a guy who made something amazing, to give him credit."

Sounds like it would have been a uniform lover's wet dream... And it makes sense to have allowed fans to "create" the teams they no longer had the rights to use. What a shame it will never see the light of day.

Full article: http://kotaku.com/a-blindside-hit-takes-down-an-ncaa-football-team-rallyi-1429336606/@tcraggs22

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Just a thought, why doesn't EA create a football game based solely on created teams? Let fans create all the teams they want, upload to a server similar to Forza, and EA would never have to deal with the ridiculous NCAA.

Exactly - just give us the tools and framework. There is a huge community that spans numerous forums that could make a generic college football release waaaaayyyy more exciting than EA ever could have. No idea if it'd even be possible now.

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I absolutely love the idea! However, how large is the market for those that want to create custom teams? I mean most individuals get college games to play with teams like Alabama and Oregon. And they want the table to be already set with the rest of the 125 D-1 teams. I just don't see it appealing to the mainstream fans of NCAA.

Although, I hope I'm wrong.

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Just a thought, why doesn't EA create a football game based solely on created teams? Let fans create all the teams they want, upload to a server similar to Forza, and EA would never have to deal with the ridiculous NCAA.

Exactly - just give us the tools and framework. There is a huge community that spans numerous forums that could make a generic college football release waaaaayyyy more exciting than EA ever could have. No idea if it'd even be possible now.

It seems like that may actually happen in the near future as there is likely enough demand and talent out there to get something up and running thats community supported? Wasn't there an unlicensed game that was released several years ago called backbreaker or something? From what I remember the technical back end was pretty good but it lacked the nfl aspect...seems like the timing may be even better now for a real open environment football game.

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Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a bunch of heresay BS that the developers are putting out after the fact to make the NCAA look even worse. I don't think it's necessarily a tactic to pressure the NCAA exactly, but I'd put good money on it that if NCAA 15 did come out next year, it'd be almost no different from NCAA 14.

It's way too easy to blow smoke when you don't need the proof to back it up.

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On 11/19/2012 at 7:23 PM, oldschoolvikings said:
She’s still half convinced “Chris Creamer” is a porn site.)
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Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a bunch of heresay BS that the developers are putting out after the fact to make the NCAA look even worse. I don't think it's necessarily a tactic to pressure the NCAA exactly, but I'd put good money on it that if NCAA 15 did come out next year, it'd be almost no different from NCAA 14.

It's way too easy to blow smoke when you don't need the proof to back it up.

This is exactly what I was thinking. Knowing EA's track record (and the near disaster that was today's ESPN Madden 25 MFN Simulation), I doubt this was ever a real possibility for NCAA 15

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So, does that mean there's gonna be no NCAA football video game at all for sure next year? Hope they'll open it up to developers and we'll get one someday...I was REALLY looking forward to doing Dynasty mode as Charlotte, Appalachian State and Georgia Southern...

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Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a bunch of heresay BS that the developers are putting out after the fact to make the NCAA look even worse. I don't think it's necessarily a tactic to pressure the NCAA exactly, but I'd put good money on it that if NCAA 15 did come out next year, it'd be almost no different from NCAA 14.

It's way too easy to blow smoke when you don't need the proof to back it up.

Here's why I buy it:

1) One, he was fired. So why would he feel the need to protect EA by lying and saying future games had a direction? Everyone knows that the series was cancelled because of outside circumstances and it had nothing to do with the game itself, so it wasn't like he was fired for incompetence... So why make it up and make the company that fired you look better?

2) Because they were losing licenses left and right, EA had to come up with some kind of hook to get people to buy the game... Plus, EA is smart. They know what goes on at places like Operation Sports where they "fix" the generic NCAA rosters. My guess is that EA would have been like "Oh, this COLLEGE FOOTBALL game is a huge engine with a blank canvas... Fill it in however you think best... WINK WINK, NUDGE NUDGE."

The article even says that is unlikely that all the features would have been available in that first game, but the goal would have been 2-3 years from now.

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Frankly, I think this is nothing more than a bunch of heresay BS that the developers are putting out after the fact to make the NCAA look even worse. I don't think it's necessarily a tactic to pressure the NCAA exactly, but I'd put good money on it that if NCAA 15 did come out next year, it'd be almost no different from NCAA 14.

It's way too easy to blow smoke when you don't need the proof to back it up.

Yep, guys saying anything and everything to try and justify their jobs to a potential employer.
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I'd like to see a game with Colin Cowherd's Meatloaf State on it (from his days on SportsNation. He had a suit with that on the sleeves and would wear it when they were on ESPNU. My, how that show has took a turn down the steepest of hills)

@loganaweaver - Twitter / @loganaweaver - Instagram / Nike Vapor Untouchable Football Template  / Logan's Logos

 

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I absolutely love the idea! However, how large is the market for those that want to create custom teams? I mean most individuals get college games to play with teams like Alabama and Oregon. And they want the table to be already set with the rest of the 125 D-1 teams. I just don't see it appealing to the mainstream fans of NCAA.

Although, I hope I'm wrong.

You'd be surprised the amount of creative people out there. I use Forza as an example because users can design car decals using just basic shapes like triangles and circles. Some of the liveries are almost photo-realistic and can be downloaded by anyone. It's amazing what people can do. I think people would have no problem creating teams, but downloading them all (branding, rosters, stadiums) does seem like a tall order.

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I guess this means now that since they won't be producing a college football game, I'm 99% sure that we'll never see a college basketball game either. I used to play the hell out of those games. I always thought that NCAA Basketball 10 would've been 100 times better if it would've had a teambuilder type system like the college football games did.

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