Upcoming NCAA Football 10 Online Dynasties

Last year we had a successful online dynasty which was very enjoyable and allowed me to post occasional updates to the site on its progress. That will happen again this year but with more availability because there will be multiple ongoing site related dynasties. Here are the details on them and how to sign-up if you are interested in participating.

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Teambuilder Hits 100K

EA Sports announced today that over 100,000 teams have been created on the Teambuilder website for NCAA Football 10. Currently I’m working on my Transformers themed team and the community based Pastapadre Ninjas have already taken shape. I just recently started playing around with it and was surprised by how user-friendly the process is while still offering a great amount of options and depth.

From a business standpoint Teambuilder is likely to be a huge success and this milestone is a sign of that. Consumers who become invested in the game from creating teams are almost certainly going to buy NCAA. It provides a lot to look forward to for not only those who have made their own but also for the ability to download ones created by others. In a rough build-up to the NCAA release Teambuilder has been and looks to continue to be the bright spot.

Road to Glory Mode Detailed

Today brings the raising of the embargo on the Road to Glory mode in NCAA Football 10. There will likely be media previews out on it later today. Until now all we’ve known about the mode is that it represents a revamped Campus Legend with the addition of Erin Andrews. EA has now released their official description of the mode and a video about it which you can watch here.

The new Road to Glory mode allows you to choose a position, embark on a college career and then reflect on your greatest moments through video presentations presented by Andrews. For the first time ever, your actual in-game highlights will be featured in these broadcast-style presentations. Plus, an all-new, completely redesigned 3-D dorm room prominently displays triumphant moments through photos, trophies, NCAA Football news and more. New online leaderboards allow you to compare your legend versus every other legend across the nation. The comparison of each position can be sorted by everyone who is playing that particular position with the same team, the same conference or can be compared across all NCAA teams.

I used to play a lot of Campus Legend mode until the last two years where it has gone largely untouched. It is difficult to say if the new presentation and additions will be enough given there were other underlying issues with the mode that needed to be addressed as well.

Introducing the Pastapadre Ninjas

After a few days of voting it is time to declare the winner of the NCAA Football 10 Teambuilder community team creation. Kyhadley’s Ninjas jumped out of the gate and the others never were able to challenge in the voting. Kyhadley will be receiving a copy of NCAA 10 and I will be awarding some of the community who put a lot of time into making teams as well. Masta Solidus, MannyBeltre, and LVradio will get a copy of the game too. Thanks to everyone who made the effort of creating a potential Pastapadre team!

Look for the team to download when the game is released by searching the name hadpats9. The roster is made up of forum community members. After downloading you’ll be able to edit the team as desired. This is the team that will be used by myself in the community website online dynasty! Continue on to see the uniforms, field and current roster.

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Madden 10 Intro Video

Returning from last year is the Gamestop weekly blog for Madden 10 which apparently will offer a new posting each Monday until release. At this point it is uncertain whether they will be replacing the Inside EA blogs and given that most of the info on the game is already out there the value of the Gamestop offerings will likely be limited.

The first blog reveals the intro video for the game which you can check out here. It features the cover athletes Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald and highlights of theirs courtesy of NFL Films.

Vote For the Best Pastapadre Team

Since the launch of Teambuilder for NCAA Football 10 members in the forum have been working on the potential community team for the site. I’ve brought out 10 of the best creations for them to be voted on. The winner will become the official Pastapadre team and will be available for anyone to download and use at their discretion. I will also be giving the creator of the winning team a copy of NCAA Football 10.

Continue on to check out the best of the teams and vote on your favorite. You can vote for more than one if you can’t come to a decision. Click on the links to see the full postings including all the uniform combos and logos.

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NCAA Football 10 Demo Impressions

Having played the full game at E3, which was probably built off a different and slightly more recent build, it makes it difficult to evaluate the demo. There are some things that seemed better at E3, yet there are also some things that seem better in the demo. So I’m not sure exactly how valid some of my impressions can be as they relate to the final build. Because of that I won’t go into much detail on those things.

Continue on to read some general thoughts on the game/demo and check out the videos of a full demo play-through.

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NCAA Football 10 Demo Now Available

The demo for NCAA Football 10 is now out on the XBL Marketplace and will go up with the PSN update this afternoon. Featured is a National Championship rematch of the Florida Gators against the Oklahoma Sooners with two minute quarters. The difficulty level is adjustable which is probably a factor in its large size of 1.57 GB.

Leave your thoughts and impressions of the demo in the comments! I’ll get some videos to go up this evening and maybe some observations based on what may be different in the version I played at E3 which was likely a slightly more recent build than what the demo was built off of.

NCAA Football 10 Issues Being Addressed

While at E3 I was satisfied after my time with NCAA Football 10. You can read back through my impressions if you haven’t already, but basically the game has a similar feel but with numerous additions and improvements from last year that become more evident the more it is played. Unfortunately after I got back all that was soon overshadowed by news of the rosters being in terrible shape and the DLC “boosts” for dynasty that would also affect Online Franchise.

First on the topic of the rosters the NCAA team has been working to find a solution. While there are no specifics at this time on how that will be done, after a series of comments including one on Twitter today it sounds as though they are going to be able to come up with a way to fix the rosters. I can’t imagine they would be making these comments unless they were confident in the ability to do so. Hopefully that can be completed without losing all the teams that have been built through Teambuilder this month.

While that was somewhat a given I was even more encouraged by the reference to the downloadable content issue. Producer Jeremy Strauser mentioned this in his message to me on Twitter: “NCAA team working on a patch so that DLC can be deactivated in Online Dynasty”. That would pretty much eliminate the reasoning behind being upset about that DLC. If you can imagine last year people would argue over the legitimacy of restarts. Having the cheats activated in online dynasties and no way to prevent them would surely have led to accusations, potentially spoiling the enjoyment since no one would know for sure of the validity of their dynasty.

If they can get both these issues fixed by release I think that would show a commitment to the community that maybe has been lacking in the past. So this is good news and hopefully we’ll hear that both come to fruition in the near future.

Madden 10 Franchise Q&A

Last week we got a Q&A about the Online Franchise mode in Madden 10. This week brings a general Franchise mode Q&A that goes into more of the basics of what has been worked on. You can read through the entire blog posting here.

As I’ve mentioned before my goal was to clean up the logic and get this mode back to where it needed to be. I’ll repeat my favorite analogy for those of you who haven’t heard it before: If you found out you had termites in your house, would you build on another addition or clean up the foundation so that you could build on the house in the future? That was exactly our attitude and my sole focus since I joined the Madden team halfway through the development cycle. I enlisted the help of one of my top programmers from NFL Head Coach ’09 (Jeff Keyek) and worked with the rest of the Madden team to address many of the core aspects of the mode that really needed fixing.

While there may be a lack of revolutionary additions to the mode (outside of the interface redesign) it seems as though they’ve been able to accomplish a good deal in getting the base of it to where it should be. It is just unfortunate that many of those areas that have been addressed such as free agency and trade logic won’t come into play in the Online Franchises.