But if you already had a great game engine then surely it wouldn't hurt to merely add a few tweaks and spend the rest of the time doing up the database..
What would be required wouldn’t be tweaks, it would be major work.
They barely do anything to the gameplay sometimes anyway, and so any reviews that say "the gameplay is the same" would be written regardless. They might as well do something of value.
We don’t know how much time and resources go into tweaking the gameplay, certainly the game has changed quite a lot since number 5 in the way it plays whether people think it or not. When dealing with the codebase they have, it might be very difficult and time consuming to change the gameplay, to tweak it, that can happen when you are dealing with code that has constantly been re-written. I have seen people work for weeks on a given piece of A.I in order to get a small change to work. So the changes you see in terms of how the game plays might take quite a while to get working in the game believe it or not. This is one of the major reasons that after a while you really need a complete re-write.
One title I worked we went into the motion capture studio to get some new animations for the game. Animations were sorted out model skinned etc and they were coded into the game. One of the animations was incorrectly exported. It was supposed to be a referee holding out a out card to a player as he did so he was supposed to lean forward on one leg. Instead of that happening his leg bent forward at the knee. That looked VERY odd. But that was nothing. Somehow we now had a problem in that all the players had disappeared. We found that somehow in coding these new animations, somehow it had affected a differing part of the game that set the level of the players to the texture of the pitch.. We found the players were still playing football, we found them via a camera replay….they were playing football at about the height of the stadium roof, floating about in the air. It took about 3 days to sort that one out.
Like I said no matter how well code is commented or organized, after years of programming and subsequent versions of a game it becomes like wires at the back of your tele and when something gets pulled out it can turn your tv on or switch your lights out..
Also bare in mind that they maybe stretching these resources over multiple platforms and that might not have been something that they were doing prior.
Plus, excuse me as I have no insider knowledge of working in games, but aren't games teams set up so that you have different departments working on different things? Gameplay, database, art etc.? In which case, why is it so hard for them to change more than one element at a time?
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It doesn’t work like that at all.
When a project is set out at the start you usually have a concept and or game design document and sometimes a technical document and schedule. The game design document addresses all the changes you are looking to put in place for the current game.
The data-set, isn’t something “Tom in the database team” can just go off and decide to alter as the game logic is written in an express way to use a given set of data. If someone went out and started changing the data you might get the whole game falling to pieces-seriously. You have the datat that the game uses, you have certain parameters in terms storage, you have the requirement of licenses for data, etc etc.
The point is, is that alteration of data, obtaining of licenses, use of resource, direction of team, codeing of all aspects of the game including the front end are all high level decisions that need to me made early on or relatively so. All aspects of the game fall in line with the schedule that needs to be signed off on and agreed with the publisher/money men.
If they only concentrated on gameplay every year, and that was a rule for all games, nothing would ever move on and become a deeper and better game, surely... Sequels wouldn't be worth buying because the movement would change but the settings would be the same (saying that, that's pretty much how I feel about the last three years of PES).
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It is about choices made by the developer.
Go and play PES1 or PES2 and see how much the game has changed. Konami has spent a massive amount of time choosing to put most of their resources into changing and updating the way the game has played, making the animation system smoother, adding new animations etc. They have spent most of their time on the core game.
They did not have to do that- they just chose to do that.
Now has that made it better or worse than FIFA?
I would say a lot better.
Are they running into the ground a little bit and making few changes worth of the money on the last two versions- maybe yes.
And maybe they are now struggling with the legacy of an old code base and with stretching their resources over mutli platforms.
So maybe this is the point at which they need to go from scratch and go with a complete re-write of the game. Take the skills, experience and ethos that has taken them to the top and write a new football game.
You say that they're slated for having so much unlicensed stuff. I remember reading a few reviews like that years ago but now most people understand that it's not Konami's fault in a lot of cases, and that EA have exclusive licenses for a lot of things. So I don't see why adding unlicensed leagues would harm the reviews; it doesn't mean they'd have to remove the licensed leagues that they do have. No reviewer in his right mind would mark down a game for having the same amount of licensed leagues AND adding a few unlicensed leagues on top of that.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the gaming press.
I think you are wrong here, I think that a whole load of unlicensed leagues, teams and generic faces would see Konami get slaughtered in the gaming press and they would be hammered in comparison to FIFA. Further more the typical bloke in the street would also be likely to turn his nose up at it, if it looked aesthetically less appealing than FIFA.
Also none of this will make the game play any better…it just wont and you are mistaking how many people would be interested in the feature. I guarantee that very few people would use the teams out of the lower leagues.
Can anyone say any of this would be a better idea that Konami creating a new game, with a new game engine and nw AI and animation etc….perhaps with an exciting new and realistic ball physics engine etc?
Anyway….I am leaving it there.
We will all just have to wait and see what Konami do next and see if their footballing games can survive the transition to the next gen consoles or not
