Take a look at the first screenshot from EA Sports’ upcoming video game “NCAA Football 12.” How many new features can you spot? The answer will officially be posted tomorrow at 3pm EST on the officiall “NCAA Football 12″ site along with a video that explains some of the enhancements made to the game. But just looking at the screen, I can already callout the new dreadlocks, the Miami Pro Combat uniforms, as well as what looks to be improved lighting and even more defined grass (yes, I’m now down to examining the grass in video games). See anything else? Be sure to check out the officiall “NCAA Football 12″ page tomorrow for all of the answers.

Pistol Full House HB Off Tackle – The Pistol Full House, aka the Diamond formation, was first unveiled last season by Oklahoma State and was later adopted by other teams across the country. A staple play of the three back pistol set is the HB Off Tackle play.

Ready for some more NCAA Football news? Well this blog has exactly what you are looking for.   More fixes, tweaks, and tuning in the form of another Title Update and the release of Live Tuning Pack 3, to continue and improve NCAA Football 11.  Both of these items will be coming to you on Tuesday (9/7). Now the details: Title Update 3 (TU3) - The pump fake exploit was resolved. The entire defense will no longer rush the QB after a pump fake. - Resolved an issue with setting SS/ FS to QB Spy and then blitzing, virtually unblocked. - Increased the Overall rating for incoming freshman. This resulted in one and two star freshman coming in at a higher overall rating. - In Season Progression is back! Players once again have the ability to get a slight boost to their ratings during the season. - There was an issue with Hawaii’s home schedule causing conflicts with particular teams. This has been resolved. In particular, teams in the Pac 10 and the WAC will now have the correct number of conference games. - Resolved an issue with the Rush Defense slider where they were only impacting defensive line special moves. They have been adjusted to also impact win/loss chances for blocking. Live Tuning Pack 3 (LTP3) - Kick Power/Kick Accuracy progression for Kickers and Punters was adjusted to be in line with the new incoming freshmen. Kickers and punters will now progress in line with other players, but will start with a higher average overall due to the improved recruit ratings in the patch. - Increased Awareness progression for all positions. - Increased progression slightly for Elusiveness, Spin Move, and Juke Move for Wide Receivers. - Increased progression of the Tackle rating for Corner Backs to be in line with WR skill ratings (Juke, Spin, and Elusiveness). - Reduced the frequency of defenders successfully jumping the snap. Also adjusted how frequently they would jump early when the offense performed a fake snap. - Tuned Man Coverage so defenders will not jump in front of routes so early. They will still jump the route, but not as early, or frequently, as before. - Adjusted in season progression to be in line with higher rated incoming freshmen. - Tuned Incoming freshman to better match the spread on the default rosters. - Tuned team prestige progression to be in line with the changes to incoming freshmen. While tuning Dynasty this year, I’ve received a lot of help along the way from Jordan Peterson, who recently joined the Design team.   Since he has been focusing on all the details of the latest Live Tuning Pack I’m going to have him pass along the information of what you are going to see going forward.   So Jordan… How do all of these changes impact Dynasty? Thanks for the introduction, Russ.  The most obvious adjustment is that the recruits are now in line with the freshmen on the default rosters.   This allows for progression in line to our original objectives, without creating too many high rated players in the first three years or, conversely, too few in later years of dynasty. Below is a count of the number of players at each Overall rating.  The top graph displays results from ship, the second from LTP2 and the third is from TU3/LTP3.  The red line indicates the default roster, while the remaining blue and green lines represent subsequent years.  Most importantly you can see that number of players between 40 and 60 overall have decreased significantly, while the number of players between 60 and 80 has increased. The table below is a breakdown of the average number of teams at each rating several years into dynasty, compared between ship, post LTP 1 and LTP3.   With the increase to the overall ratings for the lower tier of recruits, and tuning progression, we have achieved our target for Team Overall Grades.    Based on results from launch, our target was to create an even distribution between B and D rated teams, while slightly increasing the number of A and C rated teams.   LTP1 was an improvement, but did not completely achieve our goal, as LTP3 does. Below is the updated numbers of the Average Overall Chart we showed with LTP1.  You can see that on average (this is the result of many simulations) our Average Overalls did not change all that much for most teams from LTP1 to LTP3.  We were able to use the new Recruits and integrate them into the Dynasties while keeping a balance between the low and high prestige teams.   Please note that depending upon the multitude of factors in dynasty; you may see some significant variance in a team’s overall rating. There are a few things to keep in mind when looking at a team’s overall.  Most importantly are the factors that influence recruiting.  Did the team recruit every position needed? Did they win, or lose, important recruiting battles?  What was their record?  Did they win or lose any bowl games?   Has their team prestige increased or decreased?  These are just a handful of questions to ask yourself as you look at the team overalls in your dynasty sims.   Because of the significant amount of potential variance, we always tune based upon averages while keeping an eye upon both extremes. In an earlier Live Tuning Pack, we addressed the low end of the spread for Kickers and Punters by increasing their progression.  Now, with the bottom half of the recruits increased to be in line with rosters, we were able to tune Kicker/Punter progression with greater accuracy.  The table below displays the average Kick Power for Kickers and Punters for Recruits on the shipped disc (top section), compared to Recruits in LTP 3 (bottom section). That wraps up the Dynasty summary for the Title Update and Live Tuning Pack 3.  Thanks once again for your continued support and feedback. Thanks for the details, Jordan.   Most of these changes come directly from community feedback.   Our goal is to continue and improve NCAA 11 Football as much as possible for you, the fan.   Please continue to post and let us know what you think on our forums. I’ll be lurking around there, and other fan sites, to see what you think about the latest updates, so don’t be shy.  Thanks again for your support and we hope you are enjoying the start of the College Football Season.  Go Canes! -Russ Kiniry Designer NCAA Football

It’s been a while since my last blog (see: A New Game Plan – March 2010) where I outlined our philosophy for the game and the new approach our team took in developing NCAA Football 11.  An approach centered on three key elements, Core Gameplay, Collegiate Presentation, and Innovation.  Based on the response to the game so far, it seems like we’re on the right track.  Your response has been fantastic and it certainly wouldn’t have been possible without all the great feedback, suggestions, and support from you, our community of passionate college football fans.  I want to personally thank everyone who’s taken time to send us an email, complete a survey, or post their feedback on the various game forums.  The input we receive, both positive and negative, helps us continually improve the game experience today and moving forward. IT’S THE SOUND YOU’VE WAITED DAYS TO HEAR… With a nod to my favorite NCAA Football intro video, first things first…  I’m happy to report that a title update is coming soon.  Look for this in about two-to-three weeks or so (currently estimating mid-August).  We’ll communicate the official dates as soon as they’re locked in. This new update covers a variety of fixes and improvements.  The team will release more details in the coming days, but I wanted to provide a few highlights as well as discuss one final game “feature” that we have yet to formally announce.  First some background… WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD FOOTBALL GAMES Some of you may wonder, and rightfully so, “how did they miss that bug?!!”  The same thing goes on here at the studio, “HOW DID WE MISS THAT BUG!!” usually with some colorful expletives thrown in for good measure. But why does this happen?  To start with, software development is a complex science and this is why nearly every game and software company on the planet is continually challenged and often frustrated in the pursuit of software perfection.  Windows Service Packs, multiple iPhone O/S and application updates, etc.  You get the picture… Now let’s consider video games.  Sports games are some of the most complex video games in existence today, and I’d argue that the logic and sophistication of football rivals them all.  The real-world game of college football is complicated enough with its massive and constantly evolving rulebook, schedules, and even conference realignments*.  Now try to imagine the complexity of a video game in full HD running at 60 frames-per-second while attempting to mimic not only visual photorealism in 5.1 stereo but believable simulated behavior of 22 individual players, refs, coaching staff, broadcasters, and fans.  And now connect that same experience to hundreds of thousands of players through a broad array of servers and databases across the country all in real-time over a far-less-than-perfect Internet.  This is also why features that seemed almost trivial in the last generation of consoles, seem to be advancing slower with this new generation.  Hardware, connectivity, and the scale of “HD” just make everything much more complex to properly develop and execute.  To give you some perspective, the NCAA Football 11 codebase contains more than 10 million lines of source code and script combined with over 350 gigabytes of graphics, sound, and data files.  This all then gets compiled, compressed, and packaged into what you’ll find on your game disk. Over the past year we logged tens-of-thousands of hours of QA on the game in addition to tens-of-thousands of hours more in scripted game testing through networks of automated game consoles here at the studio.  And even for all that testing, anomalies, exploits, and bugs can still happen.   Consider that within days of game launch, more than 1,000,000 games will be played – more games than can be possibly exercised by an army of testers in a single year. This isn’t an excuse for not getting things right the first time, but I did want to provide some context.  Sometimes the problems are edge-cases; sometimes it’s an issue of massive online scale that can’t be reproduced in a lab, or simply plain old human error.  But when problems are discovered please know that we as developers, and true longtime fans of the game, also share your frustration.  We take bugs very seriously.  Our number one goal is to always deliver the highest quality and most enjoyable game of simulated college football possible.  Which brings me to the last unannounced feature you’ll find in NCAA Football 11…  One way in which we’ve been working to improve the game experience for everyone this year. NEW FOR NCAA FOOTBALL 11 — LIVE TUNING PACKAGES A number of you have already noticed that we do a check for “Online Gameplay Tuning” when connecting to our online servers.  Some of you may also have found a new “Tuning” category in the Files menu.  This is a new technology for NCAA Football 11 that allows us to not only live update and tune core gameplay parameters — like fumbles, throw accuracy, and juke success ratings — but it also allows us to rebalance certain core features such as recruiting logic, blocking, even control the intensity of shadows cast by the football on a sunny day! These new Live Tuning Packages (LTPs) contain literally 1000′s of key parameters which drive the heart of our game; parameters that live well below the level of specific player or team ratings.  With our new LTPs we can often turn changes around in a few days.  It can’t solve everything, and some issues will still require a traditional client update, but for many items it’s definitely a more powerful and faster strategy for tuning throughout the season. Our first LTP should be arriving next week along with detailed notes on what the update contains.  I can tell you that based on the collective feedback we’ve received, we will be carefully down-tuning the athleticism of defensive lineman and reduce the number of impressive picks by the big guys.  We’re also looking to address a few important dynasty progression and recruiting issues. NCAA FOOTBALL 11 ONLINE SERVER UPDATES The NCAA Football Live Team, a group dedicated to server-side health and maintenance, has been very busy over the last two weeks since launch.  We apologize for any issues you may have experienced in recent days.  The team has been upgrading hardware, tuning databases, and fixing web issues as they arise.  Most of these changes happen behind-the-scenes on a daily and nightly basis.  Here a few of the most visible fixes so far: – Fixed online leaderboard exploit – Fixed potential crash at online team-select screen – Fixed post-game email formatting – Optimized various database queries – Various hardware upgrades and backend optimizations Work will continue on server optimizations throughout the season to ensure a fast and enjoyable online experience for everyone.  We’re also working to do a better job of communicating upcoming fixes and outages so that everyone has a better handle on what’s happening.  And by the way, just to dispel a common myth, if you have lag issues when playing an online opponent, it’s unlikely to be an EA Server issue.  Our matchmaking system works by telling your consoles to directly connect to each other for the game and then report back the results.  The network traffic doesn’t go through our servers like an MMO.  If you have problems or disconnects, it could be your ISP, local networking gear, or simply someone unhappy about the way the game is going and pulling the cord.  It happens. NCAA FOOTBALL 11 CLIENT UPDATE 2 More details on the client update to come, but here are three of the big ones we’ve solved: – RANDOM PLAY ACTION CRAZINESS – Sure it looks funny, but annoying as heck when it costs you a drive or a game. We’re sorry we missed this one as well and apologize for the issue. – SEASON SHOWDOWN STATS REPORTING – The season showdown warning is harmless right now and this issue and related lobby problems ultimately get fixed with the update. – UNIFORMS THAT NEVER NEED WASHING – This is one of the more painful ones for us given all the work on visuals this year.  The game actually does degrade uniforms; unfortunately we broke something in a final build that made the impact way too subtle.  Consider this one solved with the update.  And we want you to know that we’ve really been enjoying the great “Art of NCAA Football” threads.  It’s clear we have some incredible photographic talent in our community!  So I expect things will go next-level when the update rolls out.  For example, this shot comes straight out of the updated game: LOOKING AHEAD My apologies to longtime fans like ODogg who can’t find peace without dreadlocks.   Or others who’ve been aggressively petitioning for broadcast cameras or bowl patches.  We just weren’t able to get them into NCAA Football 11 given all the other work we had to take care of this year.  And unfortunately, these aren’t things that we can simply “patch in”.  I can tell you they’re on our wishlists as well and we hope to get to them in a future version.  Look for a link to a new Satisfaction and Feature Request Survey in my next blog. Thanks again for the great support! Roy NCAA Football 11 Executive Producer PS — You can still email me at NCAAFootballFeedback@ea.com.  As always, given the incredible amount of email I get daily, I don’t always have time to reply, but I do promise I’ll read everything you send.  Please keep it civil and spam free * Conference changes for next year’s real-world NCAA College Football season didn’t officially happen until after our game was completed and off to manufacturing.

* Fixed an exploit where the QB could walk through the defense when the ball is snapped, with a guaranteed a gain of over 50 yards. * Tuned QB fumbling on scrambles, resolving an issue where the QB would fumble every time if hit past the line of scrimmage. * Improved deep zone coverage assignments, making it significantly more difficult to be beaten by the deep ball. In particular, deep zones have been improved against Streak routes. * Tuned QB throwing out of a sack. Previously, it was too easy for a QB to throw the ball while being tackled; this has been toned down to be more accurate. * Resolved an error with pursuit angles, which resulted in defenders over pursuing the ball carrier every play. The angle was fixed to be slightly more aggressive, creating a more accurate pursuit. * Tuned the read and react assignment for linebackers, especially outside linebackers, before the handoff. This will make it more difficult to run the ball outside the Tackles. * Fixed an issue with the CPU ball carrier being stuck in a forward lean animation. Also lowered the frequency of CPU ball carriers leaning. * Resolved an issue where AI players in man coverage assignment would swerve when covering particular vertical routes, causing them to be beat repeatedly. * Ball carriers will no longer go into a tightrope assignment when running along the sideline. This was causing the player’s speed to decrease to 70%. * Resolved an issue that was causing tackles to not matchup in online games, potentially causing a crash in online games. * Footsliding will no longer occur when the ball carrier has the ball in their left hand. * Tuned CPU screen passes so they will get rid of the ball faster, resulting in less sacks. * Resolved a crash that occurred if connection is lost before entering a game mode.