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The newest NCAA Football 11 blog details the changes to the phone call aspect of Recruiting in Dynasty mode:Hey NCAA Fans! Russ here and I'm back to discuss a crowd favorite. We are now less than two months away from the July 13th release of NCAA Football 11. Personally, I'm very excited about all the details we already talked about with game play and presentation. The game is looking really good right now and the team is working hard to finish in these last couple months.
One of the most asked questions at every event, forum, and live chat we've done so far this year is "What is new with Dynasty?" Well I'm happy to finally be able to answer that question and provide you with a lot of the details in Dynasty Mode. But with all the enhancements this year, Dynasty will be broken down into 3 different blogs; this is the first about the new Phone Call in NCAA Football 11.
One of the areas we felt would add the most to the Dynasty experience was a new Phone Call with recruits. The goal was to make each call more fun, a lot faster, and just a better experience all around. Much of the same concepts are still around when calling prospects. For example, your school will have the same 14 pitch types and the prospect has his rating of each, as well. The major difference is now you'll need to find a way to maneuver through each call so you can maximize the amount of points you earn.
At the start of each call you'll be presented with an option to select how many Topics you wish to have. You can pick from 1 to 6 topics that cost 10 minutes for each prospect every week. Every week you'll still have 10 hours for Recruiting like in previous years of NCAA Football; so you choose how much and which prospects to spend your time on.
Once you select how many topics you would like to discuss with the prospect, the phone call will begin and your first topic will be presented to you:
There are a lot of ways to go about dealing with each Topic you are presented with. If it's something your school is good at, making that pitch is often a good move; or you can try to compare yourself up against another school that the Prospect is interested in to earn your school some points and take some away from your rivals.
Make Pitch will always earn you points, but it is very dependent on your program's grade and how important the topic is to the Prospect. The only way to know the importance of a pitch is to find it.
Find Pitch will always tell you how important a pitch is to that Prospect; unlock the score range and it will earn you some points. Here you can see an example of one of the score ranges for a topic that has been found:
You'll never need to find a pitch. However, knowing what the Prospect thinks can help you maximize your score. This also opens the ability to sway the pitch.
Sway Pitch becomes available after you know how important a topic is to the Prospect. This option gives you a chance to convince the Prospect that this pitch should be more important to him. You'll want to focus on trying to sway pitches that are best for you school. The reason for this is it gives you a much better chance of scoring points because the more a Prospect cares about something, the more points you can earn.
Compare Pitch replaces Downplay from last year's game, and can be one of the most powerful options available. Compare Pitch puts your grade vs. another school's grade and how much the Prospect cares about the pitch all together to give you points as well as remove points from the school you selected. Because of that we show you the grades of each school so it's easy to see:
The further you out-class your opponent the more points you will take from them. Your score will not be affected, however. So you'll have to decide if it's more important for you to target a rival and bring them down, or keep gaining as many points as you can and hope you catch up (or stay ahead!).
Change Topic is the first example of one of the outs you have in dealing with a topic your school might not be good at. Each call will give you 3 times you can change the topic (there is one exception to this I'll explain later); so you can feel free to use it every call because they come back. Change Topic will give you another roll at a topic; but, there is a chance you could get a topic you've already passed on. Based on the length of the call and how good your school's Pitches are will dictate how often you use Change Topic. Smaller schools with lower scores may find themselves out of Change Topics often.
Make Promise is finally not just an off-season recruiting tool. If you don't like the topic you're given, another way to get around talking about it is to offer a promise; this will consume the topic and give you points. You can only offer 3 Promises to any single Prospect and if you do not keep your promises you'll start to lose what you can promise. Promises work off their own score range based on what you are promising.For example, saying you'll win a National Title is a lot more impressive then telling a prospect he won't red shirt his first year.
Schedule Visit is similar to previous years of NCAA Football. You pick a home game (or bye week) for the Prospect to come to your campus and you earn points based on how well you match up his Activities and how well you play that week. The big difference is this is now considered an out, which means once you Schedule a Visit that topic has been used. Also, you can no longer reschedule visits. Your'e now held accountable for what you tell a Prospect on the phone.
Offer Scholarship is the last option in a Phone Call. Like the previous two options, it uses the Topic, so you can Offer a Scholarship on a bad Topic for your school to get around talking about it. But you can only offer it once to a Prospect.
Once you figure out what you are going to do on a topic, you instantly get to know how much you scored on the Topic Results screen:
Two things to notice on the above screen shot is the Call Tracker at the top of the screen and the Pipeline Bonus under the points gained. The Call Tracker will show you how many topics you have left (6 in the example), the current pitch, and what you have scored on your previous topics. Based on your Pipeline States in Dynasty you can earn extra bonus points if the Prospect you are calling is from one of those states. This is now shown to you on the Topic Results screen so you can see how many extra points you are scoring for Making, Finding, Swaying, or Comparing a pitch.
When you are done with a Call you are given a Call Recap screen (this is the same screen you'll see if you quick call as well):
This is an example of a call with 5 of the options you can perform.
Now that you can really see how many points you are scoring in each call we made a change to the Prospects Top Schools screen to help you:
You can now see how many points you are behind (or ahead) of every school in the Top 10 for every Prospect. Also you can access this screen during a call to help you decide on your course of action during a call.
Well that's it for Dynasty Blog 1 of 3: Phone Call. Thanks for taking the time to read it. I hope you'll enjoy the new Phone Calls as much as we do. Keep checking back here for the next two parts.
-Russ Kiniry
Designer NCAA Football 11
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