• IGN's NCAA Football 11 Online Dynasty Preview

    Check out IGN's preview of Online Dynasty:

    NCAA Football 11: Online Dynasty Preview
    The next generation of building your collegiate powerhouse has arrived.

    Building a "Dynasty" on a single console all by your lonesome was always a bit of an oxymoron in early NCAA Football titles. After all, shouldn't a dynasty be seen by more than one person? In recent years, EA Sports has opened things up to the world of online multiplayer and have allowed fans to join up and compete with their favorite college teams in a league of their own creation. New to NCAA Football 11's Online Dynasty Mode is the ability to manage your squad from quite literally anywhere in the world with either a laptop or one of the many iDevices currently on the market.

    I've spent the last week and a half toying around the new Online Dynasty Mode and have been very pleased with the mode's overall performance. Currently I have one public and one private dynasty. The private league has members of the media filling out the ranks, while my public league contains only my Florida State Seminoles and any other folks lucky enough to score an early copy of NCAA 11. Needless to say, the public dynasty moved at a much quicker pace as I was the commissioner, meaning I had control over when the dynasty would advance. Since I didn't know any of the other players personally, I had little issue advancing weeks whenever my team was ready.


    Continue after the break to read the rest of the story as well as some video previews.



    If I did want to take my time, as my private league with other media members required, there were plenty of other activities to keep my busy. First of all, there's the recruiting that we all know and love. It's as deep as ever and resembles an actual in-game feature, rather than a menu item, now more than it has before.

    Players select an amount of time (from 10 minutes up to an hour) to spend on each player and must budget their time across ten hours. Within your specified time with each player you're forced to select a random topic from a huge list and then must either pitch him on that topic, compare your school against another of his top choices, make him a promise for the upcoming year, schedule a visit, or offer him a scholarship.

    The amount of positive response you get from each topic is governed by how much he values each topic. If your team has a low rating in a topic that he cherishes then you'll be able to switch your topic up to three times per conversation. You can also only make three promises (ranging from early playing time to guaranteeing him a spot on the Freshman All-American squad) to the player throughout an entire season. There's a lot of strategy that goes into how to best present your case for why a player should attend your institution. It's especially rewarding when you coax a player away from a rival team that's being controlled by a rival publication. Or, in your case, a rival gamer.

    While recruiting worked perfectly on my console, the web interface still needs some work before it hits the streets on July 10 (EA Sports says they're doing a lot of fine tuning and testing throughout the week). There's no doubt that being able to recruit from anywhere is great, but in my testing the EA Sports website was almost unusable on my iPhone 4. It was extremely slow to load and didn't provide a smooth browsing experience.

    I fared much better on a computer where I was able to access pretty much every ability I wanted and it transferred seamlessly back to my console. Occasionally I'd run into a bug that caused an internal error on EA Sports' servers mid-call, thus causing me to lose the time I just chose to spend on the call. I also found that I was able to invite recruits to visit my campus for a game that I had already played, provided the rest of my dynasty was still playing the given week. None of this stuff ruined the experience, but it's going to be interesting to see if EA can fix these issues before the service goes live.

    StoryBuilder is another area of Online Dynasty that permeates more devices than a simple game console. Users can now build out stories to appear on their dynasty wire with any of their devices or simply leave it to the AI. But trust me, building your own stories is the way to go. I actually haven't done it myself, but the crap-talking potential is clear.




    Web Online Dynasty Interface

    Cycling through my Dynasty Wire showed the headline, "Tigers prove they've got stones the size of Plymouth Rock as Bulldogs fall" to show that the Auburn Tigers just beat the Georgia Bulldogs. You can then pull in photos and videos to your story to really deepen the wound of the opposing team. Aside from that, your Dynasty Wire provides news updates including weekly recruiting events and you can even set up e-mail alerts to keep you posted on what's going on while you're away.

    NCAA Football 11's Online Dynasty Mode could be a big step forward for the interconnected potential of sports games going forward. It's still going to take a group of cooperative players in order to have a fun dynasty experience. I could see unruly commissioners being an issue and lagging players are sure to be an annoyance, but that nearly goes without saying. The structure and idea behind the mode is solid, I just hope that the online community can find a way to create a fun play experience (and that EA Sports can fix the bugs) for those without a huge friends list.

    NCAA Football 11 is scheduled to launch on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on July 10.


    Source
    Via: Pastapadre
    Comments 13 Comments
    1. Kingpin32's Avatar
      Kingpin32 -
      Aww I had just posted that too at the exact same time lol.
    1. gschwendt's Avatar
      gschwendt -
      Quote Originally Posted by Kingpin32 View Post
      Aww I had just posted that too at the exact same time lol.
      Yeah... but mine is prettier.
    1. Kingpin32's Avatar
      Kingpin32 -
      Quote Originally Posted by gschwendt View Post
      Yeah... but mine is prettier.
      Yeah yeah, I should throw a picture in mine too then. And maybe change the color of the font too lol
    1. JBHuskers's Avatar
      JBHuskers -
      Quote Originally Posted by gschwendt View Post
      Yeah... but mine is prettier.
      He's got the hammer too
    1. JBHuskers's Avatar
      JBHuskers -
      In all seriousness, the bug that was mentioned about a server error and losing time has definitely been reported. Good thing about stuff on the web, it can be fixed on the fly.
    1. Jayrah's Avatar
      Jayrah -
      Good stuff. Luckily for 12 us @ TGT, I think we're in a responsible dynasty here. I'm in 3 . 1 here, 1 at TF, and one with my bro. 1 week BABY!
    1. JeffHCross's Avatar
      JeffHCross -
      The bug of being able to invite players after you've played your game, as long as you haven't advanced, is interesting. From my reading of the article, that's only a bug with the web interface. That would make a little more sense, since the in-game interface blocked you from doing that last year.

      That would be a pretty nasty cheat/bug if that didn't get updated before release.
    1. JeffHCross's Avatar
      JeffHCross -
      Quote Originally Posted by JBHuskers View Post
      Good thing about stuff on the web, it may be fixed on the fly.
      Fixed. Only so many things can be easily fixed, even on a web interface. If there are hooks into the code on the retail disk, that limits the amount of potential fixes. Given that Online Dynasty first existed on the consoles, then the web, I bet the amount of things that can be fixed is more limited than we'd like.

      That said, I do think the things mentioned in this article should all be fixable.
    1. Kingpin32's Avatar
      Kingpin32 -
      Quote Originally Posted by JBHuskers View Post
      He's got the hammer too
      Thats what she said.
    1. JBHuskers's Avatar
      JBHuskers -
      Quote Originally Posted by Kingpin32 View Post
      Thats what she said.
      Well put!

    1. beartide06's Avatar
      beartide06 -
      This is going to be amazing I must say. It will be so user friendly and so easy to access. Now, at the bottom it says that the release date will be July 10th? How are all these people getting the release dates messed up?
    1. gschwendt's Avatar
      gschwendt -
      Quote Originally Posted by beartide06 View Post
      This is going to be amazing I must say. It will be so user friendly and so easy to access. Now, at the bottom it says that the release date will be July 10th? How are all these people getting the release dates messed up?
      I believe they mean the official launch date for the Dynasty Wire site. I assume they're still working on it through this week before they officially launch version 1.0 this weekend. That's likely the reason that you can't find the dynasties that we're participating in.
    1. beartide06's Avatar
      beartide06 -
      Yeah that is probably right. I should have figured that out by myself since this is the Dynasty wire blog lol. Well, I can't wait until it goes live either so that I can check it out and experiment.