I agree with the posts above. The fact that RTP isn't in NCAA is not, in itself, disappointing. The fact that I have to find that out via news and community websites is more of a sock in the gut.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "time constraints", but shipping almost two months later is a huge difference in development time.
By the time the May CD event would have rolled around (basing this off of last year, I don't even know if there was a May event this year), the game would be about (this) close to going final. Bug fixes are difficult enough to get implemented in retail code in that time frame. No way can you roll out a feature, especially something as fundamentally game-changing as RTP, in that time frame. We're not talking NCAA Backbreaker level ... we're talking the potential for gameplay fundamentally broken level.
Even the May timeframe is probably a red herring. They might have "decided" to use it then, but it had to be well integrated by that point anyway. They certainly weren't starting from scratch at that point.
Now, could NCAA have made that decision ~mid-March? Maybe that's what you meant. Sure, they could have. But I'm guessing the reason Madden waited to "decide" until May was because it wasn't ready until May. Sometimes you have no choice.
I can't overstate how big a difference seven weeks makes in a development lifecycle. Most crucially here, you can still make mistakes when you have seven "extra" (compared to when another title is releasing) weeks in your pipeline.
Bookmarks