Kotaku: Chaotic Conference Calls Scramble College Football’s Video Game, Too
Kotaku's Owen Good recently caught up with NCAA Football Producer Ben Haumiller to discuss how all of the announced, rumored and possible conference realignment in real life can cause design issues and chaos before the release of NCAA Football 13.
Whether a conference swells to 22 or even 14, as the SEC will next year, the uncertainty in eight major conference memberships has Haumiller's development team building several contingency plans, and facing a nightmare scenario in which the game released in July 2012 doesn't reflect the reality coming in August.
"We're going to go as late as we can possibly go to be correct," Haumiller said, acknowledging that uncertainties in the departures of Pitt, Syracuse, and West Virginia from the Big East could be resolved after the game enters its alpha state around April or May. So could the desperate, circle-the-wagons alliance of a proposed Mountain West-Conference USA merger, creating a 22-team megaleague to protect the midweek broadcast viability of college football's have-nots.
"A 22-team conference is something we've never had to deal with before," said Haumiller. "It would break our code," as currently written, he said.
Haumiller said his team is building code for NCAA 13 that tries to accommodate scheduling in a 22-team, user-created league—even one jampacked full of traditional rivals like Alabama, Tennessee, Ohio State, Michigan, Cal and Stanford, who stage their matchups on specific dates in the season. But this logic may not make it into the final game. They'll work as long and as far as they can until either real-world events sort themselves out, or the NCAA Football developers have to make a choice between keeping that code and maybe implementing another feature.
Haumiller said he would prefer for a 22-team scheduling engine to remain in the game, because one of the game's greatest strengths is how users can rearrange conferences between seasons. In essence, if EA Sports gets to a point where it's stamping discs with conference memberships still unresolved, ideally it could still put out a game where users can correct that themselves after spending five minutes in a menu.
"If it takes a little amount of work, and removing it would not leave much room for a new feature," it'll probably stay, Haumiller said. "But if it would be a large task to implement, and there's no certainty it will happen (in real life), I could see us making a decision to say, no, this other thing is what we want to get into the game. Do I want to get that in there? Yes. But the reality is we only have a limited amount of time and space."
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