Sega Sports' Secret - First-Person Football

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to IGN Xbox's coverage of the newly revealed 'secret mode' in Sega's ESPN NFL Football for PS2 and Xbox - a full first-person mode. According to the article, "In first-person mode, you take the snap as the quarterback.. once the ball is thrown, you can either watch the ball sail toward your wideout from the QB's perspective, or quickly switch to control the receiver and attempt to catch the ball while looking through the point of view from players like Moss and T.O." There are also 'Bullet Time'-styled slow motion effects for receivers, as well as a threat meter that shows how close would-be tacklers are to your position. So, not content with just a name change from NFL 2K4, looks like Sega's football franchise is going all-out with new features to overwhelm EA's Madden series after last year's disappointing performance.

Comments

First Person Issues

[Arkaein]

I'm not too sure how well a first-person perspective will work in a football game. There are a few fundamental differences between first-person on a monitor and a fully immersive virtual reality or real life situation:

• In real life you have two directions you control: your body and your head. While you may be running in a straight line in real life, it is trivial to turn your head and shift your eyes to make a quick assessment of the world around you. This would be very difficult in a football game, even with a dual analog controller. Things just happen too fast (probably why the bullet time feature is necessary, ugh).
• You lack peripheral vision. Besides no being able to shift viewpoints easily, its like having tunnel vision, being restricted to typically 60 to 90 degrees field-of-vision.
• When I play defense in Madden, I usually start as a defensive back to give me the greatest range and attack the ball carrier rather than the QB. However I almost always switch to a closer player when the play moves towards a different area. It's hard enough to tell which player I'm getting control of with an overhead view; I've completely blown plays because I took a player beneath the ball carrier and moved him down (away from the play) instead of up, because I thought I would get control of a different player. This problem must be 10 time worse in first-person, where I can't even see most of my teammates at any one time.

In short, I think this looks like a very cool demo feature, and might be great if I had 10 real human teammates to play with, so I wouldn't worry about switching players. However, that doesn't seem to be the goal, and I bet this mode will not be used much in practice. I've experimented with most every standard camera view possible, and have concluded that while close-up views look cool, it's just not practical if you can't see every player. This may not be quite as realistic, but as indicated above first-person video games have their own realism issues, and are harder to play to boot.

Re:First Person Issues

[CrazyWingman]

In short, I think this looks like a very cool demo feature, and might be great if I had 10 real human teammates to play with, so I wouldn't worry about switching players. However, that doesn't seem to be the goal

Are you sure they're not getting ready to throw that feature into an Xbox Live version? 22-person gaming is pretty much common-place in PC on-line gaming, maybe they're moving toward the same on consoles.
Note: Try not to flame me too hard - I haven't been a console gamer since the NES (outside of a couple of games for a few minutes here and there), so I'm a bit out of the loop.

done that ... sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

In 1986 Activision came out with a first-person football game for the Commodore 64 called GFL Championship Football. It suffered from the major flaws people have commented on here, namely that you could't see the whole field at once and had no peripheral vision, so you would just dart about hoping that there was always an open lane in front of you...

Re:Hopefully hype

[Arkaein]

I'm curious (especially as a later thread says something similar about NFL2K). I've never played any of the NFL2K series. In what ways would you say it's significantly better than Madden?

I'm genuinely curious, Madden seems very tightly put together to me. The AI seems quite realistic, the CPU knows how to manage the clock and the game situation quite well, the physics seem quite well developed, DBs will actually make interceptions regularly if you throw right to them (unlike many older football games), running works well and realistically both inside and outside the tackles, and the custom playbook feature gave me the one thing I felt was lacking in Madden 2002.

Most of my problems with it are pretty small. It's hard to defend passes whil controlling a DB, receivers don't make extra effort to keep feet in bounds along the sidelines and don't catch the ball in stride as often as they should. Things like that.

Are these features better in NFL2K, or is it just generally more refined and well tuned?