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

Bullet Time

[suineg]

I think I might die a happy man if some games never had "bullet time". This is getting old people come up with something new. Pretty soon kids are going to be hanging around in circles talking about the new Tiger Woods golf game and they are going to say "This one will be so much better you can go 'bullet time' and ease the ball into the hole." Why?

The march of progress

[lightspawn]

We need something like this every year, don't we?

2000 - Lens flare
2001 - Motion blur
2002 - Cel shading
2003 - bullet time
2004 - ?

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

[Babbster]

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..."

Things work the same way in normal NFL 2kx (now ESPN) but better [IMO]. I would note, though that real players on a football field don't get to switch between bodies on a play so that they can be involved, and if a football fan were interested in such a first-person mode it would be because they would want to immerse themselves even more in the game, seeing what the players see.

It's worth noting (in response to some of your other points) that wearing a football helmet restricts one's peripheral vision pretty severely in any case, so not having that in the game wouldn't be too far off from reality. Also, as a wide receiver (in the example given) you're not going to turn your head to look for the ball until you have to do so - a fundamental at which any good wide receiver will be proficient.

The first-person view isn't going to replace third-person for most video game football players (even in the Sega game where it's only being offered as an option) anytime soon, but I think it's an interesting addition to the genre and could prove to be a lot of fun. In fact, it should be even more fun since most of the people who enjoy football don't imagine themselves as football coaches, making a game plan to win the big game - most imagine themselves as an athlete, making the big play to win the big game.

PS-
Why does every new feature like this in any game have to be picked apart before even playing the game, anyway? I'm not necessarily directing this at any one person as this goes on amongst gamers all the time. There's a bizarre traditionalist streak that seems to go through a lot of gamers and it seems very out of place considering the constantly advancing technical nature of the hobby...

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.

Re:First Person Issues

[Z0mb1eman]

Actually I've wanted to see this in a sports game (preferrably one of the FIFA games rather than an american football game) for at least 5 years now. The technology's been there forever, I'm disappointed that no one's attempted it yet.

There are many difficulties the developer would have to overcome, definitely. Guess what, that's why games cost so much to make. It is entirely possible - not easy, but possible - to make a good 1st person sports game, but it requires some original thinking. If you take one of the standard camera-above-the-field games and simply replace the camera with a first-person view, then obviously you won't have a good game. If you rethink the entire game - frankly, all the FIFA, Madden, NHL games are fundamentally built on the same principles, just different sport - then you can come up with something good.

There are tons of features I can think of to make even a single-player first person sports game work. First of all, switching players in first person would be WAY more confusing; build the game so that you don't have to (aren't allowed?) and can enjoy the game playing as only one player - potential for a true career mode and even a storyline. Naturally, this means that you need to have REALLY good team AI. You need to add cues that exist in real life but you don't need in a 3-rd person view: audio queues of your teammates shouting as they pass, so you know when they're passing to you; a trail behind the ball, so you can estimate its speed and direction better - much harder to do without depth perception, so you need the aid; an estimate of where the ball's gonna land on the field (a glowing circle on the field would do); etc. etc. This is me thinking about the problem for 10 minutes; I'm sure a team of developers planning for a month or two can do better.

You might argue that it wouldn't be as realistic; I think it wouldn't be VISUALLY as realistic, but I think it could be more immersive - and really, more realistic overall - than 3rd person games. And there are different challenges for every sport - football would be doable, I think - the main problem I can think of with soccer is being able to see the ball as you dribble - hockey would be much harder - but I really would say there is a LOT of potential. There's also potential for the development team to screw up every single chance they have to make it work; there's no way of knowing until the finished product.

And..... of course.... I haven't even touched multiplayer, where the real fun would be :)

Re:First Person Issues

[Arkaein]

22 person live games would be cool, but I'm not sure how well they'd work out. Football requires a lot of coordination, discipline and timing between its players. This is usually only achieved with a lot of practice and experience.

I think that, except for really hard core expert teams, much in the way of play calling would end up going out the window, as routes that require precision would not be run reliably. On defense it would be easy to blow coverage, and hard to coordinate things like line shifts or coverage audibles to adapt to the offensive formation. Maybe I'm wrong, but it all seems very complicated to execute.

Hopefully hype

[AvantLegion]

As someone that has enjoyed the NFL2K series (which has routinely been a better game than Madden, but lots of people just love the fat guy on the box), I'm wary of these moves.

At the same time, it may be pure hype. Maybe you can go into a first person mode, but if you choose not to, everything is just like the NFL2K games of the past few years. That would be a good idea. If someone wants to use the gimmick, they can. Hey, maybe they can even pull it off nicely. If they don't want to use it, they can avoid it.

That's how I imagine the implementation. It would be a grave mistake to do otherwise.

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?