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...