I'm back again folks, bringing you some more additions and improvements that you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10. This week, I'm going to focus primarily on the QB position and show some of the improvements we've made for this year. First off, I'm going to talk about a new animation technology that we can call "layered blending".
Layered Blending
"Layered blending? I thought you were going to talk about quarterbacks?" You'll see shortly how this works for QB's. First, a quick lesson on what blending is. Anytime a player transitions from one animation to another, he will use a 'blend' of his previous animation into the next animation. When you don't have a nice smooth blend, you'll get poppy / hitching animations. If you make blends that are too long, you can easily not have the correct amount of control over your player (he can feel very 'sluggish' or unresponsive). The most common types of blends are linear, ease in, and ease out. Those just refer to how many frames of either the previous or current animation you use while blending. For Madden NFL 10 though, we've added something new - the ability to actually separate the blends out between different parts of the body. We call this layered blending because it allows us to create different layered animation by blending one part of the body out quicker or slower based on the needs of the game. So how does it relate to QB's? Well, how often has this happened to you?
(Note these are Madden NFL 09 screenshots)
Press the button to pass Sack animation starts, he tucks the ball away
I sure can't count on one hand how many times this has happened to me, and it's extremely frustrating, for hardcore and casual gamers alike. You hit the pass button, and you want to throw it! To try and alleviate this problem over the years, we've tried speeding up the release on pass animations, we've trimmed sack animations to be much tighter, as well as all sorts of other ways to make this problem go away. But this never quite solved it perfectly, and it inadvertently made our game a bit less realistic in the process. It's a tough problem though...when two animations start blending together, there was never really any other way around it.
I'm happy to report however that layered blending is the answer! When the sack animation starts, we can blend out the arm and shoulder of the QB at a MUCH slower rate to ensure that he gets the ball off. Here is a sample video of the tech in our ANT tool:
Obviously we had to do this on an animation-by-animation basis...you don't want the QB throwing the ball when a player has him wrapped up on his throwing arm. Immediately as soon as the tech went in, we realized what a great "sim" element we could turn this into by creating a real risk-reward of trying to get the ball off vs. taking the sack. We totally alter the physics of the ball on release based on how hard the QB is hit while throwing, and how far into the throw animation he was when he was sacked. If you were one frame from releasing the ball when you're hit, then the ball may just come out with some slight wobble. If you are hit right after you started the wind-up, you can expect some wounded duck floaters going up in to the air for the defense to go swarm to. These make for some very dramatic moments, which is a must when you're trying to re-create the 'essence' of NFL football. The great part too is that now we can return all our passes to normal speeds and make the passing game feeling more realistic since we don't have to worry about the 'suction sack'. :)
(For the inquiring minds, we were able to put this technology into NCAA Football 10 as well!)
New QB Ratings
Our next big change for the QB position was the addition of some new ratings. For countless years we've basically had Throw Power, Throw Accuracy, and Awareness as the only ratings for the QB position, so it's very hard to differentiate the players correctly and have them perform more like their real-life counterparts with just those few. For example, a superstar like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning would previously have a very high Throw Accuracy rating like a 98, well that had to be the case for a 5 yard screen or a 65 yard heave! Here are our new ratings:
1. Deep Ball Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on deep passes (streaks, deep posts, etc)
2. Medium Passing Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on medium passes (outs, corners, etc)
3. Short Passing Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on short passes (quick smash, flats, etc)
4. Throw on the Run: Creates a modifier to accuracy when the QB is throwing on the run. Every QB will take some sort of accuracy hit when throwing on the run, but a QB that has a high rating here will take a smaller hit.
5. Play Action: Determines the 'effectiveness' of Play Action for a QB, i.e. how often they can fake out or freeze the defense (which is obviously weighted against the defenders Play Recognition ratings)
With Donny's new philosophy on ratings, the addition of these ratings immediately made the game play VERY differently than in years past. Chucking up the deep ball with a QB with high throw power but bad accuracy is definitely a recipe for disaster! We have recently been doing tuning to scale down these effects on the lower skill levels because QB's are way more inaccurate than you're used to seeing, and we felt this would be a little too hard to play for a casual player. Rest assured though, on All Pro and All Madden, we will have a much more realistic representation of accuracy for the QB's. I know I've read many times that in the past it seems that the only incomplete passes in Madden are either swatted, dropped, or intercepted...that is definitely no longer the case.
The other change that was made once we got in all these accuracy changes was to change our accuracy 'algorithm'. Previously there was a big circle that got drawn around the player and we picked a random point in that circle based on the rating check. However, you could get pretty unpredictable results in this system. I'll show you why in the case of an out route headed towards the sideline:
Even if we determined that it should be an inaccurate pass behind him, it could end up hitting the WR right in the numbers since he could slow down as the ball was released. So we changed this up to match more of a realistic system based on what an NFL QB would do. Here is the NEW system:
We implemented across the board based on the 'err on the side of caution' aspect. Good QB's will put the ball where only their receiver can get it, and bad QB's, well, they'll at least try to do that.
We also used this concept for precision passing. It always felt strange to be holding 'down' on a precision pass on a curl route, only to have the ball sail over the player's head. The new algorithm will err on the direction that you are holding...so if you are trying to throw it to low to a player on a quick smash, you would put it in the dirt (assuming that your QB's short accuracy rating determined the pass would be inaccurate). Eagles fans probably know this phenomenon all too well.
Well that's it for this week. We definitely feel these changes will really help make our game much more realistic and authentic, and also improve control, responsiveness, and even accessibility along with it. There are quite a few more improvements coming to the passing game and QB's in general, but it will be a little while until we release that information (as we aren't quite sure how far we're going to get yet).
We'd like to hear from you guys though! Some topics for discussion:
- What do you think we should rate your favorite QB in the new ratings above? Donny would love to hear it.
- Have any ideas of other places we could possibly use layered blending that we may not have thought of?