NCAA Football 10: Player pursuit angles

Alright it’s time to take another look at NCAA Football 10. The design team has covered a wide array of info from Custom Conferences to our First Look into QA Auto Pass. We’ve really only begun to scratch the surface of this year’s game and we haven’t even hinted about a few of the biggest additions. Sadly we still are not ready to talk about them yet, but from reading all the comments and messages boards… I know one in particular will be a fan favorite.

This week we are going to cover the Player Pursuit Angles and how they have improved from last year’s game. First let’s take a look at an example of last year:

You can see the defenders gave up huge play due to the angle they took. The entire team took a bad angle instead of trying to intercept the ball carrier down field. Basically you could gain extra yards (or a touchdown) because defenders would use the sideline and while trying to make a tackle. Let’s look at the same situation in NCAA Football 10:

So instead of allowing the ball carrier to beat the whole defense to the sideline the defenders took a much better angle to stop a TD. What this means is all the extra yards picked up by just running to the sideline will be greatly reduced. Now if you are still able to get to the outside on a defense there are still yards to be had; but a much more reasonable amount.

The next example is from last year’s game as well:



The reasons behind that video come from a few different factors… Defenders would take the exact direction the ball carrier was using to calculate their pursuit angle. So if you were a “twitchy” runner the defenders would continue to change directions while still attempting to chase you. This would cause the defenders to slow down each direction change and not get to the ball carrier as fast as possible (or at all in the worst examples). Now for NCAA Football 10:



As you can see given the same situation as our previous example the defenders are not thrown off their angle by the direction changes. Long story short… the defenders do not fall for every direction change, but instead will move to intercept the ball carrier at a more logical location. This will really cut down on the effectiveness of “twitch” runs.

Also the new Player Pursuit will recognize a ball carrier pulling away from a slower defender and make them attempt a diving tackle. This creates more tackles and more realistic chase situations… more often than not a player will attempt a dive as a last ditched effort when they know they are falling behind, not just continue to follow the ball carrier.

That isn’t all; this new system has allowed us to have defenders sometimes take a bad angle using the Pursuit Rating (PUR) of the player. Bad pursuit is a part of football, not every player will play the perfect angle every play. So playing against lower rated players (or younger players with lower PUR) you will see them over run a play allowing the ball carrier to cut back against the gain and pick up some more yards.

And that is a wrap for this week’s look into NCAA Football 10. Leave your thoughts here or on our Forums.

-Russell Kiniry
Designer NCAA Football 10