Basic Premise
Operating under the assumption that the NCAA wants nothing
to do with college video games as it stands, this game will be an unlicensed
game. No real universities, players, conferences or stadiums will ship with the
game. Instead the game will ship with fictional universities, stadiums and
conferences. However, there will be incredibly robust customization options for
teams, players, stadiums, uniforms, conferences, post-season, etc. These
customization systems will allow for image files such
as logos to be uploaded. Using these customization systems, users will be able
to re-create real universities, their uniforms, their players, their stadiums,
their conferences and more. Users will then be able to upload these re-created
universities to file-share for all users to download for free. Considering the
enormous community that currently updates the rosters for NCAA Football 2014, it’s certainly feasible that a sizable
community would be eager & willing to essentially re-create the teams, stadiums
& conferences that make up FBS football.
Utility
Beyond FBS Football
A game like this does not have to end at re-creating FBS
college football. Perhaps members of the community re-create the FCS ranks or
Division 2 & 3 NCAA football. These are ranks that have obviously never
been featured in a college football video game. Or perhaps you or someone in
your local community creates your state’s high school teams. Maybe a 12-year-old
wants to create his youth football teams and play with his teammates. Maybe you
want to make up your own completely fictional college football universe. A
setup like this is so ripe for fostering creativity and it would be a blast to
see what the community would create.
Dynasty
Mode
Very similar to dynasty mode as it stands on NCAA Football 2014. Players can play with the fictional teams that ship with the game, create their
own team, or use the file share system to download all the current teams &
conferences as created by the community. Players will be able to schedule non-conference games, play
through seasons, manage their depth chart & recruit.
Players will also be able to set things such as the # of
conference games you’d like to play, whether or not to play a conference
championship game and re-arrange the conferences in the off-season.
Recruiting
There are 2 options for recruiting in Dynasty Mode:
1. For users who don’t like to recruit & want
the feature to be as non-invasive as possible, a streamlined recruiting system
similar to the one featured in NCAA
Football 2014 can be used. Under this system, players simply have an
allotted number of weekly points to spend on recruiting in-season. A higher
number of points can be spent on higher priority targets or targets that
need a little more swaying. Points can also be spent on scheduling official
visits, scouting players, etc. How these points are managed is up to the user.
Each prospect on your board will list their top schools and how much points that
school has. You can re-adjust the point totals weekly when needed. For
example, your school may have 12,500 points on a prospect, while your rival has
14,025. His decision date is coming up. Looks like you need to allocate more
points to this prospect if you want to snag him!
2. For users who want a more robust recruiting experience,
a brand-new recruiting system will be in place for this game. Here there will
be a recruiting budget. The size of your budget will depend on your school’s
financial situation, how good your job security is, etc. That budget can be
spent on scouting players and in-home visits with recruits.
Once you’ve scouted players & created a
board, you can call players & schedule in home visits, but be careful.
Visiting recruits who live further away will eat into your budget a little more. And each week you will have an allotted amount of time available to spend calling recruits. During a call or visit, you will talk to the prospect via an RPG-like dialogue
tree. During these conversations you can find out what that prospect likes,
what he dislikes and what he doesn’t really care about. Are academics
important? What about your coaching staff’s reputation? Your recent success?
Facilities? The schemes you run? Proximity to home? Early playing time? By
gauging their interest on these topics, you can pitch your school appropriately
throughout the conversation. You can schedule a longer call where you will be
able to answer more questions and make more pitches, but then you will have
less allotted time to spend on other recruits.
When the time comes, you can schedule an
official visit with the recruit. You can tailor what the prospect does during a
visit based on their interests. Perhaps one would rather take a tour of
downtown while another would rather tour the academic resources. At the end of
the official visit, a recruit will give you a short pop-up paragraph recapping
how the visit went. If you scheduled his visit appropriately, he’ll give you
great feedback & perhaps commit on the spot. If he’s interested in the social
life & you sent him to tour the academic facilities, he’ll tell you he
didn’t have the greatest time. If he’s super into facilities & you sent him
on a tour of your facilities, but your facilities are crap he’ll tell you he’s
seen better, etc.
Each week, when visiting the recruiting
page you can view your standing with a prospect, schedule visits & make calls with your
allotted time for that week. On each prospect’s profile you will be able to see
your scouting report on him & see where you stand. He will either
be Very Cold, Cold, Neutral, Mildly Interested, Interested and Very Interested.
Once you become Very Cold prospects will no longer accept calls or visits from
you. Prospects will also post a Top 20 toward the beginning of the recruiting
cycle and gradually shrink it into a Top 15, Top 10, Top 5 and Final 2 as the
cycle goes on. If they have announced a commitment date, that will also be
displayed on their profile so make sure to get your visits in & prioritize
calls accordingly! You will receive a notification when a prospect on your
board becomes Very Cold, announces a new Top Schools list or commits, either to
you or another school.
On other tabs on the recruiting page you
can view your remaining budget, view a scholarship distribution chart &
team needs by position.
Postseason
By default, the Dynasty Mode post-season
will be a 4-team playoff with 35 generic bowls. You will be able to expand the
playoff to 8, 16, 32 & even up to 64 teams if you want a crazy March
Madness style tournament for football. It’s a video game. Player safety isn’t
an issue here! You can adjust the settings to allow for the top-ranked teams to
make the playoff or to have conference champions automatically qualify.
Players will also be able to set how many
bowls are played & even be able to create Custom Bowls by creating the
bowl’s name, selecting the stadium, selecting a date & uploading image
files for the bowl’s logo. This can be used to re-create existing bowls, but
also to create any ridiculous bowl game you want, such as the Scrubbing Bubbles Toilet Bowl. You will also have the ability to create conference alignments for your
larger, more prestigious bowls. Doing this also allows you to create “Power”
conferences whose members have larger recruiting budgets and better seedings
for whatever post-season you select.
Perhaps you want to abandon the playoff altogether
& return to a BCS style system, although obviously called something
different. And if you’re really nostalgic, you can revert to the pre-BCS days
of the national champion being voted on after the bowls. Here you are not
guaranteed a #1 vs. #2 matchup as conference-bowl alignments may not allow for
it. This means you run the risk of a split national title as the generic
coaches’ poll & writer’s polls may not agree.
Online Modes
Players will be able to play exhibition
games against others online using any of the generic teams available on the
base game or any custom teams they have created or downloaded.
An online dynasty mode similar to NCAA Football 14’s mode of the same name
will also be available. Friends can compete throughout several seasons using
any of the generic teams available on the base game or any custom teams they
have created or downloaded.
Tournament Mode allows you to submit your
custom team into a 4, 8, 16, 32 or 64 team tournament with friends or matched
players online. However, you must be available for all the slotted times for
each round or you will forfeit the game. From time to time, official tournament
events hosted by the developer may become available.
Features to Consider in Future Installments
Because so much of this proposed game is
customizable and able to be updated by the community yearly, annual
installments of this franchise are not wise. However, a hungry market exists
for a college football video game & one this robust would certainly find a
sizable enough audience to make development of this series a worthwhile
endeavor for a developer. A new installment once every 2-3 years that includes
new features as well as updated graphics, mechanics and physics would be much
more realistic.
Therefore, here's a list of new features
to consider in future installments. Because creating this proposed game from
scratch will already take a considerable amount of time and resources, these
features are better left on the backburner for now.
Assistant
Coaches
Hire, fire, promote & poach up to 9 assistants in Dynasty Mode with the inclusion of assistants. As head coach, a
salary pool will be available for you to spend on assistant coaches and how you
divvy that money between them is up to you. Pay an assistant too little and he
may leave for another job. Pay one too much and other coaches may find their
paychecks too small and you’ll soon find them poached away.
Assistants affect the overall performance
of their position group. A top-shelf RB coach may add stats such as +4
carrying, +3 pass blocking, +2 trucking to your position group whereas a
mediocre coach may only add +1 carrying, +1 pass blocking, +2 trucking, etc.
Certain assistants also may have specific scheme preferences as well. An RB
coach used to an option system may add more points to stats such as trucking,
but contribute nothing to pass blocking, etc. so fit is also something to
consider.
Assistants will also assist in recruiting.
You can assign assistants as lead recruiters for each prospect on your board up
to a set maximum amount per coach. They will each have unique connections to certain parts
of the country, so assign them accordingly. If you just want to recruit the
south, hire assistants who all have connections there. If you want to recruit
nationally, hire accordingly.
Assistants will continue to grow as they
gain experience. Your mediocre QB coach may become a great one if your
quarterbacks do well throughout your dynasty. That also means they will become
more likely to be poached & will demand a higher salary. Pay them that
salary and you risk upsetting another coach. But don’t worry. Keep winning and
your assistant salary pool will gradually increase.
Athletic
Director Mode
Basically, Dynasty Mode with a little more
management involved. In this mode, players will still play the games and manage
their team as usual but will have the added step of also assuming the AD chair.
The AD has an annual budget to manage &
must decide how to allocate resources. Beyond overseeing the football program,
you will be given notifications on how the other sports programs are doing.
Being a football game, obviously your first priority is the football program,
but if other major programs like basketball or baseball begin to decline, fans
will start calling for your head. To continue overseeing the football program,
you must use a reasonable amount of your budget to maintain the other programs.
This includes allocating money to hire better coaches, set recruiting
budgets and upgrade facilities for other sports. You can also increase your assistant salary
pool for football, upgrade the weight room or build a new stadium, but doing so
may take too much money from other programs, causing them to decline.
Increase your budget by setting ticket
prices to as much as you think the market can hold, creating winning programs
across the board, keeping boosters happy & voting on conference revenue
agreements. Moving to a new conference may also improve your budget. As
athletic director, you even have the ability to greenlight payment of players.
This gives assistant coaches a significant boost to their recruiting stats but
get too carried away and you run the risk of being caught and fired.
Community
Hub for Online Mode
Players can create a custom athlete and
freely roam with other players online in an open hub-world set in a generic
university’s player facilities. Here you can find other players to face off with in
an online match, sign up for tournaments, compete in various mini-games, show
off your avatar's swag & interact via chat & emotes.
Mini-games include weight lifting
mini-games in the weight room or games such as darts and pool in the player’s
lounge. Go to the practice field to challenge someone to drills or more
arcade-style mini-games such as the tug of war or bowling mini-games featured
in older NCAA football video games.
Competing in these mini-games as well as
winning online matches will increase your player's “Rep.” Increasing your Rep allows you
to unlock new swag and apparel for your avatar. Some items may be exclusively
unlocked by winning tournaments.
And if absolutely necessary to sustain the
profitability of the franchise, these items can be available as micro-transactions.
Custom
Rules
Want to make a field goal worth 4 points
and touchdowns worth 9? Go ahead. How about a touchback that sets the ball on
the 2? Not sure why you would, but you do you. Here you can move PATs back to
the 20 yard line, give teams 5 downs and make first downs 15 yards. Maybe holding is now a 30 yard penalty. Sure, why not? Hell, let’s make the field 150
yards long.
Maybe there’s always been that one rule in
football that’s never made sense to you. Well now you can tweak it. Maybe you
just prefer requiring 2 feet in bounds for a catch. Or maybe you just love
chaos and want to make the game as nonsensical as possible. No judgement here.
Other
Versions of Football
While we’re at it, why not make playing
8-man football possible? Above I suggested making this game customizable enough
to allow for people to re-create their high school teams. Well what if you’re a
kid who lives in small town Wyoming and plays on your school’s 8-man team?
Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten you. Or maybe you love Canadian football with
their weird extra long fields & goal posts smack dab in the middle of the
freakishly deep endzone. Sounds like fun!
How about taking the game back to its rugby
roots and outlawing the forward pass?
Leatherhead
Mode
If you really want to play football the
old-school way, Leatherhead Mode will include more uniform customizations to allow for leather
helmets, those extra baggy pants and the long sleeve sweaters they wore instead
of jerseys. Once again, video games are 100% concussion free!
Additions to the stadium builder would
allow for the creation of more old-school stadiums that are filled in with fans
wearing 1920s-1940s attire. Gone are the modern video boards and sound systems.
Leatherhead Mode removes the modern commentary and replaces the modern
broadcast display with a more old-timey looking hub that includes the score,
down and distance and time remaining.
Re-create the glorious ivy-league rivalries
of the past! Let the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse from Notre Dame ride again!
Experience a time when Minnesota was dominant! All possible in Leatherhead
Mode.
Even
More Customization
·
Create a
Fan: Customize the facial features, hair, gender, skin tone and attire of a
fan who will sometimes appear during crowd shots in the middle of the game.
Create as many as you want and the game will shuffle through them during the
“broadcast.”
·
Create a
Mascot: Custom build your team’s mascot who will appear on the sidelines.
Try to recreate a real mascot or create your own unique monstrosity.
·
Custom
Music: Upload music files and set them to play during specific points. Play
“Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones before kickoff or Darude’s “Sandstorm” after
a turnover. Maybe play “Jump Around” before the 4th quarter in your
“totally not Camp Randall Stadium” stadium. Or for that authentic college
experience, upload your team’s fight song and set it to play after a touchdown.
Or maybe upload an audio file of a college band’s drumline to rumble in the
background between plays. Add as many songs as you want for each category so
the game can randomly shuffle. All audio would be distorted to sound like it's coming from the PA system in the stadium.
Why This, or At Least Some of This, May Soon Be a Reality!
IMV Gaming, a company founded 2 or 3 years
ago on the dream of returning college football video games, is attempting to
make a game similar to the Basic Premise
at the beginning of this article. So far it’s called Gridiron Champions but
unfortunately most of their work so far has been in silence and they have only
revealed a few details. We currently have no idea how far along they are, if
they are capable of making a game with good enough graphics and production value
or when a possible release date may be. There’s no reason why a major developer
like 2K Sports couldn’t create this game and maybe they will once this model
proves viable by a company such as IMV Gaming or indie developers.
To read the few details IMV Gaming has
released on their project, visit their website here.
The rest of this article is from my own
imagination. I wrote this proposal to show
people that a college football video game can still be done and to create buzz for one. Not only is there
potential to create a great college football video game again, but there’s
potential to create one better than we’ve ever seen before. Not being licensed
by the NCAA doesn’t have to be a limitation. In fact it can be tremendous
advantage as it creates the potential for more innovation, especially along the
lines of team-building customization options. I mean no officially licensed NCAA game would ever allow you to skirt the rules and pay players at your own risk.
When there’s a willing &
active community with the right tools, not only can we re-create the college football we know and
love in a video game, but we can create so much
more as well.
If you don’t think this is possible or that
the community would be willing to re-create all these teams, uniforms and
stadiums, then check
out this mod of Madden 19 that will soon be available for players on the PC
to download for free. This is a mod, meaning this is a completely community
driven effort. EA Sports did not create these assets. A mod means they simply
opened up the game’s code and let others mess around with it as they pleased. It’s
not perfect and certainly doesn’t replace a genuine college football game, but
if this much can be accomplished within a game designed to be an NFL game,
imagine what could be done with a game engineered to be a college football
video game with all the customization tools built in for you and others to
create with?
No EA Sports licensed college football video
game would ever give you the ability to customize the college football
post-season like this proposed game. No EA Sports game would ever allow you to
re-create FCS teams like this or create stadiums with as much detail as proposed. But give the tools to a
community of fans who deeply love college football and you’ll be amazed by what
can be created.
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