Review: Playtest Review/Preview(Review Links, Updated in First Post)

[k p 24]

Convinced enough to buy this game for my PS3 sitting here in Canada.

[hMarka]

where are the AUS reviewers? C'mon Aussies c'mon were dying here!

[hsmith1978]

Hey guys, just thought I'd de-lurk and post a quick correction and some comments.

First off, thanks for the great reaction so far, we know you guys are our harshest critics! We appreciate the honesty as well.

What I wanted to clarify was:

"You can bowl 'bad balls' by not getting into the light green section of the bowling 'goodness meter', but that just makes the ball easier to hit harder, rather than changing its pitch position"

This is actually incorrect.

The bowler has a bowling reticule circle. This circle is larger for worse skilled bowlers, as in the point the bowler bowls to when he releases the ball will potentially vary more for bad bowlers, and less for good bowlers. Hope that makes sense!

Depending on how well the bowler executes the delivery, the point will resolve to a different place. Bowl a 'perfect' delivery and it will resolve to the middle of the circle. Bowl a bad delivery, and the worse you bowl it, the further it can be pushed out to the outer edge of the circle (it will bounce randomly within this radius).

"Or at least have a bigger aiming circle for worse bowlers which then goes to a specific point at a time dependent on the bowler's ability"

This is partially correct. There is a bigger aiming circle for worse bowlers, but the point it resolves to is up to the user's skill. The point of this is, the handicap is the size of the circle, so the user's inaccuracy is magnified by the skill (or lack of) of the bowler.

If we had it resolve randomly to a point within the circle based on the bowler's ability, we would take control away from the player, and bowling would be a frustrating experience i.e. "i bowled perfect on the meter and got perfect aiming, but my ball resolved to a bad place on the pitch, that's not fair!"

The point of this mechanic is, the bowler's skill is your handicap essentially, and this is expressed in the size of the reticule circle, and this the potential points it can resolve to based on how well YOU execute it.

We found that, in our testing, the 'wobble' mechanic on the reticule frustrated players, since no matter how good they were, they were fighting an unnatural movement of the reticule just to try and aim the ball, while at the same time dealing with the bowling meter a second later. This made it incredibly difficult to bowl the ball, and made bowling take a step back to the fairly punishing exercise it was in previous cricket games. Yes, it is now somewhat easier to aim your delivery, but with the addition of aiming quality to take into account (spin, swing, line, length), and the batsman's ability to specify footwork, we believe it is a slightly different, but better overall experience for the bowler this time around (which is the feedback we've been getting).

Cheers,

Heath

Originally Posted by lazy_chesnut

I said I would post some more reaction to my playtest and here we go:

Fielding
The fielding mechanics are, in general, good. There is heavy usage of Jamie's risk/reward mantra in the fielding. Firstly there is the catching. As we all know by now, when a catch is on offer, the ball gets a coloured corona, going from red to orange to green. Press X/A or whatever in the red and you drop it, in the green you catch it, and in the orange, it depends on how near to the green you were, and also on the abilities of the player. I suspect there may be some dependence on the catch difficulty, but I'm not really sure about that. I found that this works pretty well, and even though the game is slowed to 'bullet-time' during the catching process, you still need good reactions and timing to succeed. The best point about this system compared to 2007 is that it actually feels like it was your fault if you drop it, rather than because the game cheated you (I know this idea was something Jamie was keen on throughout the entire game, and it shows).

Ground fielding is automatic and is well executed by the fielders, who behave quite realistically. For example, if you have a guy a short extra cover, and you smack it straight at him, he will probably stop it, rather than running off like a loony as in 2007. When it comes to throwing, you can either press nothing, in which case the ball is returned to the 'keeper (and I think with 0% chance of overthrows, but I may be wrong) with a kind throw. If there is a chance of a run-out, you can use the right stick to direct the throw to either end, and the end glows orange in the picture-in-picture of the pitch. This leads to a much harder throw, and can result in overthrows, especially if you throw to the bowler's end before the bowler (or someone else) has got to cover the stumps. These powerful throws along with the cool running-between-the-wickets system lead to genuine excitement when there is a run-out chance, especially when an attempted direct hit misses with you clean out of your ground.


Bad Points
These are all the bad points I can think of about the game, in no particular order.

Strange, out of context animations
During slip catches, often the slip will be running in whilst catching the ball, which looks a bit odd, but doesn't affect the way it plays. It's not every time, but more often than seems proper.

Crazy 'keeper
The wicket keeper still does his one-handed takes when the ball is wide of him, rather than moving his feet. Again, this is aesthetic and doesn't affect the way the game plays. Also, the 'keeper seemed to take some stupendous catches off edges from spinners. I'm talking diving catches with about 1ft of reaction time.

Overthrows
I'm not entirely sure on this one, but it seemed that there were slightly too many overthrows going on. However, this may have been because I was always choosing a powerful throw, even when there wasn't really a run-out chance. Time will tell on this one.

Loopy bounce
Already covered in this thread, but it seems that the bounce of the pitch is too high still.

Too many back-foot shots to full balls
I suspect that this may be due to the bounce of the ball being a bit tennis-bally, but basically, the default shots tend to sway heavily towards back-foot shots even when the ball would be too full to play that way in real life. Which leads onto....

'Good' length is actually a pretty bad length
When bowling, your cursor will change colour to tell you if the ball is aiming in a good position, but this 'good' position seems invariably to be a half-volley on or outside off-stump. Possibly due to the too-loopy bounce.

Dodgy cut shots to third man still in
A few times, the CPU spanked me for 6 over fine third man. This really made me cringe.

Test Match Batting AI
On hard difficulty, I got spanked for around 10 an over. However, this may have been because I had got the bowling marker colour the wrong way around, thinking green meant good for the bowler, when it actually means, easy for the batsman. Once their confidence was up they went mental.

No online save games
Same as in 2007, there is no way of saving a Test match online, which is a big shame. This is especially true if the AI isn't the best, and has the potential to make 'The Ashes' pointless.

When will I ever bowl a bad ball?
You can aim your delivery wherever you like, with no difficulty. This means you can essentially bowl perfect line and length every ball. You can bowl 'bad balls' by not getting into the light green section of the bowling 'goodness meter', but that just makes the ball easier to hit harder, rather than changing its pitch position (there is a good reason for this, which is that bowling a 'bad ball' would surprise the batsman and therefore make it a better ball). It would be nice if there was some degree of wobbling, latency or classic 'BLC99 floating' of the pitch point marker when aiming. Or at least have a bigger aiming circle for worse bowlers which then goes to a specific point at a time dependent on the bowler's ability (better bowlers should go to the specific point later on). There would then be some random element to the pitch point, which could be affected by skill, stamina, confidence, etc. At the moment the skill, stamina and confidence values only work with the 'goodness meter' to effectively give you a ball difficulty rating for the batsman to hit. This seems a little shallow to me. I'm sure it'll be worked on for the next version though.


That's the lot unless I can think of any others later on.

[hMarka]

wonderful! thanks Heath,
could you confirm that the bowler speeds will be up to this years standards? I would hate to have Steyn and Anderson only bowling medium pacers

[FaWaD]

Looks promissing. My only concern is AI now.
Since you guys didn't get to experience that bit, it will be a huge gamble for people who like to play the game with co-op in mind.

Secondly, in BLC2007, there was an option of 2 vs 2, a good party feature. Although we can still do it by swapping joysticks, but it would have been a great option to have that included.

I just hope it is the way you guys presented it or even better. I just don't like to wait till August (or whenever the release date is) having high expectations like last time and get disappointed.

Its funny everytime I feel that this would be my last cricket game due to the poor AI and cricket mechanics and then I come back and get excited with every new release.

[sami ullah khan]

Well I think One of the reviewers did mention that AI was reacting to match situation both in bowling and batting. I hope they chase and defend well.

sami ullah khan added 1 Minutes and 18 Seconds later...

Originally Posted by Hmarkas

wonderful! thanks Heath,
could you confirm that the bowler speeds will be up to this years standards? I would hate to have Steyn and Anderson only bowling medium pacers

Bowlers's pace has to accurate to make the game better than the previous ones. I mean anderson bowling at 75MPH will seem so pathetic. I hope they sort it out before the release.

[deepuparayil]

Please reveal more about AI.

[dhaka warriors]

What a pathetic game this gona be, What's the point of making a cricket game if there is gona be NO STATS?. Am surprised and shocked that ppl here are talking about this and that but not saying anything about stats? stats is one of the if not the main aspect of cricket, Its like making a football game without a ball or transfer market, How stupid. I will be not be buying this crap game. For me stats are important.

P.s Why didn't anybody ask that james or jamie guy about stats in the game??? if i was there i would cause a havok and make them understand that cricket and stats are like honey and bee. Why make a cricket game if you don't know crap all about cricket???

just hit the ball and ball, is that it?? so whats gona happen after a week?? am gona get bored. If there were stats then i would've played for a longer time to improve my stats.. so as always these makers have let us down. And you guys are like oh wow its a great game.. no its not. its just a crap game.

[hMarka]

Originally Posted by dhaka warriors

What a pathetic game this gona be, What's the point of making a cricket game if there is gona be NO STATS?. Am surprised and shocked that ppl here are talking about this and that but not saying anything about stats? stats is one of the if not the main aspect of cricket, Its like making a football game without a ball or transfer market, How stupid. I will be not be buying this crap game. For me stats are important.

P.s Why didn't anybody ask that james or jamie guy about stats in the game??? if i was there i would cause a havok and make them understand that cricket and stats are like honey and bee. Why make a cricket game if you don't know crap all about cricket???

just hit the ball and ball, is that it?? so whats gona happen after a week?? am gona get bored. If there were stats then i would've played for a longer time to improve my stats.. so as always these makers have let us down. And you guys are like oh wow its a great game.. no its not. its just a crap game.

lol someone has anger issues, dude no one said whether there are stats or not , so you might have your panties in a bunch for no reason

[chaitanyaraghav]

@Heath
could you please tell us whether the loopy bounce will be rectified in the final build? or provide a patch later on?

Thanks!

[surendar]

Originally Posted by hsmith1978

Hey guys, just thought I'd de-lurk and post a quick correction and some comments.

First off, thanks for the great reaction so far, we know you guys are our harshest critics! We appreciate the honesty as well.

Cheers,
Heath

Thanks for the clarification provided, Heath! And for the critics points, I can understand how tough it is to take a critic from the end users but I am sure that, those will definitely help in improving the quality of the next builds.

I would request you to ignore some of the crazy critics and take only the valid ones. May be some people are so furious with the previous versions of the cricket games released in the year 2007 that they are refusing to accept this one at their first sight.

After realizing that lot of hard works have been applied in this, I am sure that this game is right on the track of cricket!

Originally Posted by Hmarkas

wonderful! thanks Heath,
could you confirm that the bowler speeds will be up to this years standards? I would hate to have Steyn and Anderson only bowling medium pacers

Yes that was my concern too especially for non-licenced players like Steyn, Zaheer, Ishant, Gul, Taylor, Malinga etc etc.

May be the member who played as Sri Lanka can tell about Malinga's speed. I am keeping my fingers crossed on this issue.

Originally Posted by dhaka warriors

What a pathetic game this gona be, What's the point of making a cricket game if there is gona be NO STATS?. Am surprised and shocked that ppl here are talking about this and that but not saying anything about stats? stats is one of the if not the main aspect of cricket, Its like making a football game without a ball or transfer market, How stupid. I will be not be buying this crap game. For me stats are important.

Did you realize in the first place that they(developers) are trying to set the basics of the cricket right? i.e batting, bowling, AI, fielding etc. Developing a code for 2 years and make it work in the right way is not an easy joke. Learn to appreciate the hard efforts rather than criticizing it.

[stevo1]

Originally Posted by Hmarkas

where are the AUS reviewers? C'mon Aussies c'mon were dying here!

Again! Not until either tonight (MELBOURNE TIME), or tomorrow (when I'll be posting my thoughts.)

[batonage]

hey everybody!!

first post...great work by lazy and kamy, thahnks heaps for your hardwork. I'm an old fan of EA cricket and completely unfamiliar with BL/RP games. I have read through all forums and can appreciate the frustrations that players have experienced with previous builds. This new version sounds like it may have solved a lot of the issues.

I understand there has been some heat in the comparison between EA and BL/RP, but don't care given there's only 1 next gen game about to be released.

My question is regarding 'keepers. In Cricket07 is was impossible to stump a player (when bowling), is it possible in Ashes 2009? And has it been possible in versions?

I'm a huge fan of bowling so have some concerns re bounce, but i can't wait!!

Thanks again everyone who has expanded my cricket gaming.

[The_gas]

Tom the 2600pro whilst a slightly dated low end card should have no troubles running the game at low/medium settings.

[nz0003]

Originally Posted by dhaka warriors

What a pathetic game this gona be, What's the point of making a cricket game if there is gona be NO STATS?. Am surprised and shocked that ppl here are talking about this and that but not saying anything about stats? stats is one of the if not the main aspect of cricket, Its like making a football game without a ball or transfer market, How stupid. I will be not be buying this crap game. For me stats are important.

P.s Why didn't anybody ask that james or jamie guy about stats in the game??? if i was there i would cause a havok and make them understand that cricket and stats are like honey and bee. Why make a cricket game if you don't know crap all about cricket???

just hit the ball and ball, is that it?? so whats gona happen after a week?? am gona get bored. If there were stats then i would've played for a longer time to improve my stats.. so as always these makers have let us down. And you guys are like oh wow its a great game.. no its not. its just a crap game.

If you're that worried about stats make an excel sheet and do it yourself. Cricket's about having a good time and trying to win, not about a couple of stats that tell you your batting and bowling average. If that's all you want in a game, go play Cricket 07 with shitty game play.