RUGBY 24 announced...

[esoj]

I think if they haven't released anything by the end of July they will be in trouble to release anything that is still close to being up to date. By the end of July they should have had enough time to scan all the super rugby teams and during those months they could be able to scan players in international teams as they will be in squads and playing games. Teams like England and Wales coming down to NZ and Aus during those months so they will be a lot closer for the Big Ant team to scan them while they are down in that part of the world.

a demo with just some super rugby teams would be good but the big ant demos tend to just be the fanhub editor and not the actual game.

 

[Michaelwalsh]

Early Access launching this Friday June 28th, game has now been re-named to Rugby 25

 

[Don't Skip Leg Day]

Renaming the game is probably the only positive thing they've done so far…..but will they update all the teams and squads, that's the real question!

 

[TRF_Olyy]

Announcing early access for the following day, while saying the gameplay is nowhere near finished, sounds like they've run out of cash

 

[saulan]

Such a weird move to not release any proper trailer or gameplay videos before you launch it. Seems the first view anyone will get of what the game looks like or runs like and it's underlying features will be on the Steam page screenshots and trailer video.

All this consistent focus on the player photogrammetry and then in this release to say AI and player movement are in experimental phase seems to confirm that there were bigger issues that they were dealing with on the gameplay in the backend.

Feeling a bit more pessimistic about this than I have been before.

 

[saulan]

Steam page for reference

 

[saulan]

Oof - available modes in early access are offline quick play and custom competition modes. Can't really be blaming the delays on photogrammetry if on early access release the functionality of a career mode of any kind is not there (which is a staple in their other sports games and in other rugby games in general, albeit generally rugby game career mode depth is pretty limited).

Also 50GB seems quite chunky for something supposedly of limited features and teams. Will have to wait and see what the videos of others playing it looks like. I've bought it, but will only be able to download it in the evening.

 

[Not Mike Brown's Sock]

Mine is downloading now, so I'll let you all know

 

[Not Mike Brown's Sock]

Yeah... soooo.... Worse than even expected

 

[saulan]

Found some Twitch streamers playing it. Looks quite rough. Quite a bit of a step back from Rugby 22 in terms of player move abilities and strategic pieces like set plays. Took some screenshots below of their stream. Ratings are clearly a WIP 86 being highest seems low, and that being shared between France, South Africa and... Scotland seems an interesting choice.

Added to that, looks like the non-scanned teams are just called tehir numbers. You can see in the screenshots Argentina, Scotland and South Africa player names are just their positions.












Edit: that is not my cursor, that is the streamers cursor - before I get any sass about not knowing how to screenshot properly

 

[Stade Rochelais]

There is big progress in terms of fluidity of play and movement. The rugby 25 designers finally understood that it was necessary to take inspiration from rugby league live.
Rugby 25 will be, with a few updates, a great success.
It's a leap forward compared to Rugby 22 which was correct

 

[esoj]

Announcing early access for the following day, while saying the gameplay is nowhere near finished, sounds like they've run out of cash

Or possibly under pressure by nacon to put something out after the game has nearly been delayed a full year.
It does seem very sudden with no real build through other marketing other than saying hey the game is out in early access tomorrow.

It is interesting it seems like another very early access release. Tiebreak another game bu big ant that started out in early access was similarly blamed for launching with quite a lock of features.
The one good thing about this new early access release strategy is the price.. In nz on steam instead of it being the normal $90 they charge for a lot of previous big ant games rugby 25 is only $54.95 which is a bit more fair of a price.

I wish we had more choice for rugby games but this seems like the only game in town for now so I have just bought it now and have it downloading.

 

[esoj]

Oof - available modes in early access are offline quick play and custom competition modes. Can't really be blaming the delays on photogrammetry if on early access release the functionality of a career mode of any kind is not there (which is a staple in their other sports games and in other rugby games in general, albeit generally rugby game career mode depth is pretty limited).

Also 50GB seems quite chunky for something supposedly of limited features and teams. Will have to wait and see what the videos of others playing it looks like. I've bought it, but will only be able to download it in the evening.

it seems quite accurate for size my steam download was 43.9 gb with the actuall install folder size just of 53gb so it seems whatever they have scanned in for the players is at least in theory of some quality.

I would love to have a career mode at the start of early access is this is the reason I buy rugby games as I play them singleplayer only hopefully we don't have to wait too long until there is some kind of career mode. I can understand though why they didn't put it in as it is way easier to get data off other modes like quickplay where games can happen a lot faster. Data and feedback is what they want in early access especially in the beginning of the process when the game may not be that stable.

Another reason why they won't want to put career mode in straight away is because of the unfinished photogrammetry, it's just a bad look if the players don't actually look like the real players in an extended game mode like career where you see the players a lot more often. They do seem to have licensed a lot of competitions which does give hope that a career mode when it does come could be good at least from licensing side of things. It is good to see they even have some of the lesser known competitions like the MLR licensed.

 

[Bears Gamer]

Feel free to check out my first game. Unfortunately I could only last one half before I gave up A long road ahead for early access.

 

[Wasps92]

Watched a few videos of players playing the Early Access. Genuinely incredible how bad the gameplay looks given the amount of time they've spent on it.