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RWC 2011 Demo - Your thoughts?

I've played at least 10 run throughs, using both teams. This is an honest opinion: (and I'm still likely to buy both, but RWC as a second hand/post world cup purchase)

I agree with previous posts:

Positives:
- Commentary was pretty good, I liked it
- There are some good parts, but these are also the same good parts from 08 and we need new good parts for this to be new game/retail worthy, rather than patch/DLC worthy
- Its on Xbox360
... I'll think of another one soon

Negatives:
- No significant/obvious improvement from 08. In fact, they've gone backwards with less modes and simpler lineouts
- Knock on advantages go on far too long (the opp had one for 5 phases, but they kept the advantage because they didnt make a territorial gain. In rl rugby, after 1 or 2 phases if they still have the ball, advantage over. Its not a penalty advantage)
- All cut scenes were of backs of heads, obviously no faith in player likenesses
- I sidestepped the fullbacks with Matfield and other forwards, managing to run and score from halfway...
- Run on a 45 degree angle and you split the backline every time
- Hooker's arm twitch still exists so you know exactly when they'll throw it
- When you kick for goal, the tee is there and some dirt flicks up when you kick, but the tee and dirt disappear on a replay
- same kick restart glitches so there are the same holes to kick to to get the ball back easily
- rucks are a button mash, just don't button mash for too long
- its the official, authentic RWC experience but with only 10 licenesed teams, no licensed or accurate NZ stadiums, etc. Its about as authentic as my copy of the Mona Lisa I cut out from a National Geographic
- In one of my conversions the kicker slid forward and ended up being in front of the ball by 3m before he kicked it (it still went over, the ball kicked itself while the kicker did an animation in front of the ball)
- superman tackles are still in, and the ball carrier begins to fall backwards before contact from the defender is even made
- dive for a try and be horizontal and centimetres from the ground but get ankle tapped in the meantime and somehow the player is standing in a maul
- bunching is still everywhere, but we all knew that
- lineouts are a one button process
- halfbacks take the ball from the middle lineout and run around the back of the number 8s into a whole bunch of space
- no momentum when changing direction while running or sprinting
- no refs or touchies
- ball bounces 30m after it initially lands, and kickers can punt end to end if the ball does that bounce
- I almost never used the set plays, quicker to run sideways for a bit then cut to 45 degree angle and waltz through (yes its on easy but we all know this wont change on hard thanks to the same thing happening in 08)

That's probably enough from me... Its more rugby arcade than sim. A small amount of people will like it for its simplicity, the majority of the market want more and this won't meet that need. Up to RC to see if they can do better, but at least they can't do worse

PS: For the TRFers, I would have said if this was better than I expected it to be, it wasn't. I would gladly (and secretly hoped to be able to) say that this plays better than expected... it doesn't. How many people at HB/505 worked on this and for how long since 08? It would be interesting to know, and it seems whatever the actual answer is, its too many and for too long given what they've come up with
 
From your post orange.. I too am disappointed with what seems to be a lot of glitches. Surprised that those glitches are around since they had ample time to rectify them.
 
I was really hoping that the demo would be incredible and would wow me!!! (Why else would you release a demo)

Initially i was going to be buying both but after having a crack on the demo there is no way that i'll be wasting over $100 on it!!! I might get it if i see in one of the bargain bins, but it would have to be at least half the release price...

Sorry HB, but this is very poor considering the game hasn't really changed since 2006 :(
 
Agree with the sentiment really, rehash of 08 with some minor gameplay tweaks.

To the HB guys re the bunching thing: You say it isn't a problem in higher difficulties, why is it a problem with lower difficulties then? If you have fixed the problem surely you would apply that fix across the board? Why would you even consider including it given a fair hunk of criticism has been put your way because of it. Somehow the old 'fixed on higher difficulties' explanation doesn't quite wash.

So we weren't allowed an opinion about this game until we had played it, now a lot of us have and have voiced our opinions but we have to wait for the full game now because the demo isn't a real representation of the game? Please, the HB apologists need to wake up a bit.

I too am confused as to why HB linked up with a forum quite far in advance of the release of this game to get opinions and seek ideas on how to improve it. Naturally this built expectations and people expected significant changes to be made. However this clearly has not been done. I'm not questioning that the HB guys listened and participated, but they didn't actually put any of the recommended changes in place. I get that a large part of this is due to funding etc but did they not know their budget before starting to make the game?

Anyway I guess I am now a 'hater' or a 'troll'.. whatever.
 
I havent played the demo yet but somebody said its not really meant to be a sim. I'm a bit disapointed to hear that, as I though 08 was a sim.
 
donmcdazzle said:
Agree with the sentiment really, rehash of 08 with some minor gameplay tweaks.

To the HB guys re the bunching thing: You say it isn't a problem in higher difficulties, why is it a problem with lower difficulties then? If you have fixed the problem surely you would apply that fix across the board? Why would you even consider including it given a fair hunk of criticism has been put your way because of it. Somehow the old 'fixed on higher difficulties' explanation doesn't quite wash.

So we weren't allowed an opinion about this game until we had played it, now a lot of us have and have voiced our opinions but we have to wait for the full game now because the demo isn't a real representation of the game? Please, the HB apologists need to wake up a bit.

I too am confused as to why HB linked up with a forum quite far in advance of the release of this game to get opinions and seek ideas on how to improve it. Naturally this built expectations and people expected significant changes to be made. However this clearly has not been done. I'm not questioning that the HB guys listened and participated, but they didn't actually put any of the recommended changes in place. I get that a large part of this is due to funding etc but did they not know their budget before starting to make the game?

Anyway I guess I am now a 'hater' or a 'troll'.. whatever.
Click to expand...

Don't believe i said that it was completely gone on higher difficulties but much improved mostly due to how much tougher the defence is in general on the higher difficulties. I think the TRF guys said it was still there to some degree in their play tests so not sure why you seem to think we said it was completely gone. What I did mention is that while we were addressing it the issues that arose were that it made the game much more difficult. This is great on harder difficulties but not on an easier difficulty setting. On Easy we want people to score tries and lots of them.

I will say again that we most definitely have been listening to feedback, in fact we invested quite a bit of time on the bunching contrary to popular belief but our attempts led to other gameplay breaking issues. It is certainly something we want to abolish but we need to do so without breaking the rest of the game, its a challenge and unfortunately not one we have been able to overcome completely at this stage.

I don't consider anyone on here is a troll or hater as long as the feedback is constructive. I consider this post constructive.

We are listening and will continue to listen. When the dust settles we will be taking all of the feedback from the demo on board to see what we can patch, or consider for future versions if/when they come to pass.
 
HB_Glen said:
Don't believe i said that it was completely gone on higher difficulties but much improved mostly due to how much tougher the defence is in general on the higher difficulties. I think the TRF guys said it was still there to some degree in their play tests so not sure why you seem to think we said it was completely gone. What I did mention is that while we were addressing it the issues that arose were that it made the game much more difficult. This is great on harder difficulties but not on an easier difficulty setting. On Easy we want people to score tries and lots of them.

I will say again that we most definitely have been listening to feedback, in fact we invested quite a bit of time on the bunching contrary to popular belief but our attempts led to other gameplay breaking issues. It is certainly something we want to abolish but we need to do so without breaking the rest of the game, its a challenge and unfortunately not one we have been able to overcome completely at this stage.

I don't consider anyone on here is a troll or hater as long as the feedback is constructive. I consider this post constructive.

We are listening and will continue to listen. When the dust settles we will be taking all of the feedback from the demo on board to see what we can patch, or consider for future versions if/when they come to pass.
Click to expand...

Cheers for the honest reply mate. I don't pretend to know anything about coding for a game and I'm sure it is a lot more complex than I could imagine. Good to see you have looked at it, frustrating that you couldn't fix it.
 
HB_Glen said:
We are listening and will continue to listen. When the dust settles we will be taking all of the feedback from the demo on board to see what we can patch, or consider for future versions if/when they come to pass.
Click to expand...

I'm hearing things like this from another member when I asked him if anyone can win ball against the throw in a lineout in this game.

"your question certainly perplexed me for hours last night - i havent won against the throw yet, and i still wonder how

Also note, there will be riots, and violence online with the quick tap from less than 5m from the tryline...........its almost always a dive over try, indefensible.........this should not have got passed HB testing but somehow it has - they should have just stripped the episode away and awarded a penalty try, because you will almost always score from quick tap penalty from 5m out.

so basically dont give a penatly away within the 10m line, or you will be kicking off in due time

maybe u can stop it, but i havent sorted it out yet"

Very interested to know what's the story with this. For starters lineouts are much more contested in real life now than they've been for a long time. It sounds like it's auto ball for the thrower now, which is a huge concern if true.

5m tap penalties sound to me one of those things that should be much more stoppable now. Even just by giving full control to the player tapping, but making them slower throughout the mechanism of the tap, whilst a player or two auto-defends against them.

Would be very keen to know what's going on with these two facets of play. :)


Edit: Okay, have just heard that you can win lineout ball by guessing the jumper and hitting it at the right time. Sounds a lot less sophisticated than the past to me. I liked how it was, but just wasn't a fan of the hookers arm glitch and the slightly over the top precision needed (using advanced) to hit the back of the lineout. I think largely most people felt this way.

This seems very much like it's all about new player accessibility, but I really have to play it when it's out on PS3.
 
TRF C A Iversen said:
I'm hearing things like this from another member when I asked him if anyone can win ball against the throw in a lineout in this game.

"your question certainly perplexed me for hours last night - i havent won against the throw yet, and i still wonder how

Also note, there will be riots, and violence online with the quick tap from less than 5m from the tryline...........its almost always a dive over try, indefensible.........this should not have got passed HB testing but somehow it has - they should have just stripped the episode away and awarded a penalty try, because you will almost always score from quick tap penalty from 5m out.

so basically dont give a penatly away within the 10m line, or you will be kicking off in due time

maybe u can stop it, but i havent sorted it out yet"

Very interested to know what's the story with this. For starters lineouts are much more contested in real life now than they've been for a long time. It sounds like it's auto ball for the thrower now, which is a huge concern if true.

5m tap penalties sound to me one of those things that should be much more stoppable now. Even just by giving full control to the player tapping, but making them slower throughout the mechanism of the tap, whilst a player or two auto-defends against them.

Would be very keen to know what's going on with these two facets of play. :)
Click to expand...

I am being pretty honest here tonight :)

regarding lineouts, they are definitely contestable. In fact we have an achievement that relates to doing just that. It takes some getting used to but you can win against the throw, more so against lesser opponents, but I am able to do it in the lineout too. It's either going to be too easy or too tough - we'll see how it plays out in the final version to see how we pursue this but I think its fair over all myself.

Without the game in front of us to test in any great detail the specifics around the 5M quick tap, we did reduce the goal line defense considerably on the easy difficulty to allow for more tries so it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case on that difficulty setting. If it does in fact happen on the harder difficulties we will certainly take a look at fixing it, but it won't be there when the game ships. Another possible pro/con of a change we made to have the defense retreat when attempting a quick tap. We sped up the tap this year a bit as it really didn't feel quick enough in the older games.

Things that are exploits are always bugs we want to try and eliminate from the game. Of course making changes to fix exploits need testing and the risk is that fixing one thing creates something else (throw back to the bunching comments I made above I suppose)

Also so you guys know, when you do a quick match in Online play the difficulty is locked to Hard. This should hopefully reduce the amount of exploits in the game and make for a much more enjoyable online experience. Friend Invite matches you can change whatever settings you like though.

To paraphrase something I heard another developer say, we can put 1000's of hours into testing a game, but it never compares to the amount of hours logged on day one when a game is released to the general public. I couldn't agree more.
 
Well ive given this a fair thrashing now and i have a few thoughts..

Before i even get into critiquing the game itself i have to point out that the way the demo is set out is very poor for two major reasons:

1)Only giving side-on veiw with no ability to change. Whats with this? Why? Look HB, we held a heated debate on the subject of end-on vs side-on view on this very forum. It was found that this was a massively polarising issue; people that played side-on hated end-on and vice versa. We put a poll up and it was found that out of 200 respondants, 113 prefered end-on (56.50%) and 87 prefered side (43.50%).
In not allowing the option to choose end view, you have ****** off the (admittedly slim) majority of your market before kickoff..
The worst part about this decision is the difference the camera view makes to the game. The main reason its such a polarising issue is because playing the game from those different angles changes the overall feel and control of the game completely ; its hard to change from one view to another because it feels like you're playing a different game (hense two camps with strong views and no real midground). What you have done effectively is given end-on users a demo of a different game to the one they are looking at purchasing, and told them to use their imagination to guess what it might be like from a different perspective. You had free, tangible market research right here and chose to ignore it, which is a tad dissapointing.

2)Only easy mode with no option to change difficulty Let me just say first off, i completely understand the decision to package the demo with easy mode. People get scared off by the sport of rugby itself with all its complex rules and whatnot, let alone a game version. The last thing we want is a demo that completely bogs a new player down, thrashes them and then they never bother to play again, so fair enough.
Completely new players aren't (or shouldn't be) the entirety of the target market however. As much as HB and 505 look to attract new players, they should be trying to persuade back all the people that put faith in them in the years leading up to this version.
HB has been quite upfront about the "if it aint broke, don't fix it" mantra that they have brought into the RWC design process, its polishing up and working all the kinks out of 08, porting it to next-gen consoles, adding online and then we're in buisness. I don't have a problem with that approach as long as its done well. This leads into the difficulty setting; one of the things that definitely was "broke" in the 08 game was the fact that elite mode was a total joke. Im an All Blacks fan but was unable to use them in 08 because there was never even a remote chance of losing. I found the most used team to be Spain just to try and make the game a challenge and thats really not how it should be.
Upon booting up the demo, i finished my first 40 minutes up 49-0. The same problems were still there:
-every play someone in the defending backline will show you a ridiculous gaping hole, goatse style.
-if you run on a 45 degree angle, the tackles will just fall off you.
-its crazy easy to just plain run around the opposing winger, the just sort of wave at you as you run past. I burnt Ashton off on the outside with Smit for godnesssake.
-Zigzaging throws the defense off completely.
Honestly, the only times the opposition ever threaten on attack is when i cant tell the distance between my defenders due to the camera angle (grrr).
This then leads onto other problems, like why should i care about the kicking or drop kicking system? theres never any reason to kick for field position because you can easily score from under your own posts anyway, and 5 points are worth more than 3.

This demo is supposed to sell me the game; to show me that the less inspiring aspects of 08 have been cleaned up, but on too many occasions i am just left just staring at shitty plays wondering if its a game fault or due to the difficulty setting. Ontop of that i have to tilt my head and wonder what the game would be like if it were spun around 90 degees.
I really want this game to be good but the demo is just asking for the benefit of the doubt on far too many counts. Next time around, the adittion of one more camera angle and the option of trying the hardest difficulty should really be looked into.
 
HB_Glen said:
I am being pretty honest here tonight :)
Click to expand...

I've never found you guys anything but. :)

HB_Glen said:
regarding lineouts, they are definitely contestable. In fact we have an achievement that relates to doing just that. It takes some getting used to but you can win against the throw, more so against lesser opponents, but I am able to do it in the lineout too. It's either going to be too easy or too tough - we'll see how it plays out in the final version to see how we pursue this but I think its fair over all myself.

Without the game in front of us to test in any great detail the specifics around the 5M quick tap, we did reduce the goal line defense considerably on the easy difficulty to allow for more tries so it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case on that difficulty setting. If it does in fact happen on the harder difficulties we will certainly take a look at fixing it, but it won't be there when the game ships. Another possible pro/con of a change we made to have the defense retreat when attempting a quick tap. We sped up the tap this year a bit as it really didn't feel quick enough in the older games.

Things that are exploits are always bugs we want to try and eliminate from the game. Of course making changes to fix exploits need testing and the risk is that fixing one thing creates something else (throw back to the bunching comments I made above I suppose)

Also so you guys know, when you do a quick match in Online play the difficulty is locked to Hard. This should hopefully reduce the amount of exploits in the game and make for a much more enjoyable online experience. Friend Invite matches you can change whatever settings you like though.

To paraphrase something I heard another developer say, we can put 1000's of hours into testing a game, but it never compares to the amount of hours logged on day one when a game is released to the general public. I couldn't agree more.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the answer here, it puts a few of my concerns in relation into perspective.

I can't make any kind of assessment on the PS3 side of things until the demo is released to us, so it's good to hear these kinds of answers.

I myself liked most of the old system of lineouts though. The hookers arm problem and the slightly too hard difficulty (on advanced) for throwing to the back, were some minor issues, but it worked relatively well. Still, I need to see this new system and see if it works as well too.

I'd like one day to see a switch jumpers option too, as a lot of lineouts now seem to have two sets of two options (and a straight throw to the back or front if those are used). You'll see the guys turn around and change who they lifting just before the ball goes in. This would be kind of complex to implement though.

The 5m tap issue could be a difficulty level related issue. I hope it proves to be exactly that. It does partly make my case well that the demo wouldn't have received quite as much negative feedback had it been released available to use on two difficulty levels.

Still, am eagerly awaiting my crack at it. Not long to go now. :)
 
I saw a demo vid on youtube but I haven't played the game. I quite like the idea of several commentary teams as it will keep things reasonably fresh. It sucks listening to the same old lines over and over :p Also, I think the presentation is quite good (and I love the World In Union song). Unfortunately, the guy who posted the youtube video didn't seem to use many of the new features so I dunno what they are like.

I don't think I'm going to buy as it doesn't sound as good as I was hoping. I would still buy it anyway if I had a PS3 or Xbox 360 but I don't so I would have to borrow my brother's all the time and would only get limited time to play it.
 
I think most of the negative demo reviews can be attributed to playing on a dog of machine also known as xbox 360. EEEvvverrrrryyone knows that PS3 is way better when it comes to sports games. When is it out on PS3 in NZ anyways. Still not there... HB dudes?
 

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