Update 3.4: Gameplay Tunes

Dev Diary, News - By Dave - April 14, 2011 - 12:41 pm - Tweet

For Update 3.4, we decided to tackle some tunes to the gameplay that will hopefully improve the overall balance of QUICKHIT NFL Football. Changes were made that will make impacts to both the passing and running games.

On the passing side, a few minor tweaks were made to help fix the issues people see with pocket passers actually performing worse when they start getting to higher levels. Thanks to a Hot Deals flub on my part that required me to come in to work at 4AM on a Saturday morning, I was able to get some simulation results with our Stat Tester utility that confirmed that Pocket QBs actually started performing worse at higher levels than they did earlier on. The results also showed that at the really high levels that scrambling QBs began to out-perform pocket QBs as pure passers.

Tweaks were made to the max velocity of quarterback’s and to the high-end mismatch ends of the match-up tables and they were enough to change the Stat Tester results enough to where the pocket passers performed better at higher levels and didn’t end up being surpassed by the scrambling QBs. Additionally, the propensity of these guys to throw INTs were also decreased while not really changing the overall INTs too much.

Additionally, there was a tune made to decrease the % chance that a defender would sniff out a screen play based on his level by a tiny bit. This should give a slight bump to the effectiveness on some screen passes.

For the running game, the distance that a rusher will stay in his lane before pursuing a ball carrier was reduced by 2 feet. It’s still 4 feet further than it was initially back when off-side blitzers would always run down plays from behind, but the 2 feet difference will hopefully reduce some of the issues with defenders running right pass the ball carrier instead of tackling him.

As always, while these gameplay tunes did minor changes to the overall rushing and passing numbers when looked at on the whole, they come with the potential of changing things drastically on a play versus play basis. For instance, while this change dropped the overall rushing average in even match-ups from 4.52 to 4.50 yards per attempt, there’s a chance that some offense versus some defense could have been getting 15 yards per carry before the change, now gets around 4. Meanwhile others that could’ve been getting on a play versus play basis of 0 yards per carry may be getting anywhere from 4-10 to even things out.

What this means is that your first impressions of the tunes might be worthless as something that was your “go to” play might not work as well while others that you wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole because they never worked may be performing better. As a result, any time there are changes to gameplay, I highly suggest playing a lot of games, trying a lot of plays, playing a lot of different team builds, and popping a Xanax before you complain.