Well, after reading your post and thinking about all this stuff, I just feel that building this game is like a double edged sword for trickstar, specially since now they have a strong competition (which I sincerely feel trickstar either did not know about earlier or they just underestimated). Whether to go for enhanced gameplay or whether to add in more features while keeping the same gameplay as IC10, with a few tweaks here and there to iron out the issues faced with IC10. If they go with the second option, the core audience gets miffed at them, however if they go with the first option 'and' have a serious competitor who is dishing out the 'most requested features by the core user community', then their sales mike take a hit.
Let's be realistic here.....cricket gamers on this forum (based on the posts made so far in these forums) hardly form a nano sized percentage of the overall cricket gaming community. And it's not too hard to believe that the remaining population will more or less buy either of these games based on the feature list they have on the back.
An excellent gameplay actually does not cater too well to the feature list printed on the back cover. See AC3's prospective back cover for example. Stating gameplay enhancements like dynamic weather, pitch variation, realistic authentic gameplay.......all these Headings sound like cliches to the gaming community and not some groundbreaking features (even though they are ground breaking in their own right if implemented well). Now compare that to a feature list that states full career mode, manual appeals, drs, the best player creator in cricket game history, share your creations with community, new bowling and batting experience etc. Which game do you think people would buy?
Now why I feel that trickstar did not see such strong competition coming is because if they did, I am pretty sure they would have concentrated on adding a bigger feature list than mere gameplay enhancements. Specially a feature list that people have been requesting for since a looooooooooong time.
Now, I do have a strong gut feeling that the gameplay that we might get in AC13 would be somewhat similar to IC10, but obviously an enhanced version of that. I would be surprised (pleasantly of course) if that is not the case as for trickstar to make this game in the time they did, they had to build upon the knowledge base (plus the programming codes) that they had with IC10. And common sense would state that even if they are using the same code, they cannot say it in public as it would obviously cause copyright issues since some of that intellectual property belonged to the publishers as well.
If they did build everything from scratch, then why did they not factor in the most requested features like manual appeal, career mode etc? Or maybe they did factor it in, but due to strategic reasons, did not implement it in this game so as to keep it for the future versions.
Chief, based on his comments posted in this forum, does seem to be more of a marketing strategy kinda guy (nothing wrong with that)....while Ross (from Bigant) seemed more of a Passionate kinda guy. Now this perception of mine is based only on the posts made by these two gentlemen. Chief always seems to be interested in the marketing strategies etc.,while Ross has been more interested in showing off the game features, telling us about small details in the game, creating and showing off some player cards from his player creator etc. And both these personalities have been consistent with the game design + approach that they have taken in their respective games.
Bigant did have some advantage of having developed a sport based game in RLL2, however trickstar had an even bigger advantage of having developed a cricket game itself. Still one chose to add in all the most requested features in its first game itself (passion), while the other chose to develop just the core gameplay and keep all the requested features for future (marketing strategy).
I really do feel that it is important that both games do well,as then we would have good competition for the next version. But just based on the features list, it does seem like Big Ant would be calling all the shots at least in the casual market out there. This is also just based on the assumption that trickstar would have a way better gameplay than big ant. If that is not the case as well, and if big ant does turn up with an equally detailed or better gameplay, then it does seem like the approach taken by trickstar would dent them bad.
