We?ll go straight into the mechanics of the bowling here. We haven?t experimented with line and length bowling before which is how cricket works and is what?s important, it should be what drives the game mechanic. It?s been fiddly in the past and the uninitiated or the more casual fan finds it very difficult to understand what?s expected of them; maybe didn?t fully understand how to use it. So Jimmy Anderson has a choice on the wheel you bring up. You can choose between cut, swing or a straight ball, then basically you set the line, start the run up and then as you run up the length comes from behind. So you learn from that and the power is just a button press at the end.
Each bowler has lots of other different attributes running underneath; how much they can swing the ball, how much they can cut and these alongside the speed of the delivery influence how much movement you can get out of the ball.
This is a new thing that we?ve changed. In the past we?ve had bowling mechanics and fielding mechanics. The player has been bowling and will quickly switch to being the fielder and we have mini-games where depending on timing you?ll be catching the ball. Although from a cricketing perspective I think that worked, a lot of players of the game had issues with it because if you weren?t very good at timing that button press you wouldn?t take any catches and the game was too difficult for you. Seeing as catches are such an important part of cricket we had to find a way of bringing that into the player?s control, making it a skill game without making it a mini-game. So after a lot of conversations we decided that when bowling it makes more sense if you are commanding your fielding unit rather than controlling them directly so what we?ve developed is a sophisticated bowling system that allows players to act as bowler and kind of like the captain, change the field to suit the match situation. So we?ve got total control of the fielder and for the first time control over the individuals in the field.
So if you want to grab a player Ravi. So Tim Bresnan from long on is going to be moved into short midwicket like that. You can pick up these players and move them wherever you want. They all have different strengths so each player has a different catching ability, infield and out, different running speeds, different throwing abilities so it?s very important their position plays to their strengths.
The nodes on the ground which you pass over display the orthodox fielding positions on the bottom of the screen. This is another thing we?re hoping will help people who are fairly casual fans. We?re giving them every opportunity to reinforce their cricketing education while they play the game so this is where people think about both the role of the different fielding positions and understand the requirements by pairing suitable players within that and all the while hopefully they?re starting to develop a picture in their heads of where the orthodox fielding positions are, what they?re called and get a better understanding of the game.
So you can set up different fields for different batsmen. So at the moment Bailey and Cowan are at the crease. We set up a manual field for Bailey. Cowan is currently on auto. So if you don?t want to fiddle round with the fielding settings, which casual players might not, we also have over 50 different field settings picked by the AI to suit the situation. So to suit the bowling you?re facing and to suit the format of the game so you can switch mentality and the AI will switch the field for you so can go defensive, balanced or aggressive according to the situation in the match.
