Bad points of AC2009, and Fielding
I said I would post some more reaction to my playtest and here we go:
Fielding
The fielding mechanics are, in general, good. There is heavy usage of Jamie's risk/reward mantra in the fielding. Firstly there is the catching. As we all know by now, when a catch is on offer, the ball gets a coloured corona, going from red to orange to green. Press X/A or whatever in the red and you drop it, in the green you catch it, and in the orange, it depends on how near to the green you were, and also on the abilities of the player. I suspect there may be some dependence on the catch difficulty, but I'm not really sure about that. I found that this works pretty well, and even though the game is slowed to 'bullet-time' during the catching process, you still need good reactions and timing to succeed. The best point about this system compared to 2007 is that it actually feels like it was your fault if you drop it, rather than because the game cheated you (I know this idea was something Jamie was keen on throughout the entire game, and it shows).
Ground fielding is automatic and is well executed by the fielders, who behave quite realistically. For example, if you have a guy a short extra cover, and you smack it straight at him, he will probably stop it, rather than running off like a loony as in 2007. When it comes to throwing, you can either press nothing, in which case the ball is returned to the 'keeper (and I think with 0% chance of overthrows, but I may be wrong) with a kind throw. If there is a chance of a run-out, you can use the right stick to direct the throw to either end, and the end glows orange in the picture-in-picture of the pitch. This leads to a much harder throw, and can result in overthrows, especially if you throw to the bowler's end before the bowler (or someone else) has got to cover the stumps. These powerful throws along with the cool running-between-the-wickets system lead to genuine excitement when there is a run-out chance, especially when an attempted direct hit misses with you clean out of your ground.
Bad Points
These are all the bad points I can think of about the game, in no particular order.
Strange, out of context animations
During slip catches, often the slip will be running in whilst catching the ball, which looks a bit odd, but doesn't affect the way it plays. It's not every time, but more often than seems proper.
Crazy 'keeper
The wicket keeper still does his one-handed takes when the ball is wide of him, rather than moving his feet. Again, this is aesthetic and doesn't affect the way the game plays. Also, the 'keeper seemed to take some stupendous catches off edges from spinners. I'm talking diving catches with about 1ft of reaction time.
Overthrows
I'm not entirely sure on this one, but it seemed that there were slightly too many overthrows going on. However, this may have been because I was always choosing a powerful throw, even when there wasn't really a run-out chance. Time will tell on this one.
Loopy bounce
Already covered in this thread, but it seems that the bounce of the pitch is too high still.
Too many back-foot shots to full balls
I suspect that this may be due to the bounce of the ball being a bit tennis-bally, but basically, the default shots tend to sway heavily towards back-foot shots even when the ball would be too full to play that way in real life. Which leads onto....
'Good' length is actually a pretty bad length
When bowling, your cursor will change colour to tell you if the ball is aiming in a good position, but this 'good' position seems invariably to be a half-volley on or outside off-stump. Possibly due to the too-loopy bounce.
Dodgy cut shots to third man still in
A few times, the CPU spanked me for 6 over fine third man. This really made me cringe.
Test Match Batting AI
On hard difficulty, I got spanked for around 10 an over. However, this may have been because I had got the bowling marker colour the wrong way around, thinking green meant good for the bowler, when it actually means, easy for the batsman. Once their confidence was up they went mental.
No online save games
Same as in 2007, there is no way of saving a Test match online, which is a big shame. This is especially true if the AI isn't the best, and has the potential to make 'The Ashes' pointless.
When will I ever bowl a bad ball?
You can aim your delivery wherever you like, with no difficulty. This means you can essentially bowl perfect line and length every ball. You can bowl 'bad balls' by not getting into the light green section of the bowling 'goodness meter', but that just makes the ball easier to hit harder, rather than changing its pitch position (there is a good reason for this, which is that bowling a 'bad ball' would surprise the batsman and therefore make it a better ball). It would be nice if there was some degree of wobbling, latency or classic 'BLC99 floating' of the pitch point marker when aiming. Or at least have a bigger aiming circle for worse bowlers which then goes to a specific point at a time dependent on the bowler's ability (better bowlers should go to the specific point later on). There would then be some random element to the pitch point, which could be affected by skill, stamina, confidence, etc. At the moment the skill, stamina and confidence values only work with the 'goodness meter' to effectively give you a ball difficulty rating for the batsman to hit. This seems a little shallow to me. I'm sure it'll be worked on for the next version though.
That's the lot unless I can think of any others later on.
. I wasn't expecting the game to brilliant, because it won't be. But from the sounds of it, it's a good cricket game. Not great, but good, which is what I've been hoping for. The batting difficulty being improved has really got me excited.
