Quote:
Originally Posted by Haiku
I got the impression that Jim and OOTPD had the code rewritten between 2018 and 2020. Currently, FOF9 has a very similar navigation to OOTP and FHM, albeit with a very basic GUI. This change would not have been possible without the help of OOTPD and the rewritten code. It's a shame they backed out and left the project because I believe the core mechanics developed by Jim are incredible. The game lacks the graphical representation, customization and some quality of life functionality of OOTP and FHM. I haven't tried FPS Football, but I think FOF covers the coach's job very well by allowing you to create your own playbook from scratch as well as call every single play during a game.
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Does it still do the thing where if you run one play a lot it's like "the defense is familiar with this play" and gives you a debuff? That was always a pet peeve and something that people included the developer wasn't an issue. To me, there are some plays you can and should just keep running over and over again until the defense actually figures out the opposite playcall or else, in the case of stuff like zone blocking, the league legislates it away. The late 90s Broncos rather famously ran 7 plays. Granted that was a long time ago and the league's gotten a lot more sophisticated but there's still effects of that: if you constantly call passes over the middle (which is kind of dangerous anyway but still) the defense doesn't "get familiar with the play" it starts running looks with a robber sitting in that location. If you run a lot of planned roll-outs with a good QB, the defense calls a spy. Both of those open up the defense to further exploitation: the spy bit is still something you see getting exploited a TON by teams like Baltimore and Buffalo because that guy who's sitting there spying on Lamar Jackson or whoever isn't covering other guys on the field and so there's another hole to exploit.
If there's any huge difference between now and the 90s in that regard it's that individual players are tasked with making those adjustments much more than they were in the past. That's still not "the defense is familar with this play"; a DB who is giving his guy a cushion because he got cooked on a couple of long passes isn't "familiar with this play"; he is susceptible to getting beat on passes in front of him now.
That to me is the real magic of coaching, not merely that you call your own plays but that teams and players adjust to what you're doing and you have to evolve. FB Pro of course didn't do that because it was a game built in the early 90s, but you could for sure do stuff adjacent to that by swapping in plays used in certain situations. Football Manager *does* do this, so it's not really the case that it's not done anywhere else.