Multiplat AFL Evolution 2 - pre-launch thread

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saintkildaman

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Jun 1, 2010
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Still hate the marking in Evolution. Being asked to hold down the button in advance then letting go at the "right" time is so unintuitive. Marking has been pretty horrible in all AFL games, even the original Live which gets way too much love. Best tactic in that game was to spoil at every marking contest.

Nothing beats AFL 99's dedicated shirtfront button though!
Agreed, marking needs a big overhaul. Don’t mind the timing aspect but it just needs to be more realistic, for example if you’re using McGovern you should be able to mistime slightly and still complete the mark if your positioning is good. However if you’re controlling Caleb Daniel in the same contest you have to perfect the timing and positioning in order to mark.
 
Sounds like it was almost overhauled. So making comments about changes / improvements based off Evo1 is redundant now.

This is a whole new engine which will come with its own quirks and issues.

If the AFL continue to back the game and give it time to develop I’m happy with this decision and I will give it the patience it needs because I’m not expecting huge improvements

The engine itself doesn't do anything with respect to how good it is at simulating the sport. They could transport from Unreal to Unity to Source or whatever and still have the same crappy AI and animations.

I'm not saying that there isn't a chance they have significantly improved Evo 2 and that it'll be a fun game, but too often do you hear developers say "new engine" as a buzzword to try and fake a substantial change.

Remember that the joy/horror/hilariousness of Ashes Cricket 2013, where they kept claiming they had a brand new engine built from scratch...when in fact it was just a switch to Unity.
 
I'm not saying that there isn't a chance they have significantly improved Evo 2 and that it'll be a fun game, but too often do you hear developers say "new engine" as a buzzword to try and fake a substantial change.

Remember that the joy/horror/hilariousness of Ashes Cricket 2013, where they kept claiming they had a brand new engine built from scratch...when in fact it was just a switch to Unity.

It concerns me more than inspires me. Why change the engine again? Every defence of WW so far has been "Let them get their base and build on it." Yet every time they make a new game they start over (apart from Live 2 which was just AFL Wii with a new hat). They allegedly rebuilt Evolution "from the ground up", now they're going to start over again with a new engine?

Does not bode well imo and the skeptic in me just sees it as a convenient way to buy themselves a reset button on the "It's ok that it's bad because it's their first attempt at a new engine/new console" counter. I'd love to be wrong though.
 
Jun 25, 2011
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They would have started using Unreal a long time ago. You don't just switch engine on a whim, it's not like deciding to open your PDFs in a different program. I read that FB post as they have had to adapt to a different workflow, not that they switched engines last week. As mentioned, the engine doesn't determine the quality of the assets (much) or the game logic, for example if you were a pro at both C# and C++, and proficient in building games in Unity, switching to Unreal having never used it much you would have to learn a whole bunch of new scripting APIs and not just a change in language syntax as Unity inherits from Monobehavior and UE from UObjectBase. Same if you were switching between UE and CryEngine which use the same languages. You might also be used to working around Unity's lack of (until recently) nested prefabs. All of the sudden you switch to UE and that's available and it affects your workflow.

Though in saying all of that, any professional developer should be at least familiar with UE (as well as Unity) as it's one of the only professional engines available for free to hobbyists and it's what you learn on.
 

GoldbergsGold

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Sep 30, 2015
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It concerns me more than inspires me. Why change the engine again? Every defence of WW so far has been "Let them get their base and build on it." Yet every time they make a new game they start over (apart from Live 2 which was just AFL Wii with a new hat). They allegedly rebuilt Evolution "from the ground up", now they're going to start over again with a new engine?

Does not bode well imo and the skeptic in me just sees it as a convenient way to buy themselves a reset button on the "It's ok that it's bad because it's their first attempt at a new engine/new console" counter. I'd love to be wrong though.

Wicked Witch continuing development concerned me from the start.
 
IMO the Big Ant cricket games started brilliantly but have not improved as rapidly as one might like/expect. And sometimes new features come in that seem cool but are very hard to use (e.g. Stadium creator) and also sometimes things got better whilst other features got worse, e.g. from 14 to 17 the bowling improved significantly but batting dropped off.

I haven't played their other games. Didn't read great things about the tennis game, but lacrosse was supposedly fun.

I'd still much rather BA make AFL games though. Remember that when AFL Live 2 was made the WW base game was AFL Live 1 on the Wii... which itself was based on an awful mobile game. AFL Evo then from AFL Live 2, and so on...
 
Apr 10, 2010
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IMO the Big Ant cricket games started brilliantly but have not improved as rapidly as one might like/expect. And sometimes new features come in that seem cool but are very hard to use (e.g. Stadium creator) and also sometimes things got better whilst other features got worse, e.g. from 14 to 17 the bowling improved significantly but batting dropped off.

I haven't played their other games. Didn't read great things about the tennis game, but lacrosse was supposedly fun.

I'd still much rather BA make AFL games though. Remember that when AFL Live 2 was made the WW base game was AFL Live 1 on the Wii... which itself was based on an awful mobile game. AFL Evo then from AFL Live 2, and so on...

I haven't played all the Big Ant games but this sounds about right and a fairly common opinion. If you gave me a straight option I would still give Big Ant the rights to this AFL game just to see what they could do but the first Wicked Witch game is usually referred to AFL wii (AFL Live 1 being the Big Ant game) no disputing that it was based on an awful mobile game and that Live 2 was little more than an updated port. I played but didnt own AFL Evolution, and others can correct me, but I didn't think the problems were really because it followed on from Live 2, it was at least in some ways another start, they were just still getting as many things wrong as right.
 
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Had a good chuckle at one young fella have a full melt on facebook that Wicked Witch didn't get into the spirit of E3 and release any news for this.

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