Hey everyone, Ben Haumiller here and we’ve reached one of my favorite points of the year, Dynasty time. This week you will see a lot of news coming out about our new improvements to Dynasty, but before that gets started I wanted to talk a little about what we added, why we added the features we did, and answer a few of the questions I’ve seen come up so far. Let’s get into the features:

Coaching Carousel (full blog posted on 5/24)

This was without a doubt the most requested feature heading into this year (the only thing that was even close was custom playbooks ), so when we started development on NCAA Football 12 our #1 priority was the Coaching Carousel.

We will have a full blog that goes into all of the details on Tuesday, but until then let me throw out a few bullets to outline the feature and also answer a few of the questions out there:

- If coaching contracts aren’t your thing and you want to play Dynasty like you could in the past you can turn off coach contracts at Dynasty Setup.

- You can create your own coach from scratch, or assume the life of an existing coach.

- Full Coach editing (both Head coaches and coordinators) is available in the front end under Team Management. The coaches are saved to the active roster file, so if you upload/download an edited roster file you will also upload/download any edits to coaches that are on that file.

- In an offline dynasty you are on your own to determine your starting job, but in an Online Dynasty the commissioner can force everyone to climb their way up the coaching ladder by restricting which jobs are available when joining the dynasty (i.e. everyone starts as a 1-star Coordinator, start as a 3-star Head Coach or lower, etc.).

- The Coaching Carousel is different than “Coach Mode”; the Carousel is basically your career as a coach in Dynasty mode. Coach Mode is a new control type that allows you to call plays and make pre-play adjustments, but not actually control the players on the field. This is all done from new broadcast view cameras.

- As a coordinator, you will only control your side of the ball during the game. So, if you are the Defensive Coordinator you can either SuperSim the offensive plays or watch the CPU play them out (which can be pretty intense if you are watching your CPU controlled offense try to work down the field for a game winning score in the final seconds and there’s nothing you can do to help.)

There’s so much more I could go into, but I’ll save the rest for the full blown blog. Here’s one more look at the Coaching Carousel in action.


Custom Playbooks (full blog posted on 5/25)

While not technically a Dynasty feature, since you can use it in other modes, Custom Playbooks sort of feels like a Dynasty feature since all of your coaches out there are going to want to run your own offense through your coaching career.

There have been a lot of details already released on this one. I’ll let the full blog on Wednesday fill out all of the rest of the info.

Web Improvements (full blog posted on 5/25)

The overall goal of the Dynasty website is to allow you the ability to always stay connected to your Online Dynasty, as well as give you the ability to participate in your Online Dynasty no matter where you are. Moving Dynasty to the web has been a tremendous technical challenge, but as you’ve noted over the past few years, we are committed to providing fans the opportunity to access Dyansty anywhere, anytime. All fans will have the ability to experience the following features from any Internet-connected computer:

· Recruiting – complete all of your weekly recruiting tasks from the web

· Dynasty Wire – Tell everyone your side of the story by writing your game recap, or create your own story from scratch and include videos and photos from any game played in your online dynasty

· Comment on any Dynasty Wire story

· Sign up for Email alerts for dynasty events (Game Recaps, Weekly updates, notifications that the dynasty is ready to advance, etc.)

· Set your Auto Pilot status

· View rosters for any team

· View schedules for any team and any week

· View box scores for other member’s games that have been played in the current week

· View the top 25 poll

· View player and team stats

· Download roster, top 25 poll, and team/player stat information to your local pc

· View other dynasties in progress (Dynasty Wire, Top 25, Stats, Standings, etc.)



For fans looking for the ability to complete their games vs. the CPU without having to go to the console, the advanced Super Sim will allow you to play out the game as the coach—making substitutions and calling plays—helping to determine the outcome of the game rather than just letting the CPU sim the game on its own. There is a one-time fee of $2.99 or 240 Microsoft points for this feature. A free seven day trial begins upon your first use of this feature, so you’ll have a week to try it out before purchasing.

Speaking of CPU simming, the next feature to talk about will give the commissioner the ability to advance the week from the web. This is a great addition for everyone in an Online Dynasty because now you are not at the mercy of the commish being home when it’s time to advance the week. This was a major undertaking for us to get the sim logic up on the server so that when the commish moves the Dynasty forward, all of those CPU vs. CPU games will get simmed and all of the stats/records/etc. will get merged into the main dynasty file. While it’s just a single button press for the commish to start the action, there’s a ton of under the hood work that goes into place to advance that week. There is a one-time fee of $2.99 or 240 Microsoft points for this feature.

Custom Conferences (full blog posted on 5/26)

This time last year it seemed as though we were moments away from college football being flipped upside down with the dawning of the Super Conferences. Even though only a handful of moves actually happened it became obvious that we needed to implement a system that allowed gamers the flexibility to not only set things up how they want, but also be able to adapt to what the future might bring. So, if you want to see how a world of four 16-school Super Conferences would have played out, or if you want to move TCU to the Big East in year two of your Dynasty and do it by the book, it’s all up to you.

Just like Coaching Carousel, we will do a full blog going into the details on Custom Conferences on Thursday, but for now here are some quick bullets:

- You can make edits to conference members, conference rules, and BCS bowl tie-ins when creating the Dynasty as well as each off-season of the Dynasty. This will allow you to make future changes based on real world movements, or any other changes you want to make.

- Conferences can have as few as four schools and a max of 16 schools; however independents can have as few as one member and a max of 32 schools.

- The full blog will go into scheduling details and how we made sure that specific games were scheduled on the correct dates even though the size of the conference can change, as well as making sure that certain rivalry games try to continue to be scheduled even if the schools are moved to separate conferences.

To close out on Custom Conferences, I know there are plenty of fans that are going to want to recreate the old Southwest Conference, so here you go:




Dynasty Tuning (full blog posted on 5/27)

Finally, it’s not all about new additions for Dynasty. There are also a number of elements that received some nice tuning updates. Friday’s blog will go into all of those tuning improvements out soon, as well.



Well that’s all from me for now. I hope everyone is as excited about these new features as we are. We will be back soon to give a deep dive into each of these features. Stay Tuned.

This news was retrieved from EASports.com's blog section!!