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 I can honestly say that I have never played a more unique and nuanced football experience than that of NFL Head Coach 09. In-fact, its extremely tough to write about because there’s simply so much to the game, and I know those of us at the EA event hardly scratched the surface of what all it offers.
We were given a brief walk-through of the game by lead designer Josh Looman, who –more than any other EA football designer I have met- seems like “one of us guys from the forums.” Josh is all about the details, the strategy, the “mental-stuff”, and the big decisions that go into NFL football. He’s as “hardcore” as it gets. After about 15 minutes of listening to him, I think everyone in the room realized that EA had the perfect man for the job of crafting this very unique experience.
Josh Looman started off the discussions by asking us how many of us played the first “Head Coach” on current gen. About 25% of us there had. He then asked us how many of us liked it, and every hand went down, including his own. Josh then went into a laundry list of things that were done poorly in NFL Head Coach, and just how cumbersome and “not-fun” it was. He hit on all of my gripes about the old game too.
NFL Head Coach (2006) issues.
***It was never really clear what you were to do next on your coaches schedule. ***The game made you talk to everyone on your staff just in case they had something to add or to tell you to do, often making you cycle through people who had nothing to say to you. ***The AI was terrible, particularly when you often called a passing play and your QB would pull the ball down without even trying to make reads- and try to run. ***The original Head Coach game simulated boring stuff that didn’t even need to be simulated. ***The menu system on the original game stunk, often giving you no clue about what you were to do next on your schedule.
***It took too many button presses and too much time simply to get to game day. ***The game was simply tedious. The great thing is that Josh agreed with every single part of that, and added many more instances of problems with the last game. The new NFL Head Coach 09 team wanted to make a totally new experience where the game was intuitive, easily navigated, strategic, filled with NFL authenticity- and most importantly…fun.
The first thing you notice when you start the game is you are asked if you want to be a current NFL head coach, or make your own custom head coach. You can browse each coaches profile, and you’ll notice the “level of difficulty” is determined by what NFL organization you wish to coach. For example, taking over the Raiders or the Lions is rightfully labeled “HARD” difficulty. One thing that really stood out as I perused the coach profiles is that NFL Head Coach 09 is using its own proprietary facial rendering system. The real-life head coaches and assistant coaches are modeled with incredible 3D realism. The coach models are spot-on and VERY next gen. The same is true for the players on the sidelines in the game, but more on that later.
Also, one quick note, as with the Madden games, Bill Belichick is not in the licensed NFL Head Coach organization, so there is a stand in for him named “Hal Ophamer” who has all of Bill’s attributes. He is the only one not in the game that I saw.
Owner types are also modeled in-game, but they do not have their real names. However, their personality typed mimic their counterparts. For instance, the Oakland Raiders owner is a dictator type, while the Steelers’ owner is far more passive and even-handed. These owners give you goals throughout the season that reflect those personalities as well as team needs. Make no mistake, this is a management sim. If you get your jollies from the “action” side of football, such as making the tackles and catches by controlling individual players, then this isn’t the product for you. That simply isn’t part of the game. However, if you really enjoyed Madden’s franchise mode over the years and have always hoped for something deeper from the coach/GM side of the ball, this is your product.
Still with me? Great. I have to admit, although I love football games that give you direct control, I always wanted a product where I could craft a game-plan and have my team attempt to carry it out with my supervision. This is definitely that product in a big-way. Josh Looman accurately points out that crafting an intuitive interface that allows you to jump in and govern what parts of the coach duties you want to handle versus the ones you want to delegate will make or break any game like this. He’s absolutely right. The system EA uses to navigate you through your coaching debut is centered around what is called “The Clipboard”. It is basically an interactive, bullet-pointed menu of things on your schedule. These are things you can opt to do yourself, or you can opt to hand these things off to the AI if they don’t interest you. Among these are contract negotiations, scouting, viewing the NFL combine, creating offensive and defensive plays, and much more.
You also have the option to start your career in the off-season or the pre-season. If you start in the off-season, you get to completely re-do the 2008 NFL Draft (with its actual rookies) and re-write history. If you opt to start in the pre-season, you start off by having to sign the actual rookies drafted from the real 2008 NFL Draft. Its your choice. I am elated to report that NFL Head Coach seems to have more “presentation” than any EA Sports offering to-date, but its all from a completely different angle… the sidelines. The game-day graphics of NFL Head Coach are taken from the Madden 08 engine, but they are “souped up” in various ways. Player faces are now spot-on in the game, even when you are seeing your players execute plays on the field. However, when you are on the sidelines between plays with your players, there is a proprietary graphics engine handling the close-ups of your players and coaches (with or without helmets). The sidelines are very much alive. If you are used to the players from NFL 2K5 and their occasional cut-scenes on the sideline, take that concept and amplify it by about 100. The NFL sidelines seem like a living, breathing thing, with players conversing amongst themselves about the game plan, while coaches bark out plays and orders to their men. You can also opt to interact with your players in various ways. You can strictly discipline them (such as chewing them out for bad plays), encourage them, instruct them, etc. Different players react differently to the various methods, as should be expected.
Calling plays is very intuitive, and if you’ve played Madden, you can handle this part of the game…at least in terms of giving the commands. The real fun of the game is crafting your own playbook. You are given a fairly limited amount of team-specific plays on both sides of the ball when you start the game. For some, that might be a bit of a let-down, but the expectation is that you will begin crafting your own plays.
And let me be the first to report that creating your own plays is a thing of beauty in NFL Head Coach, and the fact is that you can transfer those plays into Madden NFL 08 (for offline play) is an absolute dream. I’ve played with play-builders from other football games in the past, and they are usually cumbersome and un-intuitive. NFL Head Coach’s playbuilder is a credit to the design team. The play-builder “knows” the restrictions in the NFL rulebook, so you cannot accidentally create a play that would break the rules (such as having too many men on the line of scrimmage, etc.) I’m quite happy to report that assigning routes to receivers, assigning blocking schemes, and designating the QB’s drop is as easy as you can possibly make it.
This is another area where NFL Head Coach addresses a problem I had with its two year-old predecessor. When you used to make a play in the old version of the game, the AI would determine the pass progression reads. (This was made worse by the fact that in the old version, the AI QB would also take off and run even on pass plays where there’s no reason for him to be running.) NFL Head Coach 09 lets you assign reads 1 through five to all of your passing plays, so your QB will know in what order you want him to scan the various reads. As those who know football would tell you, this can be the difference between winning and losing. NFL Head Coach 09 handles this expertly. You will love the playbook creation interface, I can almost guarantee it. 
And speaking of plays, you can edit one on the fly during a game to take advantage of what the opposing defense might be doing. You are actually allowed to “freeze time” to do so. (Although, let me preface this by saying that it can only be done before the snap. You can’t edit an “in progress” play, obviously). Sounds almost too easy, right? Well, just hold on… it might not work well at all since your team will have no familiarity with that new play, and will have less of a chance of executing that play (and more specifically, that route and its timing) properly. Yes, as your team practices starting in training camp, there’s a familiarity rating for the various plays and individual routes. That rating goes up as you run those plays and those created plays and your players get familiar with them. That’s why there’s more “risk” in the “on the fly play altering” than you might assume. Yes, the game accounts for that much reality. So it is wise to create a good deal of plays in training camp that you can familiarize your squad with as the NFL year progresses. Frankly, I love that dynamic.
And it doesn’t stop there. Players are no longer thought of in Madden terms of 0-99. In NFL Head Coach, certain players fit certain schemes. For instance, for a West Coast passing attack like the Packers, they wouldn’t want to sign someone who likes to go deep, yet hates to go short over the middle like Chad Johnson. Chad’s rating, when viewed from the Packers offensive scheme perspective, will seem lower than that of a more vertical offense team. Likewise, a vertical offense team will see Chad’s rating as being one that fits their current scheme.
The same is true of signing/drafting defenders. If you are playing as the Colts and using their cover-2 zone philosophy, lets say the Steelers fast, blitzing linebacker James Harrison becomes a cap casualty down the road. Now, James is a great linebacker, but his rating- as it would fit with the Colts- would probably be low. His strength is not dropping into zone pass coverage and covering short receivers in crossing routes. This is factored-in within the game itself. You have to get players that fit your declared philosophies and fit the plays you run, or else they simply “won’t fit”. This gives the game some unprecedented depth that few football fans are used to. Frankly, I don’t think it has ever been done. Nobody has ever done “scheme specific player ratings.” Lead Designer Josh Looman, as well as many other designers at EA, are particularly proud of the new sim engine that resides under the hood of NFL Head Coach. They are saying that the engine is tuned to give disturbingly realistic results for the entire league. There’s also a new draft logic engine that combines factors such as need, value, team strengths/deficiencies. This gives the draft some unprecedented logic. Josh told us that they finished the draft logic before the NFL draft this year, and used it as the test subject. They said they were very impressed with the results and how close the new logic engine was for the draft as a whole.
But the big question is “how does game-day feel, and is it fun?” For me it was a blast. The game is in an alpha stage, so it was subject to some crashes and issues still being ironed out (lots of time left), but the game was very playable. I took the Raiders against the Lions and won in the closing minutes of the game to the tune of 28 to 24. The game was a coaching nail-biter. Early in the fourth, I was down by 10 points. What saved me was that I noticed that the Lions linebackers became a bit aggressive on run plays, and I figured mixing in some play action pass plays might net some big results. That aggressiveness cost the Lions one passing TD at the hands of JaMarcus Russell. A Lion turnover later in the 4th helped me seal the deal with another TD. It was a very satisfying victory, and a lot of fun. Graphically, you will see the Madden 2008 graphics on the field, but on the sidelines the new proprietary engine really puts you on the field with presentation like you’ve never seen.
It is also fun to see your coordinators react to each and every play. These are the real guys, and their personalities are on display, and they have tons of dialog. EA thought about simulating profanity with “bleeps”, but apparently the NFL thought better of that. So, like in the case with the very “F-bomb” prone Raiders defensive coordinator Rob Ryan, he gets extremely mad after plays when there are missed tackles or blown assignments, and his anger comes through with the voice-actor. I noticed the video game depiction of Rob Ryan always sounded like he was just about to go off on a profanity-laced tirade. It’s extremely well done. This is in stark contrast to my offensive coordinator, Greg Knapp (who came over from Atlanta) is more subdued and encouraging- to model his real life counterpart. (As for me, on the field, I’d personally be more like Rob Ryan.) I did check with Josh about if there’s any type of file transfer between NCAA 09 and Head Coach 09, and he said no. The reason for this is that Head Coach does not share the same ratings that Madden and NCAA share. They use a far deeper system that includes things like scheme specific variables not included in the other products, as well as a proprietary “potential” system. They did say that if the product does well, they could possibly look into having that kind of “linking” with future NCAA titles, but it wasn’t high priority this year.
I had plenty of fun with NFL Head Coach, and I’m very excited to see the final product when Madden 09 Collector’s Edition hits the streets. This is a product I feel I will probably “get lost-in” for hours on-end.. and my wife will hate it.
(Which is always the sign of a good game, might I add..) I would just like to tell the community that this product is already NOTHING like the snore-fest that shipped in spring of 2006. This is something completely different and focused on getting you to the parts of the coaching job that are interesting, and if you don’t find some parts interesting, you can delegate those parts to the AI through a very intuitive interface. To be honest, my only tangible “let-down” with Head Coach came from the news that online head-to-head play is only done through the “Game-Cast” view, and not the on-field view, so you’ll get the strategy online, but not all of the graphics and in-game video of each play being run. Instead, you’ll see the plays run through an ESPN GameCast type of interface with the 100 yard depiction of the football field with the bars representing the advance/retreat of the team with the ball, while play results register in text. It is impressive just how much content made it into this game, but that omission from online will probably turn some people off. That said, this game has way more of a single-player franchise focus than any sports game before it, so perhaps it’s less of a big deal than some might think. We shall see. One thing is for sure though, it was very hard for me to play through the late alpha version of this game and not be extremely excited about the product. I think it will surprise many people who try it. I immediately reserved myself a copy of the Madden 09 Collector’s Edition at GameStop online after playing it, so I guess that’s a pretty strong endorsement.
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