Diary 5, Battle of the nations
- Date:
- 17/04/2008
By now I’m sure that a lot of the readers of this blog entry will have played the Euro demo. The feedback has been fantastic so far, so thanks for appreciating all the work that’s gone into this game. I’m writing this from London Heathrow airport as I embark on the European press tour for the game, first stop is Poland.
Now it’s time to explain the role of those points shown at the end of the match. At full time you’ll notice there’s a screen that shows how many points your performance in the match you just played was worth. I read on the EA forum that the thought was these are points you earn and get to spend in a in-game shop, but that’s not what they are for.
These points are for the product’s unique competition, Battle of the Nations.
In the full product there’s a video that explains this, but we couldn’t include that in the demo due to the total download size given we were already putting in English commentary. So for now I’ll play the part of the video and explain.
Battle of the Nations is a daily competition which will show us which country has the best football gamers in Europe. It should be a lot of fun to see how this takes off once the game launches and which countries end up battling for the championship.
All you need to play is to have your console connected to the EA Servers, you don’t have to play online games if you don’t want to. A lot of people find the online games to be very intimidating so this is designed to allow everyone to take part by playing against the CPU so long as they are connected online.
Each match generates a score, this is true for 11 vs 11 matches and also Be a Pro matches. The biggest scores come from winning matches on a high skill level, especially if you use a weaker team against a stronger team. Once your match finishes that score is uploaded and represents yourself and your country. You choose your country at the start of the game and you can’t change it once you’ve logged onto the servers for the first time. That’s to prevent people changing country on a whim and perhaps using it in a destructive way to lower other country’s scores. You are free to play matches as any country you like so you can choose your challenge, but the points you earn always country towards your specific country.
This score you generate joins all the other scores from around the world and we work out which country has the best average score. So a country with only 100 gamers is able to compete against one with thousands. The score also represents yourself, there are leaderboards that show the countries and the gamers. The day’s competition starts and stops at midnight (CET). At this time the day’s finishing positions are converted into points towards the overall leaderboards. The top ten countries are awarded points and the top 250 gamers also. Then the next day’s competition starts with clean daily leaderboards.
There are five different leaderboards each day to represent these game types. Kick Off (Team), Kick Off (Be a Pro), UEFA Euro 2008, Captain Your Country and the Euro Online Knockout Cup.
For Euro & CYC you need to complete the whole game mode to register your score, and you can only do so once. Cue much manual saving and reloadng for the perfectionists. But all the time you spend obsessing over the perfect score means you have less time to try and do well in the other categories, so it’s a payoff of how to best use your time. Plus there’s always a minimum number of games that a gamer and a country have to play for their leaderboard entry to be valid, so you can’t obsess too much about perfection or you’ll never play the required number of games.
With the Euro Online Knockout Cup this BOTN idea means that we should see far less “Barcelona” syndrome. Simply because you score less points for winning matches wth the best teams. So you may find it is easier to win the cup wth France but that only scores you 200 points. If you just win one match with Andorra you score more, so hopefully the best gamers will not be the ones choosing the best teams and we should see online being more competitive as a result.
If you are one of the top 250 gamers in any of the five daily leaderboards you’ll also receive a trophy the following day. That will populate your My Trophies screen and you can show off to your friends.
Come June 30th, the day after the final, the battle officially ends and we’ll see which nation wins and which gamer wins. The daily leaderboards and trophies will still continue after June 30th but the overall leaderboards will not update any longer; the champions will have been crowned.
So who is going to take up the challenge and show that they want to represent their country against all the other nations.
It doesn’t matter if your nation didn’t qualify for Euro 2008, any of the 53 UEFA nations are able to compete and any one of them could prove to be the champion nation of the virtual UEFA Euro 2008.
The last time I played Captain Your Country, I was playing an England player and it came down to the last game at home to Croatia, familiar huh? We had to win and then hope that Macedonia didn’t win away in Israel. Somehow we raced into an early 3-0 lead and then the rest of the match I was waiting for some news to come through. Eventually in about the 80th minute a score flashed up that Israel had scored and I pretty much knew the celebrations could start.
It’s a great little feature which adds to the tension and feeling that a world of football is being played out before you.
Create Player Renders
In Captain Your Country you are able to create your own player. We made sure that we added facial snapshots of these players to appear in the menu screens during the game mode. FIFA doesn’t have that ability, but we thought it was really important to show your player’s face on all the screens rather than just have a silhouette. So now your ugly mug can be shown in the same newspaper as Rooney, Cole, Gerrard etc.
Commentary Names
Also in the same vein as the create player render, we allow the gamer to assign their created player a commentary name. So instead of there being silence when you are on the ball, you can choose from hundreds of names. It includes the names of all the existing players in the game, plus we ran a special recording session where we recorded many new names in various languages. So if you’re lucky perhaps your name is one of these and each time you get the ball your local commentator will be calling out your name!
Closing Comment
That’s all for these blogs. I know we’ve had a lot of fun putting them together and getting the chance to talk about the game before it’s released. So all that remains to be said is that I hope you all enjoy the game, and for Battle of the Nations “Come on England!!!!” We may not be at the finals, but with BOTN you gamers can still win Euro for us!
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