NCAA Football 13 Faces Challenge of Shuffling Conference Members

One of the few new features for NCAA Football 12 that actually worked properly (outside of some scheduling issues) was Custom Conferences. With the instability of some conferences and the building up of others the continued shifting of schools in the process has turned the feature into a necessity. This will be especially apparent with NCAA Football 13 as the development team is already expressing frustration in designing for all possible scenarios and facing a deadline that may be reached before next year’s conference structure is fully determined. 

Kotaku has posted an interview with producer Ben Haumiller who described some of the hurdles currently being faced. Some notes of interest as summed up by author Owen Good:

• They’re working on a scheduling logic that accounts for a 22-team conference.
• They may include it in the game even if C-USA/MWC does not merge. It depends on space and other budget considerations.
• They’ve had to develop multiple contingency plans for their scheduling logic.
• They would probably never include the ability to rename or remove a conference in Dynasty set-up, for obvious reasons.
• They would likewise never insert AI that realigns conferences midseason, independent of the user.
• They won’t try to predict future membership changes, as the TCU/Big East lesson this year bears out.
• They don’t want to hear their Madden colleagues bitching about schedule changes, that’s for sure.

It’s definitely a difficulty for the NCAA Football team to deal with this instability – but one would suspect most consumers don’t want to hear excuses or complaining about anything this early in the development cycle particularly when NCAA 12 released in the unfinished state that it did. Still, it makes for a worthwhile read, and provides some insight on the process so check it out and leave any thoughts in the comments.