Ai Fullback and winger behaviour

Good afternoon Team,

As a suggestion, I hope to see Rugby 24 with realistic behaviours with Fullbacks and wingers. Particularly when under the high ball or catching kicks / bombs.

A few recent Rugby video game titles the last few years have had unrealistic gameplay and Ai behaviour with fullbacks and wingers particularly. For instance I could be controlling a team and kicking long range kicks and Bombing the Ai fullback and wingers 10-15 times during a match and they never once drop or fumble the ball. Not even in wet weather conditions ! or suffering from some kind of fatigue. I found this kind of gameplay unrealistic.

  • I feel that at some point during a match a tactic of high kicking or kicking duels for field position could result in the Ai making a mistake to knock on and also this would apply to my own fullbacks or wingers making mistakes if the Ai opposition team tried similar kicking tactics to target them. It might also be a fatigue issue based on how many runs or tackles they have made already in the match.

  • It might warrant a user controlling a team to replace a fullback or winger during match to counter fatigue and put a fresh player on the field to stop any errors or mistakes later in the match. Or switch a winger to fullback and put the fullback on the wing.

  • Weather conditions, rain, wind, fatigue and player catching abilities rating should influence the player/ Ai behaviours with competence and mistakes on the field.
    To see random incidents of a dropped ball gives the game some excitement and makes you feel motivated to use aerial tactics in trying to get field position or possession in territory.

  • Set default Team attacking styles might have some kind of aerial attack as an option. For instance playing against the Springboks they might have a default attack setting for Aerial attack to do a lot of kicking/Bombing. If I was playing as England or Australia I might need to ensure I have some backline winger or fullback on the bench to counter a heavy workload for my back 3 players.

4 Likes

Good solid ideas and definitely some factors to consider for AI back 3 catching, but with the human players, how about another ideas alongside fatigue?

I’d suggest that an option could be turned on/off for User-based catching. On PS5, when a kick is punted down your end of the field, you’d need to choose the “nearest player” defence button, then followed by X as the ball comes down. The window for timing a good catch could be easy generally, but reduced if:

It’s raining
The player is fatigued
There’s a lot of wind

It might even be nice to have a brief timing colour around the catching player (Red/Orange/Green/Orange/Red) for those who need assistance with timing a jump.

3 Likes

Really good suggestion with the controls layout to catch the ball. I think that would work well and add a good challenge to the Fullback or wingers gameplay with catching high balls. Definitely agree weather conditions should influence catching ability for everyone on the field.

1 Like

I just hope that you can actually use the fullback properly in this game.

In rugby 22 i found it very difficult to get the fullback involved, frustrating given they are often one of the best attacking players in the team.

The older RC games were the same, you only got to use them when they caught a kick then they disappeared into the back field.

RC4 had the option to bring the fullback into the line with a button press which worked well most of the time, and put the onus on the user to make sure you put him back in defence when you lost the ball otherwise you left yourself open at the back.

Similarly the AI team never used the fullback in any iteration of the RC games, its like the code was just missed.

Team in possession = fullback in the attacking line, opposition in possession = defensive position (both options can give the user options as to default position via diferent tactics)

3 Likes

Great points. I totally agree. Would be good to get these options to get the Fullback more involved.