After update 7 came out, I played the game with my brother as we are both pretty big tennis fans. Almost straight away we both noticed a change to rallies that just didnt seem right and visually looked out of place. It was the new running forehand that they had added to the game.
The problem with this new mechanic is number one it just doesnt look correct at all and almost looks cartoonish in action. The players launch themselves from a fair distance away from the ball, the player then gets auto pulled to the balls location and when this happens after a change of direction removes all of the inertia from the player movement and makes the game look like an arcade game.
For anyone thats done a slow mo replay of this shot in action. The players fly through the air while leaning over to the point of almost falling over and are some how able to transfer their body weight in mid air from essentially lying down to an upright position and hit the ball almost defying the laws of physics.
I genuinely preferred the game without the shot. Yes there were more lunges, but just like in real tennis these happeneded less and less as you got better at the game and you got better at positioning etc. Having lunges also meant that like in real tennis, if you were better then your oppononent in a rally and your good play forced them to perform a lunge it would rightly give you an opportunity to punish them and gain the advantage. Now we have a situation where both players regardless of skill are able to perform non stop running forehands in rallies back to one another in cross court battles etc. which not only looks unrealistic, but makes gameplay look extremely generic from an animation point of view.
I personally think that they should remove the shot, even just temporarily and re-work it to be a proper running forehand where the players dont just auto zoom to the balls without inertia and fly through the air but simply hit the ball while on the run while staying feet planted on the ground but there must be an inertia penalty applied once the ball has been hit. If this cant be done, then i would just remove the shot entirely.
Alternatively or additionally many peoples complaints about lunges were the fact that the majority of them were defensive in nature and would spoon the ball up high in the air. A simple positive change would have been to adjust some of these shots and incorporate an attacking lunge where the balls would go over the net without so much hight applied to them which would keep the speed of gameplay and rallies more consistent instead of needing to wait multiple seconds for the balls to drop from a great height everytime a lunge is performed.
By auto zooming/teleporting to every ball that is out of reach on the forehand side it looks very wonky in action. It also seems to be at odds with the games initial design philosophy which was to give the player much more manual and nuanced control over gameplay in a similar vein to Tennis Elbow or Full Ace and to remove or limit the feeling that gameplay was being affected by too much computer assistance.