Because this is quite long winded, I have bullet pointed the positives and negatives below. If after playing the game you agree with any of the points raised or disagree, please make your opinions known as this is now the most important time for the devs to receive feedback.
Positives
• Bespoke running forehand animation.
• Serve zoom toggle in options.
• Ball bounce marker toggle in options.
• Using L&R triggers (scramble) now has some risk to playing top spin & slice shots.
• Serve is more difficult but now allows more precise placement which in the right circumstances can net you an ace.
• You can no longer use triggers and have unrealistic movement when moving backwards which prevents players from running in circles when holding down scramble. Scramble movement only applies to forward and sideways movement now.
• New positive/negative reaction cutscene animations.
• Conferences in career mode
Negatives that need addressing if possible
• Some sort of penalty/risk needs to be applied to flat shots whilst using the triggers, not just top spin and slice shots. Current implementation is very unbalanced and encourages the sole use of flat shots in combination with the triggers dumbing down gameplay variety and making it look too much like an arcade game
• If gameplay speed was increased it needs to be reduced back to EA6 levels to bring back some realism. With the new running forehand animation, trigger scramble and ability to hit scramble flat shots without penalty gameplay speed is visually way too fast if both and unrealistic if both human players are using the trigger scramble and flat shot method. This is based on playing another human player of similar skill, the CPU currently has no chance regardless of difficulty.
• The generic running forehand animation needs to be improved if possible. It can look very unrealistic.
• CPU appears to have been made slightly more aggressive but is still woefully poor on expert level difficulty and doesn’t have a chance against you if you are using the scramble and flat shot method. Difficulty very much needs increasing for the CPU on higher difficulty levels. It needs to be more in line with EA5 without having the ability to get every single shot back. This is a critical issue and will have a massive impact on the games longevity and long term player base. Please do not let all of the teams hard work in single/player career mode go to waste by having the game be so easy that it becomes boring and unchallenging.
• Just another note regarding difficulty of the CPU. The changes here are very dependent on the changes the team wants to make (if any) to the current trigger scramble flat shot meta. If this is to remain, the team needs to adjust the CPU difficulty specifically to combat players using the scramble and flat shot as their base method of playing 90% of the shots by potentially allowing the CPU to play similarly. From my experience, the CPU difficulty isn’t too bad on expert when you are not using the trigger scramble and can be quite competitive, but this is not the way 90% of the player base will end up playing the game if things stay the way they are.
• Nadal forehand animations (Available in character creator) when using “A” button flat shot look very poor and not like Nadal’s flatter shots in real life. His top spin shots off both wings look okay.
• Federer’s generic forehand animation (Available in character creation) which plays most of the time when hitting groundstrokes needs tweaking as it doesn’t look right with his one leg/foot lifting up on every shot as this is not how he looked when he played in real life. he definitely did this in real life but not on every shot.
• Ball and feet marks no longer appear on any of the clay courts at any point in a match. Appear to have been completely removed in EA7.
• Could do with adding an aggressive attacking lunge animation to further assist with gameplay variety and make it look truer to life instead of the new running forehand animation playing the majority of the time now.
• Due to the ability to use trigger scramble and flat shot off all serve returns the improvements made to serving in EA7 have almost been completely nullified. The unintended consequence of this is that it has been made more difficult to serve, especially first serves and many players will be using the second serve “B” button which will be getting absolutely annihilated by anyone returning using the scramble+flat shot. Even first serves will be getting the same treatment. The community wanted the ability to perform more effective and faster looking serves and have been left with a situation where anyone serving is at more of a disadvantage than in any previous update.
• Due to speed of gameplay, many backhand animations are not animating correctly at the point of contact with the ball with the player visually hitting the ball back with the chest or waist as the animation doesn’t have time to complete. Only observed with one handed backhands so am not sure if this affects two handed.
• There is also a bug where the ball can turn different colors, red/green and persist for a few games when using the serve timing indicator.
• The bug with the white box appearing in between the opponents feet is still present and appears every now and again, not sure of the trigger for this.
When Update 7 came out I posted my feedback and suggestions based on a couple of hours worth of game time. The feedback was mostly positive, but after spending even more time with the game and after reading the feedback of others I now realize that this was somewhat premature.
This update on the surface appears to be very positive, as well as my original feedback there are a number of positive posts from many users praising the current state of the game. Sadly, there are fundamental issues that have been brought in with this update that desperately need addressing.
I originally believed that the CPU difficulty had been increased, and that risk had been added to using the triggers which naturally forced players to use a combination of normal shots and trigger shots. This in turn allowed the CPU to be more competitive, increasing difficulty and from a visual standpoint allowed the game to appear more like real tennis. Sadly, my beliefs at the time were not quite accurate.
The issue is that while risk has been added to topspin “B” shots and Slice “X” shots, flat “A” shots appear to have been unaffected. The effect that this then has, is that once you realize this, you can once again like the previous updates hold both L&R together virtually 100% of the time as long as you are hitting flat shots. The consequence of this is that because penalties exist for the other two shot types when using the triggers and they were not there in the previous update, it massively stifles gameplay variety as it is no longer such an incentive or in most cases a tactical advantage to play any other shot type other than the scramble flat shot.
The impact of this in single player/career mode is that I have gone from having competitive matches with the CPU on expert, to beating them 6-0 every set. Because it is such a powerful and safe way of playing and there is added risk to using the top spin and slice shots whilst holding down the shot preparation triggers you naturally find that you don’t really use any of the other shot types because you don’t really need to.
Because you can now once again abuse the triggers whilst using flat shots without any penalty, all of the improvements that the team has made to serving, including the increased ability to get aces have been nullified. From service returns you can hold down the triggers and using the “A” button you can hit bullet like returns at will which if not outright wins you the point every time come very close and puts your opponent straight on the defensive regardless of the quality of their serve.
What doesn’t help any of the above is that it very much appears that the general gameplay speed has been increased slightly. I don’t know if this was a necessary global change that was required to increase serve speed slightly or it just looks faster now because they have also added in a new running forehand animation. The additional problem of now being able to use the triggers all of the time and the new running forehand animation is that it turns the game from something that was aiming to be a more realistic depiction of tennis to something that more closely resembles an arcade game like Virtua Tennis. Due to the above, Inertia, including the ability to be wrong footed now appear to be even more greatly impacted than ever before and will not be a factor in most online matches if all players are using the scramble and flat shot.
Many people including myself have wanted a running forehand animation in the game for a while but now with the way the game can be played it just ends up looking incorrect. In previous updates you were rewarded for being a good player by the fact that if you were not good at getting into position for a shot you would likely perform some type of lunge and would rightly allow your opponent to follow up with a punishing finisher. I do appreciate that many found this annoying even if it was more realistic.
The running forehand whilst using the triggers (scramble) basically unrealistically zooms you to the ball and allows you to hit very good shots back to your opponent. Arguably some of these shots should still really be lunges or maybe the team could also implement an attacking lunge instead of just defensive lunges. Sometimes the new running forehand animation can look good, and other times not so, as the players seemingly fly through the air whilst leaning sideways with very little body weight transfer and somehow shift their body weight back in the other direction while they are still flying through the air.
The gameplay speed is so fast now that some of the backhand animations can’t even keep up. Upon reviewing several replays of plays that didn’t look quite right when hitting the backhand, I observed that the ball was coming back to me so quickly that when performing the backhand, I was hitting the ball back to my opponent with my chest/waist as the backhand animation was only halfway complete by the time the ball arrived at my location.
I very much intend for this post to be a fair and honest critique and appreciate all of the effort that devs have put in. As the developers have stated themselves, the feedback they receive for this update is the most important as there are only a few weeks left until final release. The positive is that the team has done some amazing work on the game and it only needs a few adjustments to sort out the great majority of the issues listed.