Great update once again. With every update I’m feeling more and more confident that this may develop into a solid foundation come August.
That being said, there are some pretty hefty fixes that should be looked at. Some being important and some being more minor.
High Importance
Risk Vs Reward. There just doesn’t seem to be a Risk vs Reward system in place. I know this has been a big complaint since the first EA and many people have voiced their concerns but I’ll voice mine once again. One very easy thing to change would be to have LT or RT create “bad hits” if you happen to press the wrong side. For instance, if I’m trying to hit a forehand (right handed) and I press RT, then the shot is good and clean. But if I accidentally press LT while using my forehand, then it creates a bad hit. Bad hits don’t have to be dramatically bad - just a little worse power and little worse accuracy. That would be a good starting point. The key here would be that LT and RT would ONLY trigger if they were pressed before your hit button. So you would actually have to react correctly. As the game is now, you pretty much always want to use LT or RT as there is no risk to using them, which means all your shots are on the line and you basically have 100% accuracy with hits. But if using the wrong side of LT/RT created a bad hit, then it becomes risky to use LT/RT on fast incoming shots and it may be safer to just hit a regular safe shot.
These bad hits could even be more punishing on serves. When a serve comes and you press the wrong LT/RT it creates a much more lofty return. And of course with serves, you have much less time to react so it becomes a situation where you either play it safe with a normal return or try to predict correctly using LT/RT with the chance that you perform a bad hit.
Stamina needs to be changed as well. We need a Long Stamina and a Short Stamina, similar to other sports games. Long Stamina starts at 100 but slowly drains throughout the match/tournament and only recovers a tiny bit on changeovers. Short Stamina drains much faster but recovers every point. The total Short Stamina is only equal to the total Long Stamina. So if you have 100 Long Stamina, then you also have 100 Short Stamina. But towards the end of the match, you may only have 70 Long Stamina, which means 70 Short Stamina to use on each point. Short Stamina is burned on everything - walking, hitting, serving, returning, etc. But some things, like sprinting or going for the LT/RT hits will drain more Short Stamina. So at the beginning of each match, you will have a large pool to waste on sprinting and hard hitting but as the match goes on, you have an ever-shrinking pool of Short Stamina to draw from. But Short Stamina would recover after every point. Once you burn through all your Short Stamina, you would be penalized with minor power and accuracy. Again, nothing too dramatic.
Serving. Just not good at the moment. Needs more risk vs reward. To aim for the lines and possibly hit out or to play it safe down the center. That’s all that’s really required. Line serves should be much more difficult to return and if the returner moves in the wrong direction, it greatly increases the odds of an ace. This along with the above LT/RT change would serving more impactful. Also, if you fault your first serve, a second flat serve should automatically have like a 70% chance to fault again. Simulate that pressure that real tennis players feel after faulting. This would encourage second serves to be kick or slice, as opposed to now where you just want to always serve flat serves. Hardly any real players would serve a full flat serve after having just faulted.
Animations. Still not where it needs to be, even though it’s come a long ways. Animation and movement started at like 2/10 and has moved to 6/10 but still not at a decent place. Need more inertia… again. Players coming to sudden stops and going from standing to sudden sprints is just ugly and is sort of difficult to predict. Add weight to the players.
Running Shots. Goes in hand with the above inertia complaint. We desperately need running shots. Not just forehands and backhands but also when running to the net. I want to be able to sprint to a drop shot be able to bump it back, but because my player needs to come to a full stop before hitting, it’s very frustrating to chase down drop shots.
Sprinting. Since Sprinting requires the player to turn instead of just simply side stepping, sprinting should be slower over short distances. Side stepping should be the preferred method of moving over short distances and only if you need to chase down balls 15+ feet away should you actually sprint. This, along with the stamina changes would greatly reduce the current over-usage of sprinting. As the game is, it’s preferred to always sprint back to position or even 5 feet away to hit a ball. It’s also one of the reasons the animations seem clunky because everyone is sprinting to the ball even though a single sidestep would be sufficient and look more like a real tennis match.
Medium Importance
AI. They were too fast in EA5 and now they’re reaction is too slow. Only two things I really noticed in this EA that needs attention. Make their reactions just a tad faster, somewhere between EA5 and EA6. And fix their net game. It seems like 60% of the AI’s shots at net go into the net. Like for some reason they NEED to hit powerful shots even though the net is right in front of them. It’s okay to let them hit lofty shots if that’s what’s required to clear the net. They also are nowhere near aggressive enough when taking short balls. Even high balls at the net they run up and take a full swing but the ball just kinda floats back. It seems super threatening when they wind up but as soon as they contact the ball, it’s just a dead ball and way too easy to return.
Low Importance
Some models are iffy. Iga’s model is especially bad, probably the worst in the game. The other characters are at least recognizable but I feel like Iga is so different I probably wouldn’t even know it was her if it wasn’t a tennis game. Medvedev is also pretty poorly modeled. And also Sabalenka’s breasts are just laughably large in the game.
Idle animations. After points end it’d be great to have more variety of what players do. Walking to reach for the towel (even though some court props aren’t in yet) or walking back to get ready for a server, or just taking hunched over breather if the point was long. It seems like currently there is just two or three animations for idling, and often times both players are doing the same idle.
Again, the updates are for sure moving in the right direction and with two updates left (EA7 and launch) I feel confident the game will be at a good playable state come August even if some major updates happen post-launch.
