Improvements
- Pick up and drive a lot more fluid and more effective than before. Player is picking the ball up more naturally with momentum and pushing forward which is a good change. Potentially need to check this though if it isn’t too overpowered when camped out on an oppositions tryline
- Rucks are significantly improved and actually feels like you have control to it and is a contest. I’ve seen a lot more steals and rucks successes on both sides. I’d like to see it more aligned to competitive advantage at a specific breakdown (e.g. I have the 3 players there before they have one so more right to win or more because an attacker has run away from their support.) This may be already occurring though and it’s tricky to tell as there is a key issue to attack at the moment. But also good to see that I do need to commit players to the ruck now to retain the ball.
- Tackling feels more responsive and I feel like I am playing a greater role in driving back the opposition vs relying on the AI to do the work for me. In general defensive gameplay feels quite a bit better with improvements to tackling and rucks
Issues
- Quick passing seems to have been removed (passing without selecting a specific recipient when holding down the bumper selecting the relevant player). This means that it’s almost impossible to link up line attack play (and a new over-reliance on pick up and drives). Basically attacking momentum is gone now
- Rucks do remain quite glitchy. It’s good that they’re more competitive, but it’s hard to tell what’s happening as there are stutters and delays in animations taking place, which makes it a bit more difficult to tell when you’re having an impact or not (still significantly improved, just needs to be smoothed out). This is especially with the pushovers - nothing will happen for a second and then the animation will start but be at an accelerated pace. (Update: I’ve played a bit more and I think the key problem here is responsiveness. I hit steal and then it only starts the steal 2-3 seconds later when I may be hitting other buttons- improving responsiveness can significantly improve the experience here)
- With the ruck wins by pushover I’ve now seen it happen quite frequently that the team that’s just been driven back in the ruck for the turnover will have a new player come in and pick up the ball. This shouldn’t be possible or should be flagged as an offside penalty for coming in from the side of the ruck or something.
- If you hold down a bumper to look at your passing options, you become locked out of a pick up and go option
- Box kicks from rucks are now too slow so that the scrumhalf is consistently tackled before the animation can complete (~80% of my box kick attempts). A couple of loops of this resulted in the ball being stuck in play in the ruck (have submitted a bug report with this issue highlighted and another bug related to disruption to tackle animation freezing gameplay)
- Might want to check the behind play camera on the Northampton Stadium, I think it may have been clipping through some of the lights when you it’s behind a team in the 22, which results in light flickering on screen (something I think which would be a bit of a hazard to someone with epilepsy)
- Had one maul. It was highly effective as it sucked in all of the defending players so it was an easy run to the tryline… but no instructions on screen meant I didn’t know what I was doing. I mashed B to try bind players which I think worked, but then once all of the players had bound that could the scrumhalf ran off with the ball immediately, I guess because throughout I was holding left stick up to try “push/direct” the maul.
I suspect there are some improvements to attacking play, but can’t really be tested until there is a bug fix to the issue of not being able to quick pass in running play at the moment.
