Hey all,
Just put live a small interim update which resolves a passing bug - I expect we’ll have further updates fairly shortly but wanted to get this one out as soon as it was ready.
19 Likes
Hey Matt, any chance we can get some specifics on this?
So far it looks positive and passing seems more creative on the player and AI side.
Seen the AI do some more advanced moves but it’s also now a bit offload happy since draw and passes can be difficult to do. Feels like a few more tweaks here they LL be able to hit the gaps.
Iv had success with inside balls now as well.
Just to note supporting lines still broken as the supporting player is running wide enough with the ball carrier. think maybe a yard or so would be enough.
Different note but this interim highlights the other two issues:
1: Player scrum half going on strolls. The AI doesn’t see this so guessing a bug. Seemed more pronounced in my last test there.
2: Rucks not really be a contest. Now that both sides can attack it’s really highlighting the need to have something here.
Overall looks positive if not a bit Fiji esque from the AI at times.
Great pass fix. This patch has had a knock on effect to everything else for me. Passes to ground are far less. Off loads far more available to do. Improvements all around to the passing which makes it far more enjoyable to play than yesterday.
Still the odd crazy rocket pass.
8 Likes
In addition to this, crowds seem to have more variety of colour in the RLL screenshot, the colour of the crowds seems to be overwhelmingly blue/white in R25. Additionally, advertising boards/crowd movement behind the tryline when points are scored will really up the immersion, I assume this is probably on your radar already and not a high priority, but good to note just incase!
This guy gets it
Thanks for fixing the passing/off loads @JNT_BA
Looks to me like attacking players are lining up a little better and running some different lines.
Game is way more playabke
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This little update changes a lot of things in my opinion and it is very successful, the passes are very good and we can finally chain the passes and create movements with several beats. we rediscovered the pleasure of playing
Great progress
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Just had a couple games seems passing is “better” still doesn’t feel fluid enough but can offload somewhat.
Had a game in the rain and the raindrops are pretty big and flying in at marc 10.
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Seen some interesting AI movement when the player has the ball to indicate that they at least have a concept of a set play involving the 10, 12,13,14 and 15 which has some different animations for the fly half then the usual first receiver.
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Here’s another example of pitch degradation and lack of overall detail. Would love to understand why this is the case with Big Ant when there’s been a generational leap in hardware 
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Awesome work Matt & Gameplay team!
Thanks to the team for pushing this update, the other guy mentioned it feels like its had a nock on affect and a lot of other pieces have fallen into place as a result.
Positive step forward I appreciate you addressing the communities concernes with action!
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Thank you for the update today. Just had a quick game and it feels way better. Passing improved and it’s letting other things happen. Not whether it’s just because the number of phases feels better but I had scrums, mauls, lineouts. The ref gave offsides and pulled me up for a cheeky forward pass. Managed to get a grubber kick away as part of the best try I’ve scored in Rugby 25 to date. Managed a counter ruck and stole a couple of lineouts.
The opposition managed to get an injury time try to take it to golden try territory and I got to see some cutscenes I’ve not seen before. Still lots of kinks to work on but this is the best I’ve seen yet. Love the camera panning to the crowds for atmosphere but as my
Laptop is so weak I have to turn the crowds off to get it to play so I just get lovely panning shots of empty seats 
. Seriously though, game on. Best game experience I’ve had with rugby 25 and I would pick up and play again.
I agree with others feedback there is still work to do but that was the single best rugby match I’ve played in rugby 25 to date. I was confident there was a good game in here somewhere and I’ve just had a glimpse. Very excited again to see how things progress from here (although expecting a few bumps in the road along the way).
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Interim update is a step in the right direction, but still don’t feel a true sense of momentum moving forward in play. (Played newest update for 2 hours)
Defensive line moves too quickly, it’s difficult to get passes off. A viable way is to pass and let the receiver auto run (without manually sprinting) this takes away control from the player IMO and makes it feel like I’m spectating a game and just pressing L1 and R1.
Stick feels too sensitive almost floaty when attacking and defending, never feels precise. Seems I’m unable to get my player exactly where I want and it lands up with too many missed gaps on attack and missed tackles on defense. Perhaps I’m bad at the game, who knows.
Passing needs to be initiated as soon as button is pressed, currently feels delayed/ slightly unresponsive and gets locked into a tackle animation before making a crucial pass to an open attacker.
Don’t like how it’s so difficult to get passes off and break the line, but then you can go on the outside and literally run around players in cartoonish fashion.
You can argue rucks are realistic in duration, however in video game sense it still feels too slow. Scrum half is still inconsistent in quick appearance, but I appreciate the improvement. Not a fan of how long the scrums take and how unresponsive they feel.
Interceptions are too common.
Mauls seem glitched, you can endlessly push your opponent forward and they only take out the ball once you’ve stopped pushing.
I like the addition of a lineout camera angle, and more offload occurrences. Would be nice to possibly see offloads from the ground (very common in professional rugby). Not the end of the world if it can’t be implemented.
Overall this is a good step forwards, but in all honesty it still doesn’t feel like a tactical game of Rugby. There is very little replay value currently but I can see the potential despite still not seeing the gameplay basics cemented.
(Rugby Champions as example…)
When I play a game like Rugby Champions, it feels dynamic because tactical gameplay is rewarded. In RC, players are moving with weight forwards. Backline players are faster, more agile, and have better passing, but the forwards are stronger , more brute force-able, and able to gain meters to setup future plays for the backline. The forwards are in pods and labeled with a different colour to the spread out backs. You always have an option to pass to a forward or to a backline player from the ruck based off their respective colors, (R2/L2= pass to forwards from ruck. R1/L1= pass to backs from ruck). It’s a simple system, and that’s why it’s perfect. RC is highly responsive and you can fairly weave gaps without being cheesed by tackle animations or AI, the passing is instantaneous as well.
The only reason a game like Rugby Champions isn’t revered enough is due to it’s poor graphics and lack of polish. However, fundamentally it’s the best Rugby game to date and should be used as a massive source of inspiration for Rugby 25, respectfully.
Rugby 25 already looks beautiful (besides the pitch) , adding simple yet fundamentally sound gameplay would give the player a reason to keep playing and buying future iterations. A system that takes into account the essential player stats (strength, speed, passing, kicking) everything else is just a fancy overcomplication. Vice_ZA previously posted some incredible feedback, take what he said seriously, and if you haven’t already, carefully study a game like RC.
Wishing you the very best Big Ant, Rugby is adored by many and it’s a great honor to be creating a Rugby video game.
5 Likes
Yeah I’d say it’s a long standing issue that outside of Speed players feel the same. I know there are some animations specific to more dominate runs but the reality is there is little difference atm between players crashing the ball up. Maybe they will have traits like in other BA games but who knows.
Game is SO much more playable, have finished a comp for the first time and enjoyed all the games. Few bits of feedback on player creator for now, as the gameplay is going in a good direction:
Stats and ratings make 0 sense so I hope these are in development and can be added to/fixed. When adding specific stats to a player, he is stuck at a 78 rated when majority of the stats are in the high 80s and don’t seem position specific, so a back with high scrummaging shouldnt really impact the overall rating.
When using the overall rating tool, to jump to a quick rating, half of the stats are 0 and some are 99 and when trying to amend they just seem quite inbalanced. From what I have gathered, a higher rated player shouldn’t rely on 99 goal kicking, 99 strength and 99 acceleration.
I think some more stat areas would be a good way to make players play more like themselves, and add more depth to them. Such as more kicking stats, chip, grubber, Drop goal etc (allowing high rated kickers to knock them from at least 40 out). Could lineout be a stat alongside scrums? Add a carrying stat, whereby they gain more meters in the carry (similar to the drive mechanic in RLL4).
Moving onto the player creator, this is really good but do not see any stubble on players which is VERY common for a lot of players and am struggling to see when creating players.
MORE Strappings! Like the Tom Curry or Sam Cane head strapping, again not sure if this is in progress but there are so many areas for strapping on the arms too with white and black tape. Also more leg straping like the tape on hamstrings, and lifting blocks above knees.
Again thanks for all the hard work and the recent updates, love having more teams and am really enjoying gameplay
1 Like
Hello Big Aunty,
thanks for the interim, being able to pass again is enjoyable, we can try the game a bit more. It is still not enough for me to join the hype train, as i don’t feel like i have enough control over players when receiving a pass. Running routes are still pretty messy, support runners almost non responsive (when passing to a pod, the other 2 don’t react instantly when the receiver is sucked into a tackle animation, delaying the ruck and so on…), number 9 still takes too much time to get to the ruck or to be replaced by another player. Still too many support players waiting around the ruck before entering, all lineout players stand still for a few seconds while the ball is already being played. When passing to the player right next to me, sometimes i will pass it to him where he is a few meters behind, sometimes i will deliver a flat pass, but i don’t get to choose when to use which and often times i would have loved that last pass to be different. So still no control over the type of pass nor the running route of the receiver, so attacking feels kind of like random passing until you can run around with your hookker left alone on the wing. I’m a bit exagerating of course, since inside passes actually work pretty fine as the AI defense gets confused pretty easily.
And of course, rucks are still the huge concern, as people have been saying for months now, but have still never been mentioned by BA as a focus for future updates. And still lineouts are pointless (no contest possible other than luck), mauls useless, and close to no rules applied.
It may sound harsh, but if we are to play online by the end of the month, gameplay needs a handful of updates.
And following are a few minor things that could brighten the experience pretty easily without impacting the dev team working on gameplay:
-with the camera behind, the ball chaser after a kick is offscreen. There should still be an icon on the bottom of the screen to indicate where our player is so we can chase in the right direction
- playstation controls inputs please, it’s very confusing with only xbox buttons displayed atm
-In competition mode, we should only be able to select one team at the beginning of the season and play only its games rather then being able to play any team on any game day
Overall even if it’s nice to be able to pass the ball around, more controls and tactics will be deeply appreciated. Thanks for the effort, keep up the good work !
4 Likes
Hey Guys
Little late to the party on the feedback due to time constraints. However, this is the most time ive put into the EA major updates so far. Because the game is playable, and can actually have some great moments.
Again ill try my best to avoid covering too many of the points covered already by people but may be some cross overs, have certainly seen some colourful discussion so far in the FAQ
Positives:
- Music, once again song choice of new songs coming in is great, thouroughly enjoying all of the songs in the main menu, got it on in the background now while typing this, another big tick to the audio team. (just a quick note, newer songs have odd titles like “FrontEndMusic_song name”, which is fine for now, but will want to be sorted before release, im guessing the game is just registering the name of the music files as the song name"
- Quick fix @MattW mentioned to stop the passing issue, worked great! It was the most annoying thing about EA4 so the fact that got sorted in a week has made the game much more playable and enjoyable experience.
- New teams ,staiums and kits added in to the game is always a great bonus
- Competitions working smoothly, no crashes, still an issue with the Simulate button not working though
- Like that the 9 is the main guy to the scrum half position now, looks much better (can have issues though where they run away from the ruck, or take too long to get there and so you get penalised because the game only wants the 9 to do it, even if unavailable)
Gameplay feels better ( I would like to make a point here of saying, “HARDEST” difficulty, is absolutely the best difficulty in EA4 for me.) the AI seem to change their style of play as you increase the difficulty. And easiest-medium is a very long drawn out game of rucks not going anywhere. However on Hard and Hardest, the AI open up so much more, defensivley more gaps appear to create overlaps and send a man through, under pressure they kick more so the egame feels more open, and on attack they are aggressive and always looking to find a hole in your defense and feels so much better. I recommend everyone giving the hardest difficulty a go from a purely entertainment standpoint.
Negatives that came with the patch:
-
Maul Issue - an issue has returned when during a maul your defensive line will completely run away from the maul leaving a huge open gap.
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Interceptions - The AI really enjoy occasionally not even attempting a tackle and seem to track passes coming like homing missiles to intercept the ball and charge 50m up the field, 1 or 2 is fine in a match, but once you get in to double figures it can be frustrating, when you dont have a lot of options as a player over the pass.
-
new glitches - there are a host of new glitches ive not encountered before.
- “Quick Throw” goes wrong 9/10 times, resulting in your guy just holding on to the ball, passing it off map, or another player beating you to the ball and just standing there with it.
- Mauls will now go on forever if you spam the buttons, meaning you can drive them back the whole length of the pitch over their on dead ball line
- Clock stops comepletely during a maul and wont restart until the ball is played or gone dead.
- Scrums can just completely disappear, all of the players vanish but the scrum continues, and the players pop back in to existence once ball is played.
- performing a high tackle on a player over the try line will always result in the ball being held up
- actual offside penalties being awarded in a ruck, but for absolutely no reason
- AI players occasionally hammer the ball 80m in a kick and easily hit the crowd on my try line, from their own 22.
- when an opponent does a goal line drop out, if you respond immediately with a drop goal by the player who catches the ball, they will kick the ball back to the try line where your hooker will collect the ball and score a try instantly
Broader Points:
- Breakdown - The rucks have become SOOOO much harder to turn over, it doesnt feel like a difficulty increase, it just feels like the AI is able to add their players in to a ruck before you can and theres nothing you can do, even as a much better team getting a counter ruck might happen 1 in 20 rucks no matter if the player is really isolated.
- Supporting players non existant - as mentioned in the patch notes, there would be supporting runners when you make a break away, I cant say Ive seen a single instance for me or for the AI where there was an obvious supporting runner, maybe thats because the default distance from player to player is too deep, or the players just dont seem to comprehend you have made a make, but its always better to go alone than look for a pass.
- AI tackle after kicks - very annoying especially when the tackle is clearly late when making a grubber kick and the ball is already well on its way, and they drag ou to the ground to stop you chasing.
- Ball grounding - Feels like you as the player has absolutly no impact on a loose ball on the ground. Settings say to press X to dive on the ball, but it just doesnt work. Sometimes I just want them to pick it up and press nothing and they dive on it stopping them from scoring a try, because by the time they get back to their feet, they have already been tackled. Cant seem to kick the loose ball on after a grubber kick either, and most times results in the AI just picking it up.
- kick off recovery - one I dont think ive mentioned before, but its very weird on kick off’s how sometimes players running back to your own try line collect the ball with an outragous 1 handed catch above their own head, rather than a player running forwards on to the ball to collect it and then charge up the pitch.
Final point (rant incomming, appolgies in advance)
Logo Creator…
Boy oh boy, is this thing a b**** to use. Ive got a video coming out tomorrow going over more thoughts on EA4, so ill try and put a link to it on this comment with a time stamp going over the logo creator in person because theres almost too much to type out. Time stamp 05:43!
Short version, it is WAY too hard to use, its so fiddly and so uncomprehesible what it wants you to do to use it correctly. A logo/emblem creator should be this super easy system where you can kill 30 minutes designing some funky characters or recreate profesional team emblems. In order for it to appeal to a broad audience it needs to be super simple otherwise players will drop off rapidly.
All the elements are there it just needs overhauling to be more user friendly. Keep all of the shapes and letters and so on as options, even keep the colour change options the same. But the layers need to be visible at all times, and the player allowed to just select a layer quickly and edit that 1 asset on that layer.
I would drop the 200 points of contact on each symbol, and just have the option when adding a layer to select the shape/letter, and then XYZ options to change legth, height and overall size, and the ability to rotate the shape.
If people want complex curvy letters they can just add curvy shapes in more layers and move the layers around.
Ive put a good 3 hours into the logo creator now, only got as far as making utter garbage, followed by the entire thing breaking because touching any of the options with the mouse seems to break everything.
I would also make the UI completely interactable with a mouse, it seems so strange to navigate the creation tabs and selection with arrow keys when I have a mouse right there to just click them.
Why are we choosing colours using “GHYJ” keys, rather than just clicking on the colour wheel with a mouse exactly at the colour we want?
Why do we have to use “A or D” to switch shape styles, rather than just click the next page with a mouse? And why does hovering over those page swaps with a mouse make it rotate constantly making it impossible to select when we could just do 1 click at a time?
Why am i using the middle mouse button to draw a box to move a shape, as opposed to just having 1 major node, that you can left click and hold and drag wherever you want?
The customisation options in RUGBY 25 are fantastic, the player and team and kit creators all have so much promise, and im looking forward to spending a lot of time using them, and making a bunch of custom stuff. But the Logo creator is nowhere near the same level for me unfortunately.
Overall, im actually really enjoying EA4. The logo creator boils my blood But the gameplay itself is gaining some real direction, and this is the first EA version im sat down in my spare time knocking a couple of games out on and actually working my way through a competition.
Think a lot will need to be done before online play is going to feel solid. Really looking forward to the eventual set plays and ability to change player line depth and widtch, and personalise the matches a bit more.
Thankyou @JNT_BA and @MattW for fielding the feedback threads, having read through a lot of the thread myself, cant imagine its easy dealing with so many people having such strong thoughts every single stage of the way. You’re both doing a solid job dealing with it all. Hopefully the general feedback has been useful accross the EA.
Im looking forward to what the next update brings.
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Agree with every point you made. ESPECIALLY that logo creator … really rips my knitting!
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I echo pretty much what others have said about the need for changes to the ruck and maul (mauls can be driven back to be dead in goal if your team is strong enough, no chance to steal or for a breakdown to occur), as well as the need for different speeds depending on position (thresholds and caps could work here, a 99 speed lock is just not the same as a 99 speed back) and for better offload opportunities. I will say, though…
The logo creator sucks unless you just import an SVG file. It’s quite possibly the best thing you could have done for designers with loads of logos already made/taken from Wikipedia, and you’ve given us the opportunity to use the tools of a real design software to execute. I’d like to see the scale of the custom logos increase in the presentation, maybe going from a 256x256 to a 1024x1024, but I just wanted to say that I greatly appreciate this feature.
Another thing that I appreciate, albeit with reservation, is the introduction of more penalties. High tackles and more consistent offsides are nice, but the cutaway to the ref just glitches the players on the field, oftentimes making the CPU run through the back of the goal. I’d rather just see the penalty and advantage signal on the scorebug, instead of a cutaway to the ref mid-play.
agree with all your points, with Rucks I have played around a lot of it join ruck and tackle contest does nothing and means nothing will not help with stealing.
However, just pressing stealing button will give you counter rucks as players will join the ruck when there is a chance to steal. I feel it gives you pretty much almost as much you see in a real match, but also it doesn’t matter if ai have 1 or 3 players in the ruck I had turnovers with AI having 3 players in a ruck while I have 1.
So try a few matches with just using steal button and than a few where you use tackle contest and join ruck and you will see there major difference
I only use the steal button at this point, might be the consequence of playing on the harder difficulty, that even the steal button tactic doest pay off. Finding a lot in EA4 that my players dont actually interact with the rucks. Sometimes my players will just stand there until until the AI have all 3 players in, and then join, and in the time for my guys to get in th eruck, the opposition 9 is already passing the ball away. In EA3 you basically stole whatever ball you wanted from any ruck.
I do like the counter ruck animation, just wish it was more consistent at what you need to do as the player to have a higher success opportunity.
1 Like