EA Sports College Football is still a twinkle in everyone’s eye more than anything right now, but it does not mean we have not been thinking about what’s on the horizon. How will recruiting be handled? What kind of sandbox-like options will we have? What newly introduced MyTeam-style mode will eat up resources and be the focus of career mode users’ frustrations? All of these are real questions I have, but my biggest question comes back to TeamBuilder and how it will evolve (assuming it even exists!) in the newest college football game from EA Sports.
To make TeamBuilder the best it can be, I took a look at the current creation suites we have in some of the biggest sports games around and picked one thing TeamBuilder can borrow from each of them.
EA Sports College Football TeamBuilder
Introduced in NCAA Football 12, TeamBuilder took over as the game’s new create-a-team feature. Rather than occur within the game, it existed as a companion website outside the game. Users could upload their own images, design uniforms, pick a stadium, and edit their roster. Moving forward, I’d recommend they keep having TeamBuilder be present outside the game as its own website.
I’d obviously keep quite a few other features as well, but I’ll borrow some ideas to improve on them from the games below.
MLB The Show
In the last version of TeamBuilder, a user could choose from any stadium in the game, including neutral sites and bowl games. They also let you choose from a few generic ones. MLB The Show now lets you do the same with one big, obvious addition: stadium creator.
Much like baseball, stadiums are one of the things that make college football great. There’s something unique to almost all of them. And there’s nothing like being able to create one with your own distinct flair. I’ll admit, I haven’t gotten too far into the nuances of MLB The Show’s stadium creator. But having a collection of fun assets to choose from to build anything from the stands, to the scoreboard, to the stadium’s backdrop would be a huge step forward. There was also an interview a few years back where some of the developers admitted that a stadium creator was in the cards for NCAA Football 15.
NBA 2K
While we did have the ability to upload our own images with TeamBuilder, several games since have not offered that ability. MLB The Show has you design your logos within their logo creator featuring shapes and text. NHL and FIFA offer you the ability to recolor some logos that exist within the game. But with NBA 2K, you can still upload your images.
There are legal hurdles to get over with having users upload images they may or may not have the rights to use, and that might be why other games shy away from it. With the overall process of just getting College Football off the ground presenting its own legal hurdles, EA may opt against having users uploading their own images.
But this article exists in a dream world! I’d recommend EA keep/borrow from the NBA 2K franchise, giving users the capability to upload their own images.
Madden
Nothing. Madden’s creation suite is basically non-existent. If TeamBuilder returns and looks anything like what we have in Madden, it will be a huge letdown.
FIFA
FIFAÂ not only offers the chance to change uniforms but allows you to change your uniforms every year. With the rate that college football teams change, add, or update their uniforms, this would be a welcome addition to keep any career mode fresh.
NHL
NHL’s creation suite might be the deepest that currently exists. Sure you can’t upload any logos you want to use, but the options within the arena editor are really nice. But I’d argue for MLB The Show’s overall stadium creator as a better option for a college football game. That’s why I’d like for TeamBuilder to update the uniform creator and borrow some ideas from the NHL series.
TeamBuilder did a great job of including an abundance of jersey templates. The number of available number fonts to choose from was pretty bare, though. NHL does a great job of both. They’ve included almost any jersey template in use in the game, and the same can be said for the amount of available number fonts. TeamBuilder should be able to get all the jersey templates (again), but they need to up the number of fonts available.
It’s easy for NHL to get all the fonts and jersey template in the game because they’re only contacting one manufacturer. A college football game would have to reel them all in from about five different manufacturers. The good thing for the EA team is that they’ll already have them all, they just need to include them in TeamBuilder. To paraphrase the company: if it’s already in the game, it should be…in the game.
Bottom Line
Look, there a lot of things the EA Sports College Football team will be focusing on over the next year, so it’s a pipe dream to get many TeamBuilder improvements, much less all of the features mentioned above. But the most important thing the team can do is not take anything away from what we had 10 years ago.
