Postby dnielsen » Fri Aug 28, 2009 8:24 am
I sometimes like the idea of interested people in the KOA creating a "Kick Off 2.5". The idea would be to preserve the ball control physics 100%, but to allow people a free hand to rethink and tweak various aspects of the game (for instance, slides, headers, keeper behaviour, tactics, etc.). With a Kick Off 2.5, people who are curious about figuring out how to possibly create an even better game than Kick Off 2 could focus their efforts fully without having to worry about offsetting people whose main concern is to play and preserve KO2 proper. [I know that Final Whistle, KO2002, and other versions could be interpreted as Kick Off 2.5, but I sense we could do a better job. Problem with Final Whistle was bad implementation of various ideas, problem with KO2002 might have been a too radical departure from KO2 proper].
So, sometimes the mind is wandering about specific mechanics in KO2 and how they might be rethought. One such mechanic is the "second closest player" mechanic:
When you control a player, the player among your computer controlled players who are closest to the ball will run towards the ball, departing from his position otherwise dictated by the tactic. Furthermore, this 2nd player will not count for players available for proper passes. That is, even if you make a pass to the right, and the 2nd closest player is directly in the line to the right, your controlled player will nevertheless pick a pass to another player somewhere in the area to the right of him. This mechanic can often trick you into making another pass than you actually expected, until you learn to master the mechanic anyway so as to know what to expect.
Now, one could consider how to tweak this mechanic in a Kick Off 2.5. You could either:
1) Stop treating the 2nd closest player in any special way entirely.
2) Only make sure that passes to the 2nd closest player are available (but this just means that the normally activated pass becomes UNavailable, so it is give some, take some).
However, I think that the radical solution 1, the "pure, logical" solution, would remove one another important feature of KO2. First, let's wonder why Dino Dini created this 2nd closest player concept in the first place. My guess is that it is some kind of ad hoc programmer hack implemented to fix something like, if a CPU player falls over, another player should be available nearby to challenge the human. Then, why would he make passes to this player unavailable? Maybe the 2nd player ended up in his own category, so it is only a programming artifact, or maybe Dino Dini had an idea about passes being something that should spread the play wide, or maybe that a short pass to 2nd closest player would be picked too often and disrupt passing play. Generally, I sense that he landed on some typical KO2 quick and tricky logic that made also this aspect of the game work without serious flaws.
OK, my main point, finally: This "2nd closest player" feature makes the melee battles a lot more intense and frantic! Without it, a lot of melee battles might simply be of the form "1-1, one player wins first challenge and gains full control". But instead, with the feature in place, there are always "a bunch" of players active around the ball. In particular, you can have the 2nd closest player (the one you don't control) run at the ball and then you will change control to that player once he touches the ball. This mechanic thus makes the melee battles almost infinitely more varied and challenging, I guess. (One thing to notice is that when you change control to a "2nd" player as a consequence of him running into the ball on his own, then it seems like his "first touch" on the ball is different than when you run into the ball on your own, so that the ball's placement relative to your player is different -- one example of the extra variety provided, and of one of the countless aspects to learn to master in the area of melee play (in particular, one important thing to master is which direction to direct your joystick in when a cpu-controlled player of yours is about to run into the ball -- some directions may be better for achieving quick control than others due to the ball's path before the touch)).
I think this feature may simply be another example of Dino Dini being led by God's hand while writing KO2 (or Dino Dini being deity himself).