Curiously enough, Stephane tells me his team got the ideas for these little helpers from other sports games. Fighting, hand-to-hand combat sims, boxing… even racing games. “You can see our in-game helpers in a lot of racing games. Some are very demanding in terms of precision, but they also try to teach you what you should pay attention to, so we have had a lot of inspiration there. How do they find the balance? How do they tweak the settings?”
This concept of tutoring is taken a step further in
Top Spin 4’s Academy mode - which is basically a glorified tutorial, but Stephane hopes that players won’t see it that way as a lot of the nitty-gritty technical gumpf is found within this multiple-stage challenge. Each area of expertise is split into six tasks that you need to complete before moving on to the next one, and rather than telling you what to do it aims to drill into your mind the philosophy behind it.
Unfortunately, it does mean a lot of patronising. Some challenges present you with Super Cheery Chappy Coach of the Day asking, “Dah, try and hit duh ball back!” If you manage to lose this frighteningly daunting task, it doesn’t matter - you’re still his favourite. Once you treat these exercises less as individual lessons but as building blocks to a bigger form of practice, it all starts to make sense though.
It seems to work, as well. Just after playing through the first Academy session I found myself consciously moving back to the centre of the court after each shot, when normally I’d just flail about like a mongoose in heat. Murray always seemed perfectly suited to my play style.
Another major thing to improve for
Top Spin 4, based on consumer feedback, was in the game’s custom character building modes and the balancing in general. “We really wanted to do something about that, especially when competitive online play is involved,” Stephane said. “In
Top Spin 3 the people who win are the guys who are charging the shots and using - sometimes abusing - the risk shots, so its a one way road. With this one we hope that we can renew the experience because you’ll have to think, adjust and adapt your game with each player.”
I’m not sure how it will hold out in an online environment, but from what I played the statistics in
Top Spin 4 seem to be vastly improved over the last game. Different tennis stars act and move around the court in their own unique manner - because of this, you can assess your opponents skills easier and use your strengths against them. Roddick will tire out if you use a long-baller like Chang to send him around the court, for example.
Perhaps what Stephane was referring to regarding a more definite change in tactics is with the revamped custom character mode. Instead of plopping points to attributes manually, there are three areas of training for your character to take advantage of: either Serve & Volley, Offensive Baseline Play or Defensive Baseline Play. Selecting one of these will automagically raise the core attributes of your superstar-in-training. And there’s no way to create the ultimate tennis player - even focusing your skill points on as many areas as you can will still leave you poorly matched in certain aspects.
The result is a tighter tennis experience - one with matches that don’t necessarily have a foregone conclusion, and one that helps you learn about the finer points of tennis to boot. I didn’t see any compromise in the level of detail and simulation found in
Top Spin 3 (if anything it’s increased thanks to these changes), but the Academy mode and guiding systems will mean that I probably won’t be forgetting about
Top Spin 4 any time soon. Especially if I want to be the very best.
I’ll leave the final word to Stephane, and the whole simulation concept: “The core objective for us is not to make the best simulation ever. What we care about is the fact that buying a game today is an investment. They are quite expensive. We need to make sure that after five, ten, fifteen - even twenty hours, you still discover something new and learn from it.”
