The Road to NCAA Football 10
"These stadiums are over 150,000 polygons each and they take about 250 man hours to build," explains "NCAA Football 10" producer Adam Thompson. "We actually hire photographers from the city where the stadium is, and they spend the day at that stadium taking high-resolution photos, everything from 360 interiors to exteriors that go out about a mile beyond the stadium. They take close-ups of things like the press box and scoreboard, and then our artists use all of those photos to provide the details that our game has. We want to make our stadiums as realistic-looking as we can, and I think the look of our stadiums is one of the things we do best in our game."
And according to Thompson, "NCAA Football 10" features 151 authentic stadiums and two generic stadiums to accommodate the 120 schools and 30-plus bowls.
"There are just a couple of schools who we don't have stadiums for because they are either building a new stadium or completely renovating their stadium." says Thompson. "Schools like San Jose State, who are building a new stadium, we are holding off on until they get in their new stadium. We'll get them in the game when the stadiums get built, but we have just about everyone in there.
"The thing is, if you're a fan and your favorite school's stadium isn't in the game or it's not accurate, that can be a pretty big drawback for people. Even if someone in your conference doesn't have the right stadium and you're playing them in Dynasty mode when you're on the road, you want that experience to be as realistic as possible, that's why we go to such great lengths to make sure we do this right."
Throughout the year, Thompson and the other NCAA producers scour message boards and blogs to find out the latest renovation and building plans throughout the NCAA in order to keep themselves up to date on the latest architecture.
Louisville's updated scoreboard will appear in "NCAA Football 10."
"We also get a lot of feedback from the schools," adds Thompson. "We send them screenshots every year of the game and they'll tell us about different changes that they've made and will provide pictures."
And for "NCAA Football 10," the upgrades include nine new stadiums and new features and renovations to 21 existing schools, including new scoreboards and press boxes.
New stadiums include Nevada, The Alamo Dome, Utah State, Bowling Green, Buffalo, Ohio, Tulsa, Troy State and Central Michigan.
"We also renovated the University of Texas," says Thompson. "They closed off their end zone and added some new seats in there. We also totally renovated the University of Illinois because they've been doing some big upgrades to their stadium the last few years.
"If you're a fan of the school, you get upset when updates don't get made to their stadium. We have over 150 stadiums in the game, so keeping track of everything is no easy task. We just added a new end zone structure to TCU that we didn't think we were going to have time to do, but we were finally able to add in. <span style="font-weight: bold;">A lot of schools are installing these huge video boards, and we were able to add those to places like Oklahoma, Florida State, Louisville, Oregon, Mississippi State, Old Miss, Oregon State, and Nebraska.</span> <br style="font-weight: bold;"> <span style="font-weight: bold;">"Like I said, it's no easy task to keep track of, but we take pride in making all of our stadiums look as realistic as possible. We owe it to the fans."</span>
To watch fly over videos of all the new stadiums, check out the
Inside EA Sports Blog.
