Well, I hate to have to do this, but I have to make a bit of a retraction to my previous blog about College Football 25. As many of you probably know, I posted a pair of blogs a few weeks back, expressing some of my biggest challenges with College Football 25. Those blogs were focused on the difficulty of the kicking meter, and problems that I was having adjusting to the revised option controls.
I stand by most of what was presented in both of those blogs. After all, the core complaint of both was the lack of tutorials and a Skill Trainer to teach the new mechanics, and the lack of difficulty and customization settings to make these mechanics easier to use for people who are struggling. The lack of such features is still an absolutely valid complaint, and EA has yet to take any steps to address it, other than to include QR Codes linking to online tutorial videos, which you have to watch on a separate device because EA didn't even bother to include links to view the tutorials on the console's browser. I mean, heck, the controller summary in the pause menu still does not show any of the read option or kicking controls, nor does it explain that the Switch Stick exists or how it works.
I may have misread this option tutorial pop-up (which only ever appeared once).
But I will admit that I was actually largely wrong about one of my biggest complaints with the option mechanic. I want to correct that error here, and explain how this mechanic actually works. I had previously explained that I was struggling with the new mechanic of having to hold the X button (on the PS5) in order for the QB to keep the ball on a read option hand-off play, and how the input windows didn't seem to line up with the actual mesh point animation for the hand-off. It turns out the the mesh point timing window is not actually broken after all, and my problems were almost entirely the result of me not understanding how the mechanic actually works.
Somehow, I got the mistaken impression that the user is supposed to hold the X button through the mesh animation in order to keep the ball, and could release the button at any point to hand off the ball. As such, I was pressing and holding X through the snap of the ball, and then continuing to hold X into the mesh point animation, and then trying to release X to hand off the ball.
Setting tool-tips to "Always On"
actually permanently disabled them.
That's not how the mechanic works. In fact, looking back at the Option tutorial pop-up, that's not what it said to do. So I misread it, and because there's no way to bring these tutorial pop-ups back up, or to view the controls in any of the menus, I didn't realize my mistake till much later. I tried resetting the the tutorials in the game's settings, but I think that actually had the opposite effect of completely and permanently disabling all tutorials and tool-tips, with no ability to turn them back on. This is a bug that EA needs to fix, and as far as I know, it has not yet been fixed.
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