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EA Sports has updated its website with two new screenshots for NCAA Football 09, their upcoming college football game. While EA is known for releasing incremental upgrades to their games, both contentwise and visually, this may be a big difference. The character models look stunning and while it still doesn’t stack up to the “Madden Next Gen” footage they showed a few years ago it is getting close. While this doesn’t get any more excited for NCAA it does get me pumped for this year’s Madden. NCAA has always been Madden-light, so I can’t wait to see what that looks like

They look fantastic, plain and simple. The characters are so much better then the past few football games and stand up to just about every sports game made so far. Clicking on the images brings them up in their full, work-in-progress glory. They are jagged and a little goofy at first, but still fantastic when put against some of the other games in the genre. Granted, there is always the chance that they are bullshots.

Below is the full run-down, courtesy of EA Games. Take everything they say with a grain of salt, since they are bound to pump up their own series, but the news is still exciting. Maybe this means EA is about to start taking their Football games seriously again and is prepared to stop treating them as free money.

Check out two new screens highlighting improvements in NCAA Football 09's player models. Thanks to several new body types, new equipment, and new lighting, NCAA Football 09 will feature the most realistic looking college football athletes ever.

NCAA Football 09 Art Director Jason Renfroe shares some details on what his team has done to improve the in game visuals and some of what you'll see in future screens of NCAA Football 09.

On player models:

"We've done a lot of work this year to improve the player models. They have a much more dynamic body shape. A key example here is what we've done with our linemen. In years past all of the linemen were big, fat guys. This year we have added lineman body types that are much more athletic. This really helps make the players look more authentic. We also added extra padding to accentuate the players' form and see the pads and their movement."

On improved lighting:

"In the past we had one lighting model. This year we have two. One model is for environments and one is for players. This does a lot to help the way players look better when they are in the shadows.
We also added a subtle rim light around the players so they pop more on screen. To improve the look of the stadiums, we've saturated our crowds and really brought in a lot of color to better bring out the college atmosphere. Our skies and field art are new as well."
 

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