I agree with both of you.
The Golf Club is a series that I’ve casually followed over the years but never quite taken a chance on. Even though I loved Links back in the day there always seemed to be something missing in the Golf Club games to prevent me from buying it. That might be changing with the Golf Club 19 based on this interview from Operation Sports. New features include a proper career mode and some licensed courses with the promise of more to come. Ideally, you’ll be able to customize the career mode to add in more courses and events, but I haven’t seen any mention of that. However, the fact that you can edit the AI opponents’ names and attributes makes me feel optimistic.
I’m still going to wait and see how the career mode and some DLCs shake out. Regardless, it’s been cool to see how the series has developed and improved over the years, even if I haven’t actually played any of them.
Welp, it’s out today:
Gonna try to find a few reviews before I take the plunge, but man is it tempting now that they’ve got the PGA license – which I presume will mean authentic courses.
I just got this the other day, so I’ll be good for a while while reviews come out. ;)
I’m going to say on this wait for a patch. Or three.
The interface remains an absolute mess. There might be a good game in here, but after 90 minutes of fighting the interface I gave up and did a refund.
I might circle back in a few months, but every complaint I had about poorly explained and non-intuitive UIX in TGC2 is back, with a vengeance here. It might be worse.
To put it another way: right now it’s easier for me to figure out how to do what i want to do in a game of EU IV – which I haven’t played for three expansions and over a year – than it is to figure out this mess.
Holy shirtsnacks.
I mean, I want to eventually learn to play HOI 4. I don’t know how to play it now.
But I can guarantee you that I could figure out faster how to launch an amphibious assault with an ally in HOI 4 than do half the stuff I wanted to do in an hour of TGC 2019.
Whoa whoa whoa, now you’re just talking crazy. Next thing, you’ll say it makes less sense than Dwarf Fortress.
Lol…how do you make a golf game interface complicated? /boggle.
In the interest of fairness, old buddy Bill Harris said he negotiated the UI just fine.
He’s smarter (and more patient) than me, though.
I, therefore, should never touch this game, for I am an known impatient idiot.
How does someone screw up a golf game interface so badly? Weird.
Real courses without crazy green physics would be a great addition tot he game. I’m in no rush so I can wait a long time before getting this. I haven’t played the prior one in a long time.
One of the most common complaints of the 2nd game on the Steam forums and reviews was the putting. There were many, many people who commented that putting was simply a guess with a terrible interface. To the extent of not being able to understand why putts would go 5 meters or 15 meters. That convinced me to not buy that version.
Considering the first was a mess that was shoved out the door early and the second one had so many complaints about the putting, I am in skeptical-mode about this third installment.
I didn’t play the first, but I did the second. The biggest problem with putting was that some courses had greens that were ultra fast, either due to slopes or just being very fast greens.
Yeah, the putting problem was more a course design nonsense problem. Putting worked pretty well, though it was difficult and required practice.
The problem with putting in TGC2 was the creation of some absurd green behavior. Creators would set them for hard and fast, and then slope them away sharply to bunkers or (worse) hazards. There are thus so many courses in the game where you get the green in regulation…and then you’re halfway done with the hole.
The obvious solution: make the course/hole design more challenging so that it’s tougher to get that GIR. But that requires smart tree/bunker/water hazard placement, something beyond the ken of too many course designers out there.
Hmm, it sucks to hear that the game doesn’t seem to be improving.
I had a great experience with the first one once I joined the TGC Tour. They also had some very talented people vetting the courses and testing all pin placements and course designs before we played them. Some were difficult tests, but most of them were at least somewhat fair. It is unfortunate that a lot had to be done with high winds and hard conditions to provide at least some challenge to the top players, but competing against hundreds of people each week with active leaderboards and player stats was pretty damn fun.
I purchased the second game, but only briefly played it. My biggest complaints were that I could never adjust to using a controller (which probably 90% or more of the players on the tour used), and it took a lot of practice and discipline to use the mouse. This was tuned to be horrible at release for the first game, then it found a sweet spot where I actually felt the balance was near perfect for me while playing the tour, and then with the second game, I felt it was lost again with the mouse control way too easy on one difficulty setting and way way too hard on the toughest one. Golf just isn’t enjoyable when you can either hit every drive exactly where you want on one difficulty of shanking 80% of your drives way in the trees or out of bounds on another. There has to be a balance.
I may have to look into the latest version to see where they are with the swing difficulty as if that is good, the rest of the experience was always plenty sufficient for me to have a great time.
This is the inherent problem with video game golf. It’s always too easy to hit the fairways. If you don’t make the greens sort of mini golf ridiculous, people end up shooting more or less max possible lowest scores pretty quickly. It’s a difficult problem to solve, because making it tough to hit fairways makes the game feel really frustrating in a bad way to play. Depending on what type of system you have in place, 3 click, analog swing via mouse or controller etc, how do you go about doing that?
You could actually extend that problem to long irons. Long irons/woods are way too easy to hit in video game golf. Actually hitting a 1 iron or a 3 wood into a green that’s 250 yards out is pretty tough, it’s far easier than it should be in video game golf. I guess the TLDR: is that the long game in general is too easy.
Video game golf has always been a tough nut to crack for me, at one point in my life I was a scratch golfer, so it’s tough to get something by me. As funny as it seems, links 386 is still the closest anyone has come to real golf.
Sierra’s PGACG 2K was the game that figured it out, 18 years ago. Difficult course designs but they rewarded strategic play, and required you to manage the course.
When the same developers got tabbed to take over Tiger Woods, one of their first directives from on high was to make the game easier from PGACG.
The only golf game you’ll ever need…