|
Post by lessthanbread on Jun 21, 2019 19:38:53 GMT -5
I thought this would be an interesting thread to start after some earlier discussion on difficult courses.
It’s a fine line when describing a difficult but fair course vs an unfair course.
I’m hoping the very experienced designers can weigh in here and give some insight into what their thought process is when designing a difficult course.
Some base questions but feel free to give thoughts on anything: What is the ideal score on a difficult course you design? Even par? Over par scores? How do you go about making a course difficult? How do you make sure you don’t go too far and make an unfair course? Do you prefer designing easy courses or difficult courses?
|
|
|
Post by ohheycat on Jun 21, 2019 20:10:24 GMT -5
The designers tightrope.. and there's no answer that suits every player, but a good topic indeed.
The best fair way imo to make a course difficult is the use of angles. For example, if your hole doglegs to the right and the green slopes to the right, an approach from the left of the dogleg is essentially landing on a downhill, is longer than an approach from the inside, and the further right you go off the tee the more mitigated that effect is. Add a hero carry bunker at the inside, and viola! A golf hole is born. With this idea the outside of the dogleg would need to be about 210 and the inside 180 from the center of the green, that area where stopping power is crucial. The hole is probably knocking on 500 yards total, and par would be a great score.
So who wants to make this hole?
|
|
|
Post by Violinguy69 on Jun 21, 2019 20:18:27 GMT -5
It is a fine line. That's definitely true. The thing is, for the best players, no course is difficult. My scores change week in week out based on the course, but the top players shoot -45 for the week no matter what. Tucking pins and tightening fairways helps, but top players will still go low.
The trick is, there must always be somewhere to hit it off the tee. A (mostly) flat area. It doesn't have to be 320 off the tee, but it has to exist. Likewise, the pins have to be mostly accessible for the shot you require from the fairway. That doesn't mean every golfer should be able to hit it to 5 feet, but it means that most players should be able to have at least a 20-footer and not a 75-footer up 2 feet.
Failing to follow those guidelines will get your course the dreaded "tricked-up" rating. You will also get this rating if you have too many 460-yard par 4s with a fairway that ends at 230. Additionally, having a green the size of my desk where you are hitting a 4-iron in is pretty bad. It's all about moderation really. You can put a lake at 230 on one hole, but any more than that is conspicuous.
The harder you try to make a course tough, the more synthetic it becomes. Golfers will notice the obvious ways designers try to toughen up their courses. When you playtest, if the course seems to easy, maybe you alter a few holes. Remember, what's unfair or difficult to one golfer, is no problemo to others.
|
|
|
Post by lessthanbread on Jun 21, 2019 20:27:17 GMT -5
Great stuff. Thanks for going in depth on this.
This just came to me. Elevation.
Do you guys think elevation changes are a good way to add difficulty?
|
|
|
Post by ohheycat on Jun 21, 2019 20:33:12 GMT -5
Great stuff. Thanks for going in depth on this. This just came to me. Elevation. Do you guys think elevation changes are a good way to add difficulty? elevation is really just a calculation for the pga. It also affects wind and rollout of course and as long as the pins and green complex agree with that it can be a fair way to add a bit uncertainty. I'm gonna be honest though if the change is more than about 40 uphill I'm gonna be a little annoyed. Downhill I'm okay with a bit more
|
|
|
Post by Riotous on Jun 21, 2019 23:25:31 GMT -5
Difficulty for me (very average player) off the tee, is a small landing zone next to a lost ball area because I can still hit the green from the rough. NB I don’t expect to birdie every hole. Fairway shots on a side hill, with wind whilst hitting to a slopping green are what keep me up at night. You can’t design for wind but you can add side slope to your fairways. Greens are in the eye of the beholder in terms of what is reasonable, what is realistic and therefore how hard you make them. I’d prefer to make a realistic green than one that’s ‘tricked up’
|
|
|
Post by jeachus on Jun 24, 2019 9:13:01 GMT -5
I am wrestling with this challenge now. I found my first two courses to be fairly easy. In this latest design I am really narrowing my fairways, but to maintain fairness, making sure that the greens remain accessible and even in heavy rough, players still have a fair sight line to the green. Interestingly, this course is coming out short-ish thus far, at about 7200 yards. Consider some of the tougher U.S. Open courses, like Pebble Beach this year. The same course was played earlier in the year with very low scores. Though this year's alteration wasn't the hardest, by allowing the rouge to grow higher and sneaking the first cut in on both sides, you have a track that places more emphases on tee accuracy. More first shots in the rough will lower the chance at birdie.
|
|
|
Post by linkslover on Jun 25, 2019 1:48:11 GMT -5
elevation is really just a calculation for the pga. It also affects wind and rollout of course and as long as the pins and green complex agree with that it can be a fair way to add a bit uncertainty. I'm gonna be honest though if the change is more than about 40 uphill I'm gonna be a little annoyed. Downhill I'm okay with a bit more You're not going to like the second at The Swiss Wall then!
|
|
|
Post by ErixonStone on Jun 25, 2019 12:28:26 GMT -5
What I've done recently is to always make the player think on every shot. I don't care so much about the overall score. I do care about three things:
1. The process the player must use in order to determine the best shot.
2. Subtle differences that encourage specific shots.
3. The penalty for missing a risky shot.
I prefer that the fairway be accessible (even if it means a longer approach) because landing in the rough takes the player out of the hole. A couple of those in succession, and the round is not fun.
However, I do shrink the tiers and plateaus of my greens. If you're more than 6 feet to the wrong side of the hole, then you're getting penalized somehow. This is how my courses tend to encourage players to play it safe and accept a longer putt.
On the course I'm working on now, several holes have a steep drop to one side of the green. Some have deep bunkers; some just brush. There's real risk in taking aim at the flag. Some pins are tough to get close to because a slope tends to send the ball to another area. But on the same greens, there are pins where using the slope is the only way to get close.
Even though the course is unrelentingly challenging, none of the holes are unfair. Each pin of each hole can be played to a low score if the player executes great shots, but the player will have to take some daring risks on some holes and execute well-thought-out strategy on some others.
I've used about every method of challenging players as I could - elevation change, narrow landing areas, small greens, sidehill lies in the fairway, approach length, green slopes - but always provided a safe route to the green in regulation.
|
|
|
Post by ddixjr509 on Jun 27, 2019 12:28:22 GMT -5
The designers tightrope.. and there's no answer that suits every player, but a good topic indeed. The best fair way imo to make a course difficult is the use of angles. For example, if your hole doglegs to the right and the green slopes to the right, an approach from the left of the dogleg is essentially landing on a downhill, is longer than an approach from the inside, and the further right you go off the tee the more mitigated that effect is. Add a hero carry bunker at the inside, and viola! A golf hole is born. With this idea the outside of the dogleg would need to be about 210 and the inside 180 from the center of the green, that area where stopping power is crucial. The hole is probably knocking on 500 yards total, and par would be a great score. So who wants to make this hole? This topic obviously has a lot of Subjective variables- and there's a ton of methods to artificially create difficulty (green sloping being the most misused). My main focus to create difficulty is the use of angles and green shapes. Ohheycat/dog's scenario is the thought process you should be considering when laying out your holes. Multiple options off the tee and creating green shapes and angles based off the approach location.
|
|
|
Post by lessthanbread on Jun 27, 2019 15:04:07 GMT -5
Great stuff you guys. I totally agree David, there are countless ways to artificially create difficulty but it's a very simplistic way of doing it. I was just noticing a couple weeks ago that a theme of some courses I've played so far on TGC (only been playing since January so not a huge sample size) was that they featured ridiculously manufactured green slopes and had speed defaults at 187... That gets really boring and also pretty annoying when you hit every fairway and 16 GIRs, yet 2-putt almost every hole and shoot say a -4 because the only challenge came from the putting surface.
I'd rather hit 12 fairways and 9 greens and shoot a similar score because at least I had to think my way around the course and when I did hit the green, it was a little more rewarding.
I guess what I'm getting at is I think everyone is looking for a balanced challenge; both from the course itself (FIRs, GIRs, Putts per Round) and also the mental aspect of shot placement for angles and aggressive vs conservative shot options
|
|
|
Post by jacobkessler on Jun 27, 2019 19:44:25 GMT -5
The problem I’ve always found with creating difficult courses is that the game is just so easy that any realistic course is a total birdie-fest, so you have to really trick it up to get realistic scores, even on TST.
Take what I say with a grain of salt- I have not published a TGC19 original course. Even though neither of my current courses were published in TGC2, they were both designed in previous games.
My personal ideal score would be where -7 is a very good round, but that just isn’t possible with this game’s mechanics. If you can keep the best players in the game from breaking 60, it’s a tough course.
How do you force this while also giving the player a fair chance?
Make it more of a mental game. Wide fairways or flat land do not necessarily mean it’s an easy course. The best (and also most difficult) courses force the player to play their tee shot while taking their approach into account at the same time. Reward shots that force longer carries with better angles at the pin. Make “Cape” or “Leven” style holes where the player has a choice as to how much they cut off with their tee shot, where the riskier shot has a greater penalty, but also a greater potential reward. Put pins in places where they have to pick a specific spot on the green to have an easy putt, where a different angle is very difficult to make. As in, maybe a shot that’s hole-high but 10 feet right is nearly impossible to make, but a 15 footer from below the hole but on line is actually pretty straight. You have to be smart to figure out you want to be there, then you must be very precise to actually hit it there. Also, regarding wide fairways, if you want a difficult course with wide fairways, you need a lot of slope, too. Whether that’s a small area that allows for a level lie on the approach shot with the rest being super bumpy or just a lot of sidehill action, it keeps players thinking about their tee shots.
Also, distance is NOT everything. Just look at the real life U.S. Open. Merion in 2013 was under 7,000 yards, but it tied with Olympic and Shinnecock for the highest winning score at +1. Olympic was relatively short too, and the +1 at Shinnecock was completely forced by the USGA @!$#ing up the course on Saturday. That’s not to say that any 6,950 yard course will hold up, especially in a video game, but tight, narrow courses that force the player to consistently hit good shots are more difficult than wide open course with flat-ish fairways.
There's a slippery slope from difficult to tricked up, though. Tricked up courses are not fun for players like me who struggle to break par on relatively easy courses. Difficult courses are still fun even when you’re shooting over par. Why? Well, tricked up courses are unfair because even if you hit perfect/perfect shots on the right line, you can still be punished, where any bad situation you find yourself in on a difficult course is all your fault as the player. Tricked up courses punish bad shots and don’t reward good shots. Difficult but fair courses punish bad shots, but also reward good shots, and just “ok” shots still give the player a shot at par and occasionally a birdie. That’s the big difference for me.
To answer your final question, I try not to design for any specific difficulty level as it can limit my creativity. However, I do find that I naturally make easier courses as they’re more realistic to real life, which is what I enjoy creating.
So, if you read through that text wall, thanks, and hopefully it helps you become a better designer!
|
|
|
Post by lessthanbread on Jun 27, 2019 20:26:45 GMT -5
I most definitely read through it. Thanks for taking the time to post. I think I’d like to start studying golf course architecture a little more. My first course has had great success (more for the visuals than the course itself I’m guessing) and I am happy with how my second is shaping up but quite honestly I’m running out of hole design ideas already after 36 holes
|
|
|
Post by linkslover on Jun 28, 2019 6:09:12 GMT -5
Jacob's long post, see above. Is that text porn then Jacob?
|
|
|
Post by speakingstones on Jul 16, 2019 5:33:29 GMT -5
I aim to make challenging courses most of the time. You may have played some of mine, "SS's - Dystopian (tour)". or "SS's - Drifting Rock Ranch" My theory on making challenging but fun courses: 1. Have a huge difference in challenge depending on the tees. I only have 3 tees. Red/White/Black.Red - Short/Easy - Many par 4s are drivable and all the par 5s can be reached in 2 but there is risk involved. Fairway bunkers can be carried. (good players will shoot -12 or better) White - Medium - The course plays well for beginner clubs - This is the standard hole setup Black - Long/Hard - The course plays well for master clubs - Significant length added as well as different angles to drive onto the fairway, all bunkers in play. Still risk reward options on every hole (good players will shoot -6) 2. Always reward good shots and penalise bad shots.A good tee shot down the middle should stay in the fairway, a bad shot should mean par is a good score. Slightly off approaches to the green can run away making par tough. 3. Tricky tiered greens but fair putting. I hate when you can easily putt off the green from 5 feet after hitting a great approach. Instead I like small target areas within the green itself that require using the slopes to get close. Also make lots of run off areas for tricky chips. 4. Lots of elevation changesI love downhill tee shots and use them all the time. It forces the player to think about the shot and calculate the correct club in their head, its adds adrenaline because of uncertainty 5. Master clubs have an advantageFrom the back tee I like to design it so master clubs are required to really attack the course. All holes have generous areas for driving with beginner clubs but the angles are tricky to the green. Master clubs are harder to use but open up many risk reward options. 6. Visually Intimidating tee shots and approachesYou need to think about the tee shot, none of this "dont even look at the hole and drive" on my courses. There are clear no go areas on every tee shot and approach. 7. Use OB to reduce frustrationThere is nothing worse than getting down some steep slope and taking 6 chips to get out. Make sure every danger area is playable or make it OB 8. Ignore the hatersI have received abusive feedback about my course Dystopian because its too hard, but thats because it's the ultimate target golf. I say play off the reds or if thats even a struggle just embrace something unique its just a game. 9. Use the unpublished filter to play your course in tough conditions before its publishedYou learn a lot by playing an unpublished course with really strong winds off the back tees. Tee shots that cant reach the green or fairway will show up. Also to be safe all fairways should be reachable with a 2 iron. 10. Make the course you wantDoes it really matter if 10+ is a good score if the course is exciting and fun to play? Of course not. SS's - Dystopian (tour) SS's - Drifting Rock Ranch SS's - Volcanic Skye /9\ C64 - Leaderboard Golf #1
|
|