Post by theduke21 on Dec 30, 2019 4:12:57 GMT -5
I'm sure people have posted this idea before and some of you have seen it, but I wanted to post it again in case anyone hasn't. With the PGA TOUR year about to get underway in Hawaii this week, I finished up a project I started a while back on TGC.
The offline societies give you a lot of cool customization to basically create your own PGA TOUR season and career mode. It's way better than the actual career mode and honestly way better than anything you could have done on Tiger Woods outside of brands and official tournament sponsors and things like that.
STEP 1, CREATE THE PLAYER DATABASE: This is the most tedious and time consuming part. For PC people, maybe there's a file everyone could share to import this stuff, but I have no clue as a console person. There's roughly 300+ players I believe in the player database for the offline society. They have auto generated names and countries. I went in and basically edited everyone's names and countries to most of the top 300 in the Official World Golf Rankings. Each player in the society has a handicap that generates after you play events. I recommend simulating a full auto generated season so you have a good sample of which CPU's are good. I put real world players onto CPU players accordingly -- Brooks Koepka best handicap, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson following that etc. This creates a fairly good representation of player ratings. I added a few guys here and there for fun outside of the top 300, mostly old veterans like Freddie Couples and Ernie Els who I still wanted to play here and there. Obviously this took forever for me. Multiple hours. To make it better for console I put the PS4 remote app on my computer and typed the players in there. It's worth it in the end though and now I have this database of probably close to 400 real world players who perform much like they probably would. The game still keeps you guessing from the season I simmed though and random bad players would compete any given week.
STEP 2, CREATE THE PGA TOUR SCHEDULE: This is much less time consuming than the player database and in my opinion is pretty fun. I went in and completely copied the 47-week PGA TOUR schedule for this year (that started a couple months ago). The customization is cool, you pick the tournament name, the course, the setup each day, just like the guys here at TGCT do. I used as many real courses as possible for the schedule and it was more than I expected. Honestly you could use nearly every one but I made sure to use reputable courses that are in the TGCT database and picked custom courses for the others. There's a couple of users who have basically made every PGA course but they aren't very good, mostly below average. For the courses that weren't accounted for, I surfed around on TGCT and tried to pick courses that closely fit the setting and theme of the real course. I think the current ones I used should be pretty good. I can share the schedule if there's any interest.
NOTE: Be careful with the handicaps of the courses you select. I recommend always picking a handicap approved course, because the players will perform in some relation to the course stroke index. Courses rated around 75 will probably perform the best for scores to par. If you pick something rated a 68, you're going to have your Brooks Koepkas or whoever you choose as your best handicapper (probably around +12) shooting mid 50's. If you can keep your course ratings around 74-80, you should have some realistic looking scores out there. More on that at the very bottom.
Beyond the basic stuff, TGC gives you awesome customization options for the season. I was able to set the Sentry Tourney of Champions to only allow players who won in it. I was able to set each WGC event to Championship FedEx points and a maximum field of 100, and then set the 100 players to the top 100 in the current season points. You can add TONS of qualifiers, points from current season/last season, winners from last season, all types of stuff. Basically I was able to mimic each event in the season to allow for a field that would be similar to what we see in real life. Even the FedEx playoffs will run similarly. You also can create alternate events on weeks of WGC's and majors like the PGA does. This part was pretty cool.
FINAL STEP, CREATE A SIM EXPERIENCE FOR YOU: This will all depend on your skill level. You can set the CPU difficulty to however you want it. I have it on very hard. I then changed my settings to make the game play as sim as possible for me and to make each week a challenge for me. I didn't want to win by 20 every week like I would on Tiger Woods career mode. My first step was the basic TST settings. Green grid off, scout cam off, lie grid off, wind meter number off. Those are the basic settings most people know of for sim settings. I then went an extra couple of steps to really make it tough. I turned distance to the pin to estimate instead of precise. This makes it to where I can't pinpoint a number and dial in exactly to what I need. I have to play smart yardages. I also turned my swing feedback to only distance. That way if I'm having any swing difficulties during a round, I have to figure it out myself.
RESULTS SO FAR: GO TO THE TOP OF PAGE 2 FOR ALL TOURNAMENT SUMMARIES.
Let me know if anyone is interested in more details or wants to see how my season goes. Not sure if I'll run through it quick or play one a week to try to keep pace with the real schedule. This should be really fun though and as someone who has always wanted a cool career mode, this is about as good as it's going to get. A fully realistic leaderboard with every single tournament and whatever course you want. On Tiger Woods, it was like 15 tournaments and the same course every year.
The offline societies give you a lot of cool customization to basically create your own PGA TOUR season and career mode. It's way better than the actual career mode and honestly way better than anything you could have done on Tiger Woods outside of brands and official tournament sponsors and things like that.
STEP 1, CREATE THE PLAYER DATABASE: This is the most tedious and time consuming part. For PC people, maybe there's a file everyone could share to import this stuff, but I have no clue as a console person. There's roughly 300+ players I believe in the player database for the offline society. They have auto generated names and countries. I went in and basically edited everyone's names and countries to most of the top 300 in the Official World Golf Rankings. Each player in the society has a handicap that generates after you play events. I recommend simulating a full auto generated season so you have a good sample of which CPU's are good. I put real world players onto CPU players accordingly -- Brooks Koepka best handicap, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson following that etc. This creates a fairly good representation of player ratings. I added a few guys here and there for fun outside of the top 300, mostly old veterans like Freddie Couples and Ernie Els who I still wanted to play here and there. Obviously this took forever for me. Multiple hours. To make it better for console I put the PS4 remote app on my computer and typed the players in there. It's worth it in the end though and now I have this database of probably close to 400 real world players who perform much like they probably would. The game still keeps you guessing from the season I simmed though and random bad players would compete any given week.
STEP 2, CREATE THE PGA TOUR SCHEDULE: This is much less time consuming than the player database and in my opinion is pretty fun. I went in and completely copied the 47-week PGA TOUR schedule for this year (that started a couple months ago). The customization is cool, you pick the tournament name, the course, the setup each day, just like the guys here at TGCT do. I used as many real courses as possible for the schedule and it was more than I expected. Honestly you could use nearly every one but I made sure to use reputable courses that are in the TGCT database and picked custom courses for the others. There's a couple of users who have basically made every PGA course but they aren't very good, mostly below average. For the courses that weren't accounted for, I surfed around on TGCT and tried to pick courses that closely fit the setting and theme of the real course. I think the current ones I used should be pretty good. I can share the schedule if there's any interest.
NOTE: Be careful with the handicaps of the courses you select. I recommend always picking a handicap approved course, because the players will perform in some relation to the course stroke index. Courses rated around 75 will probably perform the best for scores to par. If you pick something rated a 68, you're going to have your Brooks Koepkas or whoever you choose as your best handicapper (probably around +12) shooting mid 50's. If you can keep your course ratings around 74-80, you should have some realistic looking scores out there. More on that at the very bottom.
Beyond the basic stuff, TGC gives you awesome customization options for the season. I was able to set the Sentry Tourney of Champions to only allow players who won in it. I was able to set each WGC event to Championship FedEx points and a maximum field of 100, and then set the 100 players to the top 100 in the current season points. You can add TONS of qualifiers, points from current season/last season, winners from last season, all types of stuff. Basically I was able to mimic each event in the season to allow for a field that would be similar to what we see in real life. Even the FedEx playoffs will run similarly. You also can create alternate events on weeks of WGC's and majors like the PGA does. This part was pretty cool.
FINAL STEP, CREATE A SIM EXPERIENCE FOR YOU: This will all depend on your skill level. You can set the CPU difficulty to however you want it. I have it on very hard. I then changed my settings to make the game play as sim as possible for me and to make each week a challenge for me. I didn't want to win by 20 every week like I would on Tiger Woods career mode. My first step was the basic TST settings. Green grid off, scout cam off, lie grid off, wind meter number off. Those are the basic settings most people know of for sim settings. I then went an extra couple of steps to really make it tough. I turned distance to the pin to estimate instead of precise. This makes it to where I can't pinpoint a number and dial in exactly to what I need. I have to play smart yardages. I also turned my swing feedback to only distance. That way if I'm having any swing difficulties during a round, I have to figure it out myself.
RESULTS SO FAR: GO TO THE TOP OF PAGE 2 FOR ALL TOURNAMENT SUMMARIES.
Let me know if anyone is interested in more details or wants to see how my season goes. Not sure if I'll run through it quick or play one a week to try to keep pace with the real schedule. This should be really fun though and as someone who has always wanted a cool career mode, this is about as good as it's going to get. A fully realistic leaderboard with every single tournament and whatever course you want. On Tiger Woods, it was like 15 tournaments and the same course every year.