Cricket is a very odd sport. Matches take five days, often end in a draw, and if there’s a spot of rain the whole thing gets called off. I enjoy a lot of sports, but I don’t like cricket, oh no, I love it. Cricket is excellent because you never know what’s going to happen, and sometimes, what happens is nothing - but since you’ve been sat on the drink all day, what a wonderful way to see nothing happen. While I suppose you could get the beers in while playing Cricket 22, it has to rely on a little more than that to be a success. Ahead of the 💖game’s launch, I spoke to Mik🃏e Merren, director of development at Big Ant Studios, about how Cricket 22 taps into the sport’s appeal and the struggles of making a sports title in a field full of big budget blockbusters like FIFA and NBA 2K.
“Some stuff we're doing this time is giving people a little bit more information about what cricket is,” Merren says, adding that pockets of expats have seen the game sell in modest numbers in non-cricketing nations like South Korea, Brazil, Taiwan, and Argentina. “If you know it, then off you go, just play the game. But if not, then we can hold your hand and show you the ins and outs of the terminology, as well as how to play the game along the way. As much as I suppose England and Australia are the big two powerhouses for the game because of the Ashes licence, we've now got a lot of the short form licences as well. So when you've got the Hundred, the Big Bash, and Caribbean Premier League in there, I think that also appeals to a wider audience that maybe don't know Test cricket. It's nice to be able to go ‘this is a version of the sport that in real life could be just two and a half, three hours long’, which is what the Hundred is. I think that length, people can get into it a lot quicker. I think now it's definitely gonna appeal to a broader audience.”
These short form versions of cricket have shot up in the past two decades. At the turn of the century, there were only really two ways to pla꧂y cricket - Test matches (that’s the five-day one) or One Day, which lasted for, you guessed it, a whole day. There’s also First Class, which is the less elite form of Test Cricket that typically only lasts three or four days. One Day cricket gives each team 50 overs at the crease, but in recent years, t20 has emerged as the most popular short form game. This gives each team just 20 overs, meaning games are shorter, and because each team still has eleven batsmen, it encourages explosive, risky play. The Hundred is even shorter again, swapping out the 20 overs for 100 balls. Each over is six balls, so you’re losing 40 balls a match swapping to the Hundred from t20, and losing 500 hundred balls from classic One Day cricket.
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This allows more young children and casual fans to get into cricket without needing to s🍸pend a wholౠe week waiting for the outcome of a game, and while Test cricket remains the most elite form of the game, these new iterations - especially t20 - have been widely heralded as a great step forward for the sport. With the Hundred making its official debut in July 2021 though, for developers like Big Ant, it means new sports are literally being invented while it makes the game.
“It's a tough one to get right,” Merren says. “We've gone through six or seven cricket games since [Don Bradman Cricket in] 2014. That's six games of cricket to try and get that right and refine it. And then the powers that be will throw another of them in [another] version, so we’re trying to play catch up now and again. You've got football, and you've got seven-a-side football, five-a-side football, then five-a-side football that doesn't allow you to put the ball above head height, but FIFA doesn't do that. We have to because that's what cricket is tied to.”
It’s not just that one type of match is longer, however. All forms of cricket are played in very different ways, and Cricket 22 reflects these approaches. “I suppose for Test cricket, you've got to have a little bit more patience in the way you play the game,” Merren says. “So we try to make sure that if it's a red ball being used, there's generally more movement being done on the pitches done in slightly different ways to how it is on a shorter form game. If that ball’s moving more, then the way the AI has the work will be different. We have confidence levels on batsman. Steve Smith might come to the crease more confident. Jimmy Anderson [might be less confident], or somebody on a pair in a Test match or whatever. They might have to then get more settled at the crease.
“Whereas when you're playing the shorter form, we bump that confidence level, which might give easier timing on a shot that you wouldn't necessarily get in a Test match. That means you can go in and cut off a couple of balls, then you might be able to hit a four. But if you did that in the Test match, you're probably going to edge it if you haven't done everything perfect. We try to balance out the different forms of the game. If [Glenn] Maxwell comes to the crease in t20, he might look at one ball, and then he's definitely gonna be trying to hit sixes. That’s just the nature of that player. And we try to have that in the game, in terms of the strengths, weaknesses, and skill levels.”
To further add to the realism, the bowling mechanics have been tweaked for Cricket 22, and Merren explains what this shift means, both for casual players and more hardcore cricket fans. “The key thing with bowling is that we added another element for those people that are more pick up and play,” he says. “There's the old style, [where you] put a mark on the pitch, move it around, and aim for that. That's been put there to make it a little bit easier for those that [are] maybe not so used to using the two sticks, which we introduced as an almost revolutionary thing back in Bradman [2014]. It's very hard for me that I can't play the game unless it's the pro controls, but it's definitely a more familiar thing. [Putting a marker down] makes it easier for new players to get into the game.”
This change is reflective of Cricket 22’s audience. Whil𓂃e most sports sims have a mix of casual players and more committed sports fans, cricket is a tricky sport to get into - or at least it was back in the days of Test and ODIs - so initially, most cricket sim players were huge fans of the sport itself. Recently, with Cricket 19 being on Game Pass and the increase in popularity of the short form game, Cricket 19 has seen an upswing of new players, and Cricket 22 aims to cater to them without losing the true cricket feeling the series has always aimed for.
Cricket 22 will launch on November 25 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. A Nintendo Switch version will launch in early 2022.