As someone who is not a top level player I can certainly believe that the game is not demanding enough for the best as even I can play on the hard swing difficulty and not totally suck! I suspect that what the game could benefit from is an additional swing difficulty coupled with far more of a penalty for ending up in the rough or bunkers.
One thing that annoyed me with 2k21 and ultimately lead to me giving up on it was that they kept changing the swing timing/plane effects etc so I wouldn't like to see EA PGA Tour go down the same route, which is my I suggest an additional difficulty rather than changing the current 'hard' setting.
This won't affect the players on SIM but I do think that the Tour mode should have the ball arc disabled as right now it still doesn't actually require anyone to try to work out what to do in terns of compensating for cross-winds or angled lies, or judging how much draw or fade to use.
Definitely to one more swing difficulty
What I think would be a good idea is another higher level of swing difficulty (Sim+ maybe it could be called), in which the controller stick movement required mimics a swing arc rather than the straight back and forward movement that is currently required. A golf swing is an arc, and the controller movement required (right-handed swing as an example) should be: center position (address) to bottom left corner (top of backswing), back to center (impact) then to top left corner (finish). This should be sufficiently more challenging to consistently hit the perfect swing plane to hit a perfectly straight shot, just like IRL.
Why golf games continue to require a straight path for controller movement on anything other than putting (which should remain as is) continues to puzzle me. It's just too easy to master a straight path for controller movement.
2K makes things more difficult by making swing tempo (overly) sensitive. What a golf game should be doing is requiring both a tempo component and arc to the controller movement, and that could be made plenty challenging on the hardest difficulty settings.
@DrProtista wrote:What I think would be a good idea is another higher level of swing difficulty (Sim+ maybe it could be called), in which the controller stick movement required mimics a swing arc rather than the straight back and forward movement that is currently required. A golf swing is an arc, and the controller movement required (right-handed swing as an example) should be: center position (address) to bottom left corner (top of backswing), back to center (impact) then to top left corner (finish). This should be sufficiently more challenging to consistently hit the perfect swing plane to hit a perfectly straight shot, just like IRL.
Why golf games continue to require a straight path for controller movement on anything other than putting (which should remain as is) continues to puzzle me. It's just too easy to master a straight path for controller movement.
For any draw or fade shots this game already requires an angled swing plane for those that have this option on though?
Can I just check, on the weekly tour difficulty tournaments and the seasonal tour and sim tournaments, is everyone forced to have the angled swing plane option on? I know it defaults to this on the weekly tour tournaments and this is how I play it but I've never looked to see if it can be disabled. I'd assumed it couldn't be (and in my opinion is definitely shouldn't be possible) but @gasman1 's comment from yesterday has just made me wonder...
