After the disappointment of College Football 26, I wasn't sure if I would care enough to play this year's Madden. If the college game that everyone was excited about and praising last year somehow managed to get worse this year, that didn't bode well for Madden. As usual, I waited a couple weeks and bought it used, then still put off playing it for another week or so. After having to click through multiple advertisements for Ultimate Team and the stupid Season Pass, getting into the actual game didn't make me feel any better.

Just like with College Football 26, my single, biggest problem with Madden 26 (at release) is the inability to run the ball. Just like with the college game, blockers seem incapable of holding blocks, and defensive pursuit is uncanny good. There's like 3 run plays that even seem viable: draws from shotgun, read option keepers, and 01 Trap. With almost every other run play that I call, there is always a defender in the gap. Unless you are able to quickly react to cut back, or you have the stick skills to make a move or break a tackle in the gap, you'll be lucky to average more than a single yard per run.

That's the case for the user, anyway. For the CPU, every inside running play seems to break for 20 yards, and the CPU running back will successfully juke at least 2 defenders every play.

People online are saying that in order to run the ball, you need to utilize the new "Untarget Defender" feature in order to force your blockers to ignore backside defenders in favor of sending an extra blocker to the play-side. There are a few problems with this. First and foremost, as a matter of principle, I should not have to change the blocking assignments every single play in order to get competent blocking!

Running the ball was borderline impossible when the game launched.

Madden also doesn't bother to teach or explain this new "Untarget defender" mechanic. Unless you pay attention to pre-release promotional material, you probably won't know that this option is even available. It isn't documented anywhere, and there's no tutorials for it. I had no idea about it until I went online looking for advice on how to run the ball. Worse yet, this option is located under the "Pass Protection" pre-play menu, which means that a lot of users might not even realize that this feature can be used to modify run blocking assignments.

Almost as important is the fact that, unlike College Football, Madden does not show the actual individual blocking assignments of your blockers on running plays. It does for [most] pass plays, but not for run plays. I have no idea who the offensive line is actually going to try to block, so how am I even supposed to know that I should be modifying the blocking assignments? Or how am I supposed to know that the Untarget Defender command is even working?

The coach cam can show pass blocking assignments,
but not specific run blocking assignments.

If it ain't broke, break it!

Or at least, that was the case when the game released. In mid-September an update was released that seems to have inverted that problem so that running the ball is easy for the user, but the CPU cannot run the ball to save its life. I've had to reduce my Run Blocking sliders down to 20 or below in Franchise just to make CPU run defense competent, while tuning CPU Run Blocking into the 70s or higher just to make it so that the CPU running backs can gain positive yards.

Unfortunately, setting this slider so low leads to recurring problems where my own blockers will cut right in front of my running back right as he hits the hole. This is particularly annoying with receivers or tight ends who go in motion across the formation, away from the run, only to U-turn as soon as the ball is snapped and run through the hole as if to lead block. Despite there being a huge hole, my running back runs right into the back of one of my own players, has all his momentum stopped, and gets dragged down by a backside defender. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens frequently enough to really get on my nerves.

Maybe I would be able to fix some of these problems if the game would only let me see who each of my blockers is supposed to block on running plays. Then, maybe I could use the "Untarget Defender" function to force my pullers to block someone else, so that they don't get in my running back's way. But I can't do that because I have no idea who each of my blockers is actually supposed to block!

It would be really nice if publishers would stop being so reliant on post-release updates, and would actually put some QA effort into their games before they launch. That way, I wouldn't keep feeling like I have to write 2 fucking reviews for every one of these damn things!

I think I've finally decided to take a stab at some long-form video analysis and critique on Youtube. My first go at this came in the form of a nearly-hour-long breakdown of my frustrations with the Madden NFL video game series (broken up into 2 parts). For the benefit of my readers, I'm also transcribing the video onto this blog post. Though reading this post will certainly convey all the same points that I make in the video, I still highly recommend watching the video, as the video footage included will do a better job than screenshots of demonstrating the problems I report. The entire video is embedded below.

If you want to see more (better-produced) video content like this from me, then I invite you to support me on Patreon.

EA's ethos of releasing a new Madden entry every single year has become a tremendous detriment to the game as a whole. Modern games have become very large, very complicated, and very expensive to create, and every game series that has relied on an annual release cycle has, in my opinion, suffered for it. Even companies like Ubisoft have recognized this, which is why the company has decided to end the cycle of annual Assassin's Creed releases, opting instead for a major release every two or three years, with some large-scale DLC and expansions to fill out the intervening period. Despite re-using the same game engines, the huge cost of creating a new game every year stretches the company's resources further than they can go. Though I still didn't think that Assassin's Creed: Origins was particularly great, the game still clearly benefited from the extra design and development time that the year's hiatus provided, and the general internet consensus is that the game is very good.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was released only a year after Origins, and it looks like a terrible, derivative, waste of time fueled by a grindy micro-transaction economy pulled straight out of a mobile free-to-play game, except with a $60 upfront price tag. We'll have to wait and see if Ubisoft follows through on its promise to "spend more time making fewer, better games", or if it goes back to milking its franchises with slapped-together annual releases.

EA's Madden game is in an even worse boat than Assassin's Creed was in. Not only is Madden an annual release, but it's internal resources are being stretched out between multiple, completely divergent game modes! EA has to chose how much resources to devote to each of these modes, and that commitment comes at the expense of the other modes. In addition to having to make general gameplay improvements every year, the team is also tasked with coming up with new features and improvements for Franchise mode, Ultimate Team, and now Longshot. They're basically developing three different games, and trying to squeeze them all into a single annual release cycle.

Madden's resources are divided between three divergent game modes every year!

Worse yet, one of these game modes clearly makes a lot more money than the others...

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