With the football season nearing its finale and the college Bowl and NFL playoff pictures coming into focus, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect on EA's NCAA Football 13 and Madden NFL 13 and offer up my suggestions for next year's football games.

Table of Contents

• Gameplay suggestions
  • Universal physics, "Wasted Movement", and "Breaking Down"
  • Player awareness, and universal ball-seeking
  • Fix issues with putting players in motion
  • Double team pass blocking
  • Bring back the blocking play-art
  • Angled blocking
  • Make screens, draws, and play action passes work
  • Complete overhaul of special teams
• Other features
  • Adaptive AI
  • More game-preparation features
  • Wider variety of optional plays for custom playbooks
• Balance the game for full-length, 15-minute quarters
  • Game-managing AI teams
  • AI QBs that need to take some time to read the defense!
• Bring back the in-game save!

I was really impressed with the demo for Madden NFL 13. So impressed that I went ahead and bought the game new. I am now suffering from severe buyer's remorse. The demo looked and felt really good. The AI seemed surprisingly competitive (even at the default, Veteran, difficulty). Heck, even the commentary was good!

Then I bought the actual game and had access to Instant Replays and all the teams, and I realized that this year’s Madden was just the same game as last years', but with a few extra coats of paint and polish.

Table of Contents

• Real-time physics doesn’t solve underlying problems
  • Every player now matters
  • Having physics is meaningless if the AI is allowed to break the rules
  • Physics is not universally applied, anyway
• New AI-systems are hit-or-miss
  • Passing game sees some improvement, but only incrementally
  • Running game is broken
  • Special teams still broken, too. Go figure
  • Catch-up logic makes the game feel too "arcade"
• Updated career mode is rough around the edges, but may soon set a standard for sports games
  • Practice doesn’t make perfect
  • Hello scouting, good bye draft classes
• A new style
  • Nantz and Simms are a huge improvement over Collinsworth and anybody
• A whole console generation, wasted

It seems pretty apparent that EA doesn’t give a damn about releasing the best product possible. They just want to milk it for all the money it’s worth. If they really cared about making NCAA Football ‘13 the best game it could be, then they would have delayed it a few weeks in order to install the same, potentially revolutionary, physics engine that is being implemented in this year’s Madden. The game releases six weeks prior to the start of the college football season anyway, so it wouldn’t have hurt to delay it a month. It still would have made it onto store shelves before the kickoff of the season. Heck, most teams haven’t even finalized their depth charts yet, and some are still revealing new uniforms and stadiums!

Table of Contents

• Reverting back to a broken foundation
• Passing is the focus of this year’s game
  • Psychic DBs seem to be gone … for now
  • My receiver never saw it coming
  • Issues that were unaddressed
• Controls have been obfuscated to accommodate a feature that isn’t even used in most game modes!
• New career modes and augments to Dynasty
  • Recruiting loses some mystery; remains the highlight of the game
  • Trying to capture that NFL 2K5 awesomeness, and not quite making it
• Maybe next year we’ll get the college football game we’ve been waiting for? Probably not.

One of the biggest side effects of EA's insistence of releasing its NCAA Football games more than a month ahead of the start of the season is that its rosters tend to be out of date. First off, no real names can be used due to NCAA rules, but EA provides a handy roster-share feature that allows fans to upload named rosters to share with other players. I usually get my roster from Operation Sports. But the great guys at Operation Sports can only do so much. Updating the rosters for big-name schools like Alabama, Florida, and LSU is pretty easy. The little schools are a bit more of a problem. So I've taken it upon myself to make some corrections to Operation Sports' rosters for my alma mater, UNLV.

First and foremost, I went through each position and made sure that the players listed match what is on the most up-to-date versions of the team's depth chart and roster. This required moving a few players around, since they've changed positions. Other players were renamed and completely revised since those players have since left the team. I also took the liberty of making spelling corrections on some players' names (such as Maika Mataele and Ron Scoggins), updating redshirt statuses that were incorrect, updating the High School and Home State of most players (using the names of the closest town whenever I couldn't find a match), and also updating the faces and equipment of starters.

Just saw this article in the online version of the Wall Street Journal. According to the article, Electronic Arts (EA) has settled a class action anti-trust lawsuit that alleged their exclusive contracts with the National Football League (NFL), National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and Arena Football League (AFL) constituted monopolistic behavior. If the settlement is upheld by the court, EA will owe a small sum of money to consumers who purchased any of their Madden NFL, NCAA Football, or Arena Football video games for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Wii, PlayStation 3, or Xbox 360.

I doubt that many gamers will be able to actually claim the money owed to them, since I'm sure EA will demand receipts that show a new purchase of the games (and honestly, how many people actually keep receipts for every game that they buy?). I'm also not sure how the settlement will treat consumers who purchased applicable games used, or consumers who resold the games (i.e on eBay or to GameStop).

The most disappointing thing though, is that although EA is agreeing not so sign exclusive deals with the NCAA or AFL, there is no mention of the status or future of its current deal with the NFL. If EA is not forced to relinquish its exclusive deal with the NFL, then this settlement is a very hollow victory for football gaming fans.

I still have a lot of questions, but the prospect of a return to open competition on football video games should be very exciting for football fans! Even if it doesn't apply to the NFL. I hope that companies like 2K, Natural Motion, Sony, and Microsoft will release competitors to EA's NCAA Football over the next few years. I'm disappointed that NFL 2K, NFL Fever, or Backbreaker NFL don't seem to be any more likely, but I hope companies will step up to the plate with new titles like NCAA Football 2K, NCAA Football Fever, and Collegiate Backbreaker.