As many of you already know, EA Sports College Football 25 is considerably more challenging to play than your average Madden. I have been struggling a lot. At the time of this writing, my record against the CPU currently stands at an abysmal 2 wins to 10 losses, after starting 0 for 7. All of these matches have been played at the All-American difficulty without any modifications to the sliders. They've all been close losses. I'm not getting blown out by any stretch of the imagination. But these struggles are really starting to sour me on the game as a whole. I have personally found that most of my struggles have been the result of 4 factors, 3 of which should not be causing as many struggles as they are causing, and I am starting to chalk those up to poor design, rather than my own lack of skill.
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The first factor is my own mistakes, to which I take full responsibility. And I'll admit, I am making a lot of mistakes. Specifically, I have been interception prone. Most of these interceptions are being caught by lurking linebackers in the middle of the field. These linebackers seem to play their zone coverages considerably deeper than in Madden, and so routes in the middle of the field that are usually open in Madden are being intercepted in College Football 25. The linebackers are not super-jumping or making one-handed catches or anything like that. They're just playing their zones differently than in Madden, and I haven't adjusted to it yet. Pass trajectories could maybe have more arc and touch on them, but maybe that's just me not using the pass charging mechanic correctly. Though EA's games have a long-standing track record of low pass trajectories.
The 2nd problem is that my CPU-defenders are not playing contain very well, and are routinely taking poor pursuit angles and giving up big plays. This is something that EA and Tiburon definitely need to address, as defensive force players and safeties should do a better job of keeping the play in front of them.
I have been losing a lot of close matches against the All-American CPU.
But this isn't the issue that I want to talk about today. The issue that I want to discuss is the 3rd reason why I am losing matches of College Football 25, and if you have been keeping up with the early reviews and impressions of the game on the internet ... or you read the title of this post ... then you probably already know what I'm going to talk about. The single biggest reason why I am losing all my matches of College Football 25 is because of the new kick meter. And this kick meter is coming dangerously close to making me hate this game.
Figuring out the kicking meter
In my first few pick-up matches, I was maybe making about 1 of every 4 extra points and field goals, without really having any clue why I was missing them. I also got multiple penalty flags for kicking kick-offs out of bounds, and was probably netting 20 yards on punts. My partner had a similarly poor success rate when she tried kicking in Practice Mode. After spending well over an hour in practice mode, and trying out the Field Goal Accuracy mini-game, I think I've figured out how the mechanic works, but I am still struggling with kicking.
First and foremost, Tiburon and EA didn't bother to include any tutorials to teach the player how to kick (or to use any of the game's new mechanics). Hell, even the Control Summary in the pause menu doesn't include any explanation of the controls for kicking, nor of how to actually execute the new kicking meter. There's a tiny tooltip in the corner of the screen that is easy to miss, which explains that you have to set the accuracy and power of the kick, and that you should avoid overcharging the kick. But that's all the explanation I was given.
The effect of overcharging is never explained.
The first point of confusion was that, since there was already an accuracy meter, I had assumed that Overcharging would result in a loss of power, not in a loss of accuracy. Why would the game test and penalize my accuracy twice?
This mis-conception is probably largely due to the fact that my first attempt at a kick was a punt, in which I did overcharge the kick, but it was accurate anyway. This only caused my brain to immediately assume that overcharging did not affect accuracy -- which was obviously an incorrect assumption.
But that's not all! Even if I stop the accuracy meter dead center in the green, and I don't overcharge the kick, it would sometimes still go off in a random direction. I can only assume that this is the result of the kicker's accuracy rating coming into play. So even if I do everything perfectly, I can still miss a kick due to random chance (or because of A.I. game scripting, perhaps?). So that's actually three checks and penalties on accuracy!
On top of all that, wind has unpredictable effects on the trajectory of the ball. Even when kicking with the wind directly at my back, a seemingly perfect kick will still veer off in a random direction. Seriously, what the fuck, EA?! The kicking rules penalize my kick accuracy in no less than four different ways?! And that's without applying other effects like stadium noise, player composure, or being iced! It's also assuming that the framerate isn't stuttering, and input lag isn't causing the user to completely whiff on the kick, which still happens frequently, even in offline, single-player matches. This has been a problem in Madden for years, going back to the PS4. Why is this still a problem?!
People have been justifiably complaining about kicking being too easy in Madden for years, but College Football 25 overcompensated on its kicking difficulty way too hard in the opposite direction. I mean, kicking in college football is already harder because of the wider hashes and overall poorer quality of the kickers in general. The speed of the accuracy meter, the overcharge penalty, and having the kick sail wide even when I input all the commands perfectly is just overkill.
Kicking has always been too easy in Madden, but CFB 25 overcompensates.
How kicker accuracy should affect the meter
If the kicker's accuracy rating is actually resulting in otherwise good kicks missing the mark, then this is the absolute wrong way for this mechanic to work. The kicker's accuracy rating should be doing 1 of 2 things, either:
- A high accuracy rating should act as a security blanket that overrules a "failed" user kick, and result in a successful kick, despite the user not stopping the accuracy meter within the green.
- Or the kicker's accuracy rating should affect the width of the green section of the accuracy meter (increasing the range in which a kick is considered accurate), and / or slow the accuracy meter so that it's easier to stop in the green zone.
Poor kicker accuracy should not, under any circumstances, result in an otherwise perfectly-executed user kick sailing wide. If the kicker doesn't have the power to make a long kick that's outside of his range, that's one thing. But if the player executes the kick meter perfectly, then the kick should at least be accurate.
The end result is that even after spending time in the Practice Mode to learn how kicking works and to practice it, I am still failing kicks on a regular basis. Sometimes I still miss the mark on accuracy, or I overcharge the kick because the meters just go too fast. Other times, I feel like I made a good kick, only to watch it sail wide anyway.
Lessons not learned!
None of this would be as big a problem if there were just some options to tweak some of these kicking rules, but there are no options to modify the difficulty of the kicking process at all! The only option is whether you want to tap the button to set power, or hold the button to set power (holding the button is the default). There's no general option to make the kick meter easier or harder, independent of the general gameplay difficulty. And there's definitely not any more granular options, such as an option to slow down the accuracy meter, or to reduce or remove the accuracy penalty from overcharging, or an option to slow down time after an overcharge and allow the user to manually correct the direction of the kick and get one last chance to salvage the kick. Nothing! The only thing you can do is to change the difficulty of the whole game, which does slow down the kick meter a little bit (emphasis on "little bit"), but then the rest of the game is too easy. And maybe you can also change the User Kick Accuracy slider, which might help mitigate the problems with otherwise good kicks missing because of the kicker's accuracy rating.
There are plenty of options for customizing the pass charge meter, but not for the kicking meter.
This whole situation reminds me of when Madden 18 added the targeted passing, and it was too hard to use because it all moved too fast and had poor user feedback. Nobody liked it, hardly anybody used it, and it was scrapped the following year. A similar concept would be re-added a couple years later with a slew of new options for slowing down time, changing the speed of the target reticle, locking the range of the target reticle, and so forth -- all of which was based on user feedback of Madden 18, and the positive response to Legend Bowl's pass charging mechanic. And hey! Now targeted passing works, and people love it!
Why didn't EA and Tiburon apply those same lessons to this new kick meter?! Given Tiburon's experience with targeted passing, it should have been common sense to include analogous accessibility options for this new kicking meter. But they didn't. Is the dev team and its management really that incompetent that they can't learn simple lessons from past mistakes? Or could it be that the game's play-testers are so afraid of losing their insider access that they act like "yes men" shills and don't give honest feedback about whether a feature like this needs to have options to tone it down? Or heck, maybe all the playtesters really are just that good at the game that they didn't have any problems with this kicking mechanic? In which case, EA needs to do a better job of getting play-testers who are more representative of the general public, because based on all the posts and articles about the kicking meter, the general gaming public is having a hard time with it.
In any case, just like with the targeted passing, we the consumers, or other indie studios, are basically going to have to design EA's game for them, because they seem to be incapable of doing it correctly themselves. And they had at least 3 years to get this right!
Good ideas in principle
I don't want to be all negative. There are good ideas going into the kicking meter's design as well. For one thing, I like how kickoffs, punts, and field goals all have different timings. This is a subtle effect that makes different types of kicks actually feel different, and means that a user can't get by training a single set of muscle memory to trivially make all types of kicks perfectly every time. I also like having to hold the button to charge the kick instead of just tapping it. Heck, I even like the idea of overcharging the kick reducing accuracy. I just think that the way this works needs to be better communicated to the user from the start. Hell, maybe overcharging kicks can also increase the risk that the kicker injuries himself by pulling a hammy or something.
The overcharge penalty incentivizes
undercharging shorter kicks.
The overcharge penalty even creates an interesting risk / reward element to attempting long field goals. Do you hold for max strength to ensure that you clear the crossbar, at the risk that you overcharge and miss the goal entirely? It also creates a strong incentive to undercharge short kicks and extra points so that you don't even risk an overcharge. More generally, you only want to put as much leg into a kick as you need, which even makes medium-range kicks more interesting because you have to decide just how much charge you actually need. You really need to know your kicker well in order to judge how hard to kick a try.
The hold mechanic even opens up possibilities to introduce more mechanics involving bad snaps or bad holds, which is something that I've asked for in the past. Having a bad snap or a bad hold could cause the kick meter to charge slower, which can change the timing of the kick, thus making it harder to fully charge, and also open up the possibility of the kick being blocked because the punter or holder has to spend that extra split second to reposition the ball before the kick.
In any case, I think EA and Tiburon really need to add some options to mitigate the overly-punishing nature of this kicking meter. At the very least, there should be a "Kicking Difficulty" option in the game settings. Ideally, there would be more granular settings so that users can specifically address whichever part of the kick meter process is giving them the most trouble. Maybe you lack the hand-eye coordination to stop the accuracy meter in the green and want to either slow down the meter or widen the green zone? Or maybe you're fine with the accuracy punt, but just can't get the hand of charging the kick power, and want to slow down that meter or reduce the overcharge accuracy penalty? Users should be able to tweak those sorts of settings to keep the game accessible and fun. If you want to enforce the default kicking meter for ranked online matches or for Online Dynasty, then fine, there should be an option for that too.
I have long advocated for football games to add ratings and mechanics for Longsnapping.
A potential deal-breaker?
Anyway, I can't believe I just had to spend that long talking about the kicking meter. This really should not have been as big a problem as it is. I haven't had this much trouble with a kick meter since Maximum Football 2019, but at least in that game, I just had to practice for a little bit to get the hang of it. Then I could consistently make kicks. I've spent time trying to practice kicking in College Football 25, and I still can't make kicks. I'm losing too many games by just 1, 2, or 3 points because I miss an extra point or make-able field goal, and it just isn't fun anymore. And if I'm not having fun, then I'm not going to play the game. And if the upcoming Madden uses the same kick meter, then I might not want to play that either.
For now, I'm going to keep giving it the ol' college try. But if either this kicking meter doesn't click for me soon, or Tiburon doesn't do something to address the overly-punishing difficulty of this meter (whether that is to nerf the difficulty entirely, or provide more customization options, as I've suggested), then the kick meter might end up being a deal-breaker for the entire game.
I can already hear the elitists and ableists typing up angry replies about how "kicking isn't actually that hard. You just need to git gud!" Well, Even if you're handling the kick meter just fine, you should probably still advocate for EA and Tiburon to add more customization options for this kick meter. I'm not the only one who is struggling. If kicking proves so difficult that it turns people off of the game, It might cut into sales and Ultimate Team play. In that case, EA might write this game off as a failure, and they may not put as much development resources and effort into future games. Or might not make future games at all, if it isn't worth it.
After all, not having any settings to change kick difficulty will make it very hard for casual gamers to pick up and play this game. Casual players aren't going to want to half an hour in Practice Mode, every time they want to play a match, just to refresh their muscle memory on how to execute kicks. I can tell you for sure that if I were to play a local multiplayer match with any of my friends, they would fail abysmally at kicking, and it would give me a tremendous advantage, since I could actually make some kicks. That would only serve to turn those players off from playing again.
But the kicking meter was just the 3rd of 4 reasons why I'm struggling with College Football 25. My struggles with kicking are probably the single biggest reason why I'm losing so many games in general. The fourth reason has to do with problems executing my preferred style of play, and I'll be talking about that soon, in the next post. I hope to see back. Until then, good luck with College Football 25. I hope you're having more success than I am.
I haven't given up yet, and am still giving the game the ol' college try!