I felt like College Football 25 would be a real make-or-break title for EA Sports. Madden has been getting criticized for its focus on Ultimate Team, lack of attention to Franchise Mode, and myriad legacy issues that EA just refuse to address. The market has been jonesing for a licensed college football game -- in fact, it's been jonesing for any alternative to Madden. This is EA's chance to really put out a quality product that can earn it a lot of good faith to help carry it through the coming years of renewed football video game competition. I honestly expected that College Football 25 would hit a home run with its Dynasty Mode and feature set in order to earn back that trust and good faith -- especially after it was delayed a whole year from its original expected release.
Instead, I keep feeling disappointed and frustrated with College Football 25 at almost every turn. It feels, to me, like a pale shadow of its NCAA Football forebears. It's a mess of missing features, confounding control and interface issues, bad A.I. (especially on defense), and rosters that are muddled and obfuscated by the legal tightrope of name-and-likeness rights. It checks off almost all of the "must have" feature boxes (like adding the playoff and transfer portal), but this game seems to aggressively refuse to go above and beyond in any capacity.
Strap in and get comfortable. This is going to be a long review...
No-huddle gameplan
The launch version of College Football 25 is really friggin' hard! I started 0 for 7 against the CPU (on the All-American difficulty, with default sliders). I had to play a Boise State home match against lowly cupcake New Mexico in order to get my first victory. Since then, I've been doing a lot better, but victories do not typically come easily.
I have my share of responsibility in this. I don't know the playbooks yet, and I threw some facepalm-inducing interceptions. Linebackers seem to play a lot deeper in College Football 25 compared to Madden, and my QBs weren't putting enough touch on passes over the middle of the field. So Post and Dig routes that would be wide open in Madden were repeatedly being picked by lurking linebackers.
Lurking linebackers make a lot of interceptions between the hashes.
Despite my own mistakes, the designers of the game seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the barrier to entry would be as high as it could possibly be. The game doesn't seem to want to teach its new features, mechanics, or controls, and it insists on changing things just for the sake of change -- screw my decade (or longer) of muscle memory! Many problems that have long frustrated me in Madden reared their ugly heads to conspire against me as well. I often felt like I could call out exactly how an upcoming play would unfold before the snap, because I've seen all of this so many times in Madden.
Sacks and interceptions tended to come in pairs or triplets.
My star receivers refused to catch open downfield passes, while the CPU receivers all had hands of glue.
Force defenders refused to do their job, and my defense in general refused to contain the edge or take viable pursuit angles. Even if I expected an outside run and spread my line or linebackers, they'd still all crash inside and get smothered by down-blocks.
CPU receivers would repeatedly beat my DBs on in-breaking routes and break free for huge gains or scores, even though I explicitly set inside shade before the snap.
Outside shade was basically an invitation for the CPU to score on a post or quick slant, even if I had a single-high safety or robber to supposedly stop those specific routes.
My blockers would absolutely refuse to block the single most important assignment on the play whenever I needed a run play to be successful, even with elite running teams (such as Michigan).
My own big plays would consistently be called back by penalties.
The CPU teams would go into un-beatable "turbo mode" as soon as the 2-minute warning hit.
And so on, and so on. You've heard or read all of this before if you've looked at any review of Madden in the past decade or so.
CPU-controlled defenders take horrible containment and pursuit angles.
There was even a patch, released a couple days before this review was published, which was supposed to have improved pursuit angles. But in my limited play since the patch, it seems to have actually made pursuit even worse, somehow! Not only do players continue to take horrible containment angles, but any defender that happens to be in the open field on the perimeter, and in a position to stop an outside run, now has an infuriating habit of just bouncing off the ball-carrier. So perimeter tackles that were being made a week ago, are now being missed after the patch, giving up even more big runs and scores to the outside.
I cannot understate how much these poor pursuit and containment angles are ruining my enjoyment of this game! So many of my losses can be directly traced to my defense just completely shitting the bed and giving up big run after big run because they are completely unwilling to defend the perimeter. And there is little-to-nothing that I can do about this, because I can only control a single player on the defense at a time.
Wrong read
Then there were the frustrations that came from new controls and mechanics -- none of which are adequately explained. The Skill Trainer that has been in Madden for almost a decade, and which might be the single best feature of any sports game in the past 15 years (and one of the best features of any sports games ever!), is not present at all. Not only does the Skill Trainer in Madden serve as a great tutorial for gameplay mechanics, but it also teaches real football concepts and reads. Without a Skill Trainer, there are no tutorials to help a user learn the new or modified mechanics -- let alone to explain how any of the new college-specific plays are supposed to be executed, or what reads the user is supposed to make on any given play. Instead, all we have are the same shitty Mini-Camp games from last year's Madden, which are not teaching tools, and do not work as such.
Not only was I expecting to see the same Skill Trainer tutorials and drills that are present in Madden, but I was also expecting to see new tutorials and drills for college-specific concepts. I was expecting to see Skill Trainer tutorials for managing the collegiate game clock, running the no-huddle offense, playing collegiate overtime rules, executing the Triple Option, and running different defensive schemes like the 5-2, the 4-2-5, the 3-3-5, the 3-2-6, and so forth.
New DIY Reverses are a great way to exploit the poor defensive containment and pursuit logic
-- if you can figure out how they work.
There's also a new "Do It Yourself" Reverse play type and the defensive "Switch Stick", which are not documented anywhere in the game. The DIY Reverses also aren't easy to find with the limited time available in the play-calling screen, since there isn't a specific category for them under Play Types or Play Concepts in the playbooks.
The DIY Reverse requires the user to press a button in order to actually hand off the ball on a reverse. It's basically a new type of Option play. The game did not give me any tutorial or instruction on how to execute this play, and in my early attempts, the runner would not hand off or pitch the ball back to the reverse player, even if I was pushing the "pitch" button. After spending more time in practice mode, I discovered that this play requires the user to manually run close enough to the reverse player to execute the handoff, even though the CPU would automatically run further up field if I didn't press any buttons after the hand-off. It sure would have been nice if the game had explained any of this. But then when I would try the play in an actual match, the ball would still never get handed off.
Given the new mechanics and lack of tutorials, I even went into the game's settings to make sure that tool tips are "always on". But then I never saw any tool tips again. So either that is bugged, or EA didn't bother to put in tutorial tool tips for things like the Option, RPOs, and so forth. And, of course, there's no option or button to reset the tutorials either. I saw one tutorial pop-up in one of the first matches I played, but then I never saw it again, and can't figure out how to bring it back up. Worse yet, the in-game control layout screens do not explain many of the basic controls. It doesn't show the controls for option plays, or RPOs, or for kicking. Put simply College Football 25 absolutely refuses to teach users how to play it! Which is a big part of why so many players are finding it to be more challenging that they expected.
The kicking meter almost served as a deal-breaker for the whole game.
I've already written a lengthy breakdown of the overly-difficult kicking meter and the counter-intuitive Option controls. I'm not going to fully rehash all of that here. But in summary, kicking is exceedingly difficult, and there are not options to tone down the difficulty of the kicking meter.
New players and casual players are going to have a really hard time with this, and without an option to make kicking easier, they are going to be at a severe disadvantage against veteran players. This could result in limiting the potential player base, and could hurt the game's long-term appeal, if Tiburon doesn't do something to address the unforgiving challenge. Worse yet, Dynasty Mode doesn't differentiate between user kicking and CPU kicking for its sliders, so if you increase the power or accuracy of your kicker to try to make it a bit easier, you'll also make all the CPU kickers that much better too.
Similarly, Tiburon changed the Read Option controls such that the user needs to hold a button for the QB to keep the ball on a Read Option play. This flies in the face of all other controls in the game, as well as a decade of precedent and muscle memory from Madden. Nowhere else in the game is the user expected to hold a button in order to keep the ball. In fact, quite the contrary, the pass charge and kick charge mechanics specifically involve holding a button in order to get rid of the ball! Further, the timing for these plays has been changed such that the controller inputs do not line up with the "mesh point" animations, so the decision to keep or hand-off the ball must be made extremely early, sometimes before the conflict defender has even moved -- let alone with enough time for the user to actually process what you're seeing.
Changes to the Option controls and timing almost served as a deal-breaker for the whole game.
Speaking of conflicts in the controls, there's a new "Switch Stick" mechanic that allows the user to flick the right stick to select a different defensive player during a play. The Switch Stick is a great idea! Being able to switch away from a defensive lineman in order to help out in coverage or take over a player on edge containment is a much-needed feature in football games. I even suggested a feature like this in Axis Football, and it was added for a post-release patch in one of the games, only to be omitted in the following release.
But this Switch Stick doesn't work very well, and there's no in-game documentation or tutorial for how to use it. I didn't even know this feature existed until I saw a video about it online. Controlling the Switch Stick with the right stick conflicts with the Hit Stick and break-block controls, which means I never know if using the Switch Stick is going to result in triggering a Hit Stick animation instead of switching my control to another player. The defensive block-breaking controls flat-out prevent using the Switch Stick to switch away from an engaged defensive lineman, which is probably the single biggest use-case for this Switch Stick mechanic (at least for me)!
Why couldn't the Switch Stick just be the exact same control as changing players pre-snap? Just hold the Circle button and use the left stick to change defenders. The circle button isn't used for anything else in-game, so there's no conflict. While holding Circle, the game could even put the controlled player in an assist mode so as not to cause the player to move out of position. Using circle in this manner would even free up the L1 button for something other than Defensive Assist (which doesn't work anyway). Maybe pressing L1 could toggle an overlay of the defender's current assignment, or open up an in-play "guess play" menu that could allow the defensive user to make mid-play adjustments to prevent a total defensive breakdown?
I can't switch away from an engaged lineman, because the right stick performs block-shed moves.
On top of that, there's even more problems with the selected-player indicator and defensive pre-play controls that lead to me not knowing what player I have selected, or putting my selected player out of position. First of all, the selected-player marker is green, which blends in with the green fields. This makes it hard to see which player is selected when I'm trying to quickly scroll through the defensive players before the snap, and makes it easy to loose track of which coverage man I'm controlling on kick coverage.
This problem compounds with some control issues with the Coach Cam and pre-play adjustments. There seems to be a buffer period after letting go of the Coach Cam button in which the Coach Cam controls are still active. So when I start pressing the Circle button to switch control to a different defender, the game brings up some adjustment or audible menu instead, and I end up being caught way out of position on the ensuing defensive plays. And since CPU QBs snap the ball very quickly in EA Sports football games, there's very little time to view the defensive matchups, select the defender I want to control, and make any pre-play adjustments, and even less time to fix any mistakes that are caused by lousy controls.
In the worst cases, this has caused me to accidentally give up touchdown passes because I thought I had a linebacker or lineman selected, but I was actually controlling the cornerback. In other cases, I have the right player selected, but the confusion with the controls resulted in me performing an audible or coverage adjustment, and so I play the wrong assignment. And since College Football doesn't auto-save the match after each play (like Madden does), if I make a mistake like that, I either have to live with it or restart the entire match. Stuff like this just further kills any enjoyment I might have been having.
I frequently can't tell which defender I have selected, and accidentally move the wrong player out of position.
So yes, there are a lot of face-palm-inducing fundamental design flaws with College Football's on-field gameplay. Kicking and Option controls each comes close to being a deal-breaker for the whole game. Along with all the other legacy problems I mentioned above, it all combined to make me more annoyed and frustrated while playing the game, and less capable of enjoying the things that the on-field gameplay does well.
Right reads
This game does do a few things well. There's new options for slide pass protection which can dramatically improve pass blocking, and which much more closely model real football pass-protection schemes. The game also highlights every blocker's individual assignment (something that older PS3-era EA football games used to do). This is great for verifying where the weaknesses in pass-protection will be, and also where holes will potentially open on running plays. It's too bad that viewing the blocking scheme is confusing and cumbersome. There's separate button inputs required for viewing the pass blocking scheme and for the run blocking. I don't know why the basic Coach Cam can't just show who everybody is supposed to be blocking.
The user can see who each and every blocker will block, and has more control over pass protection.
Of course, just because a player is supposed to block a given defender, it doesn't mean that he actually will block that defender. He can still miss the block, or get beat. Or an exotic blitz or coverage scheme from the defense can force each blocker to improvise once the ball is snapped. At least now I know exactly who each of my players was supposed to block, so that I know exactly who blew his assignment if I get sacked or tackled for a loss.
Or at least, that's the case when the feature is actually working. The U.I. that was supposed to show the slide protection also apparently doesn't work whenever I play an away game or run a play action pass. So it's useless for more than half my offensive passing snaps.
More generally, the on-field gameplay plays pretty smooth, and players show more awareness of what is going on around them. Even players who fumble the ball will know that they fumbled and will make an effort to try to recover their own fumble. This cuts down on the frequency of turn-overs and scoop-n-scores. This resolves one of my long-standing complaints with Madden. Running is responsive, and hitting a seam in kickoff coverage to return one to the house feels great!
Zone defense is also a lot more dangerous, as zone defenders react quickly to the play in front of them. They will lay the smack down on the receiver, or will even jump routes for swats or interceptions. So far, they've been doing it all without having to make blind plays with their back to the ball or the receiver.
No-huddle gives defenses some time to adjust.
I also like that the no-huddle has been reverted back to the way it used to work, in which the players actually have to run to the line of scrimmage, instead of Madden's recent method of just skipping straight to the line of scrimmage and running off 10 seconds. This makes the no-huddle more organic, more realistic, and gives the defense an actual opportunity to look at where the offensive players are lining up and make appropriate adjustments. The offensive players also take a moment to look over at the sideline to see what the new play-call, which gives the defensive user a couple extra seconds to pick who to control or make additional adjustments based on what the offense is doing (or the situation).
Lastly, the "Wear & Tear" system is a huge improvement over Madden's Progressive Fatigue. Instead of players getting "too tired" to play in a playoff game or the SuperBowl, players in College Football 25 will suffer minor, nagging injuries to various body parts that will accumulate over a match or a season. These minor injuries can reduce the player's ratings and hurt their on-field performance, encouraging the user to substitute a backup who might be healthy and performing better.
Players with some wear are also more prone to severe injury. The play-call screen will even highlight when a given player is accumulating a risky amount of Wear & Tear. This also encourages the user to play a backup instead of risking a major injury, such as utilizing a running back or defensive line rotation. It also encourages the user to be more protective of players and avoid taking big hits whenever possible. For the first time ever, an EA football game is actually providing the user with a very good reason for a scrambling QB or a kick returner to step out of bounds instead of lower the shoulder for more yardage!
Wear & Tear gives a good reason to step out of bounds and avoid a big hit.
And when a player does suffer a minor injury, the user can be given the choice to have the trainers put some tape or a pad on the injury, and send him back out. So some of the cosmetic player accessories might actually have an injury-reduction effect. Maybe? Does putting a knee brace on a player in his appearance customization reduce his risk of knee injury? The game doesn't explain.
I haven't really been able to see how this system plays out through a season of Dynasty, since none of my players in a simulated Dynasty ever seemed to acquire any Wear & Tear that persisted from week to week. Everyone seemed 100% healthy whenever I checked the depth chart. So maybe this feature is badly-tuned for simulated Dynasties? Or maybe Wear & Tear only happens if you are actually playing each match? If so, I wonder if simulating a single match is an exploit to easily erase any wear & tear that a key player may have accumulated? Also, I haven't seen any settings for tweaking the frequency or severity of the Wear & Tear system, other than to simply turn it off, which is perfectly in-keeping with the rest of the game's frustrating lack of tutorials and difficulty adjustments. I also wish that the Medical Center menu would actually show a summary of which players currently have some Wear & Tear, instead of having to go through the entire depth chart to figure out if someone has any nagging injuries.
So yes, even though this review is harping on design flaws and missing features, there are quite a few good ideas in this game, and I want to give EA credit for those good ideas. When I wasn't shanking easy field goals, wasn't botching Read Option hand-offs, when my CPU-controlled receivers weren't dropping open passes, and when my CPU-controlled defenders weren't blowing their assignments, College Football 25 was playing really well.
Players can suffer minor injuries that hinder their performance.
Empty Trophy Case
There was a lot of hype preceding College Football 25's release, saying that it would be a very full-featured and robust football game. I hate Ultimate Team, and I don't care all that much for Road To Glory or the Road To The Playoff online mode. I'm here for Dynasty, which I'll talk about in a moment.
But honestly, I was disappointed by all the modes and features that I didn't see. I already mentioned the lack of a Skill Trainer, but there are other features that were in NCAA Football that I expected to see here, and which I'm surprised to not see, given the multi-year development process. There are also modes and features from contemporary Madden games that are not present here, even though they would be mostly copy-paste.
There's a User Profile attached to the logged-in console user, but the profile literally has nothing in it except for your chosen favorite team. There is no Trophy Case. There's no "ESPN Instant Classics". And the profile does not track my win/loss record, or my stats, or my play-call tendencies, or any other useful or interesting information. Trophies were a great collectible for completionists, which encouraged playing with different teams and modes. Now, there's very little extrinsic motivation to try out pick-up games with different teams or run multiple Dynasty save files with different schools. I even expected that there would be online-specific trophies so players could have bragging rights over other online players. But nope.
Many popular features from NCAA Football 14 are missing.
Custom Stadium Sounds is also missing. The game includes most schools' fight songs during the pregame presentation and after scores, but we can't add unique band music or PA songs, as we could in the older games. No more Viva Las Vegas during my UNLV Dynasty pre-games, "Darth Vader's Theme" preceding an opponent's 3rd and long attempt, Sweet Caroline going into the 3rd quarter, or Kiss 'em Goodbye when winning late in the 4th. Viva Las Vegas feels especially absent considering that the announcer references it in the pre-game introduction before every UNLV home game, but I don't get to hear the actual song.
Building a champion
OK, so if all these other features and modes are missing, then Dynasty Mode must be fully blown-out, right? Well, no. Once again, EA only did the bare minimum. Basically, playing Dynasty consists of playing your football schedule on the field, and doing recruiting, and that is it! There's no weekly team-management, no player progression, no weekly practice or game prep, no academic or disciplinary standards to maintain, no facility upgrades, or anything like that. You just play the week's football match, and then you do recruiting, and you move onto the next week.
The only other thing that you might do is is pick new perks for your coach's skill tree. This still tree is a lot deeper and wider than the skill trees in Madden or the ones from NCAA Football 14. But with so many features missing from Dynasty mode, most of these skills are just passive buffs.
The coach creator has 600+ faces, but only 2 shirts?!
When you go to create your coach for Dynasty, you'll be met with one of the worst character-creation screens I've ever seen. There's like 600 or 800 different faces that the user has to scroll through. That sounds like a lot of variety, but shockingly, it isn't! They are all just variations of the same few dozen faces, just with different skin tones and hair styles. The Road to Glory character customization allows the user to select a base face, then set skin tone, hair style, hair color, and facial hair options independently. But for some reason, EA couldn't just re-use this same character-builder, and had to use this ridiculous set of hundreds of pre-set faces instead.
Then after I finished selecting a face, the rest of the customization options consist of a whopping 2 shirts! That's it! 800 faces, but your coach can only choose between a team-color polo or a team-color wind-breaker. No T-shirt, no suit-and-tie, no Hawaiian shirt, no hoodies. You also can't customize the coach's pants, or even give him a hat or glasses!
When in a football match, the in-match depth chart does not show which players are currently redshirting. If I'm looking to sub in a reserve player because of an injury to a starter or because I'm up by 4 scores in the 4th quarter, it is easy to accidentally sub in a redshirt and cause him to loose his redshirt status and a year of eligibility. The depth chart in the Franchise menu shows redshirt status, but not the one in-match. Why are these screens even different to begin with? Honestly, why are redshirts even listed on the in-match depth charts to begin with? My understanding is that redshirted players don't even dress for games, and might not even travel with the team for away games. They shouldn't even be available on the in-match depth chart to begin with!
I might accidentally sub this Redshirt Freshman RB into a game, and remove a year of eligibility.
Similarly, the in-match depth chart doesn't show player deal-breakers. So if a reserve player has "Playing Time" as a transfer deal-breaker, I can't see that when I'm making substitutions in-match. Though it's not entirely clear if this matters, since the game doesn't explain whether the "Playing Time" deal-breaker is actually based on whether that player plays in games, or whether it's simply determined by his position on the depth chart. The game tracks "Games Played" under each player's personal stats, so I would hope that this stat affects playing time.
Other features that are missing from Dynasty Mode include the ability to assign a custom playbook as your coach's playbook. Instead, you have to navigate through 50-some-odd teams to get to your playbook, before every single match you play. There's also no formation subs, which would have been yet another copy-paste feature from Madden that the developers must have consciously decided to cut out.
Name and likeness doesn't extend to personality
Even the Recruiting, which is supposed to be the glue that holds all this together, is lacking in many ways, and missing a lot of content and ease-of-use features. For one thing, there is no independent difficulty setting for Recruiting (as there was in NCAA 14). So if you're only here for the recruiting, and are just simulating the weekly football matches, then there is no way to make the recruiting easier or harder.
There's also no easy way to see a list of all your pipeline states, or an explanation of how pipeline status affects recruiting, or of what causes a state to become a pipeline state. Can pipeline states change during the Dynasty, as a result of my actions? I also miss the handy map of the U.S. that put push-pins on the home towns of all the prospects I'm recruiting. That was a nice, visual short-hand to make sure that I was meeting quotas to maintain or create pipeline states.
There is a summary of recruiting, coach experience gain, and deal break status that pops up after progressing to the next week. This is very handy. Too bad it drags the user to the next screen while I'm trying to read the info on the current screen, and once this summary is closed, it cannot be re-opened.
The user actually has to discover each prospect's pitch interests.
For the recruiting itself, EA did a pretty good job of finding a middle ground between the efficient-but-sterile recruiting of NCAA 14 and the more character-driven recruiting of NCAA 13. This game brings back the process of figuring out what a prospect's desires and values are, and then trying to specifically target those desires and values with your recruiting pitches. It's not a simple matter of assigning completely abstract points to each prospect, which was a big weakness of NCAA 14's recruiting. But it's still considerably more streamlined than NCAA 13, since it doesn't require a tedious process of manually making the same pitches to every prospect every single week.
Perhaps best of all, the fact that modern consoles all have solid state drives means that the recruiting does not suffer from the obnoxious lag and frequent loading times of the PS3-era games. There's still a few minor U.I. quibbles that add a few unnecessary button-presses and slow down the process, but overall, the recruiting process flows a lot smoother, and moves a lot quicker.
Unfortunately, College Football 25's recruiting doesn't really do anything to add more personality or character in order to make this system truly stand out or feel special. There's never really a sense of dialogue or conversation between me and the prospects I'm recruiting. Many prospects and players do have mental and physical abilities that can be revealed from scouting. This helps to specialize certain players or prospects, and even gives some of them a slight shred of personality. But I was really hoping to see some kind of short biography or personal factoid for each prospect, like what was given in Maximum Football 2020's Dynasty recruiting.
Maximum Football 2020 humanizes each prospect with a simple 1-sentence bio.
I like 25's recruiting more than I liked 14's recruiting, since it actually provides some context for what the point allocations mean. But I still don't think it has anywhere near the personality and character of the recruiting in 12 or 13.
Honestly though, it doesn't matter how good Dynasty Mode might have been, because Dynasty Mode really wasn't worth playing at launch due to bugs and U.I. issues. In the time I've spent testing Dynasty, I lost out on multiple high-priority recruiting prospects because of a known bug that prevents users from scheduling visits with certain prospects after the ability to do so should have been unlocked. This bug was finally fixed, but it took almost a whole month, when it should have been a day-1 fix, or part of a hotfix in the first week. In any case, this bug caused me to put off starting a serious Dynasty save file until this bug was fixed, because I didn't want to waste valuable recruiting time on prospects that I'll never have a realistic shot at committing.
A glitch prevents certain prospects from visiting the user's campus.
Many gamers will also be disappointed to find that, after their college stars graduate, they cannot be imported into Madden. Presumably, this is due to legal complications of the NIL licensing. I don't buy that as an excuse though. EA already allows custom draft classes in Madden, and the ability for gamers to share their draft classes with each other, despite not having the rights to those players' professional names and likenesses. This is pretty much the exact problem that got them sued for the NCAA Football games to begin with. If they can get away with this in Madden, then I don't see any reason why they can't include a clause in the contracts that allows users to export their draft classes into Madden.
Restrictions of the NIL licenses also apparently put huge restrictions on the roster-editing capabilities offered by the game. The user can change the names and ratings of non-NIL players in the game, but we cannot change their jersey number, hometown, class, or face. And there is no player-creator at all. This means we cannot manually correct mistakes or omissions in EA's rosters, or add ourselves as a player in our Dynasty. If you want to play as yourself, you have to play the Road To Glory Mode. Again, we can do all of these things in Madden without any apparent legal licensing issues, so I honestly do not understand why we can't be allowed to do it in the college game.
If you want your College Football 25 draft classes in Madden, you'll have to manually enter each and every graduating player into a custom Madden draft class for the respective season. If EA cannot legally allow players to be imported into Madden, then they shouldn't be allowed to let us customize draft classes in Madden either -- and they probably never should have been able to get away with it to begin with. But they did allow it, and never got sued, so I expect this feature to be present in College Football 25. If it was illegal to import real college graduates into custom draft classes all along, then I hope that one of those graduates sues EA for it, forces EA to pay a settlement to all those players who's names and likenesses were stolen, and gets Madden cancelled for 10 years.
Roster editing is severely limited, NIL players cannot be edited, and draft classes cannot be exported to Madden.
Minimal viable product?
I have a myriad of other complaints, and could probably easily write another thousand words of nitpicks. Hell, even the cover art disappointed me! There's a promotional art for the game that depicts players walking out of the tunnel and onto the field that would have been a much better cover. It highlights the player names on the back of the jersey; shows bands, mascots, cheerleaders, and flags on the field to highlight the presentation and pageantry; and it does a great job of conveying the anticipation of the decade-long wait for this game. That promotional artwork would have been a perfect cover for this game. Instead, EA settled on a much uglier cover showing a few players doing silly poses. It's a much lesser cover than the promotional artwork.
And for the love of the gods, could you please rotate some of the school fight songs into the music rotation during the main menu and Dynasty menus? The drumline music in the main menus is good, but it gets old when I have to listen to it for over an hour straight while doing recruiting in Dynasty mode. You have over 130 licensed school fight songs in the game. Use them!!!
Even worse, these drumline tracks appear to by copywritten, and the game does not have any "streamer mode" that replaces the copywritten tracks with un-copywritten tracks. So streams to Twitch and YouTube are being blocked for copyright, with the only recourse left to streamers being to just turn the music off entirely and play Dynasty in silence. It's almost as if EA is embarrassed or ashamed of Dynasty Mode, and doesn't want streamers showing it off and giving it free promotion. Or maybe they just want to block streamers from streaming Dynasty Mode in the hopes that they'll stream Ultimate Team instead?
I'm sorry, but this game is not good. It's not "awful" either, by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me like everybody else is just so blinded by their excitement that there's a new licensed college football game, that they are ignoring the fact that College Football 25 is missing a ton of content, and is loaded with absolutely bone-headed design choices. From the lack of tutorials, to the lack of accessibility options for hard-to-use features, to conflicting and contradictory control schemes, to inept defensive A.I., to a Dynasty Mode that has absolutely nothing going for it except for half-way decent recruiting, to the absolute mess that is roster customization, to commentary frequently being flat-out wrong, College Football 25 feels like an Early Access shell of an incomplete, work-in-progress game. It is barely more than a "minimal viable product". Yet EA spent at least 3 years working on this, and they're charging $70 for it. To make matters worse, EA is leaning heavily into the game's pay-to-win gambling micro-transaction economy, and will surely want us to pay $70 for it again next year.
EA combined the bare minimum of NCAA 14 with the bare minimum of real-life changes to college football
to create a bare minimum viable product.
Sure, the on-field gameplay generally feels pretty good (when my CPU-controlled teammates aren't completely throwing the game), and there are some very good ideas that I would like to see cleaned up and iterated upon. But the awful design choices that rear their ugly head at almost every level of this game prevent me from being able to fully enjoy that solid gameplay and those good ideas. I'm throwing my controller in disgust and rolling my eyes in disappointment just as often with this game as I do with any given release of Madden (maybe even moreso, because I actually did have hope for this game), and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But hey, maybe next year will be better. Right?