Madden NFL - title

But before I get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that EA has actually partially addressed some of the issues that I've discussed in a previous installment of this essay series. Specifically, Madden 24, Madden 25, and College Football 25 have substantially improved player logic in loose-ball situations. Since I published the 5th essay, about loose-ball situations, EA has added a number of new animations of players diving or falling onto fumbled footballs. This has mitigated some of the frustrations that I expressed in that essay. Scooping-and-scoring does not happen nearly as often, and players are now also able to recover their own fumbles.

There are still problems with fumbles and loose ball logic, so I won't be rescinding the entire essay. Many of the criticisms are still valid. Most notably, fumble recovery animations often appear pre-determined and break the laws of physics and human anatomy. Awareness during loose-ball situations is also still hit-or-miss.

Nevertheless, EA did actually improve this area of the game, and I want to acknowledge that. As I've said before, I don't make this content simply to shit all over Madden and EA for the sake of it. I make this content because I love football, I love football video games, and I want EA to give us a better product. All my criticism is intended as constructive criticism that I hope is taken in good faith by anyone who watches. As such, I always want to give credit where credit is due.

This full essay is available in video format on YouTube.

In any case, I previously started talking about off-field strategy and team-building. Now, I want to talk more about what to do with that talent once they have been scouted, drafted, and evaluated. Today I'll be talking about another one of Franchise Mode's most glaring high-level flaws. It's finally time to talk about how Madden handles (or fails to handle) gameplanning and preparation.

At a very high level, Madden focuses its game strategy almost exclusively on what you like to do! Not off of what the opponent likes to do, nor even off of what you team is built to do. This is not really representative of how real NFL teams prepare for games. In real football, teams do not generally take their entire playbook into any given game. They install, tweak, and practice a different subsets of specific plays each week, based on what they think will work best about their upcoming opponent.

However, modifying your playbook for a given opponent has just never been a part of Madden. This is especially frustrating, because the game has a mechanism for doing this. There is a Custom Playbook and Gameplanning editor that was introduced in Madden 11, and which is still in the game after all these years. While Madden games from over a decade ago did encourage users to use this feature to customize your play-calling to your personal preferences, newer games have pushed this feature more and more into the background, in favor of EA pushing updates to the pre-set playbooks, based on the play calls from real-life teams as the real-life NFL season progresses.

This seems good on paper. Why wouldn't we want realistic playbooks based on the plays that real coaches are calling this season? Don't we want those plays and play-calling frequencies to change to more closely reflect how those coaches call plays in real life? After all, that more closely reflects how the real NFL season is unfolding, right? Sure. Those are great things for Play Now pick-up games and Ultimate Team matchups against randos. But it's not exactly ideal for playing in a simulation Franchise Mode, in which the user is ostensibly taking on the role of a head coach or general manager over the course of multiple seasons, and in which coaching decisions should be based on the events and situations within the Franchise Mode, and not on how things are happening in real-life. And that is where Madden's Franchise Mode falters.

Madden 11 introduced a gameplan editor along with its playbook editor 15 years ago.
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Madden NFL 25 - title

We finally have another big-budget football game to compare Madden to! Yeah, sure, it's another EA Sports game, so it's not much of a contrast. We still haven't gotten a proper new game from 2k, so we still don't get to compare Madden against another studio's vision. In fact, the closest thing that we have to a direct competitor to Madden is probably still NFL Pro Era (which released its first sequel earlier this year, but I haven't played it due to on-going elbow pain). Pro Era is, however, a VR game, and more of a middle-budget "Double-A" game, and so it also is not directly comparable to Madden.

So how does Madden look when compared against the only other football game at its level? Well, not very good -- which shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody. I'm not exactly loving College Football 25. In fact, I've been a pretty outspoken critic of its since its release. I didn't have a honeymoon period with it the way that so many other reviewers and critics did, and I was noticing and reporting flaws and limitations from day 1. Unsurprisingly, my biggest complaints about both game are the things that they don't do, but which the other does.

There are multiple commentary teams.

To copy-paste, or not to copy-paste?

There are some features from College Football 25 that did find their way into Madden. Just like the college game, Madden now has multiple broadcast commentary teams. In fact, Madden got 50% more broadcast teams, as it has 3 different commentary teams, instead of CFB's 2. They are of mixed quality. Mike Tirico's line delivery might be the worst of the bunch, and it's often stilted and disjoint. Kate Scott, on the other hand brings a lot of energy -- maybe too much energy! She is a welcome change from the normally sterile and lifeless Madden commentary. Greg Olsen is probably the highlight of the bunch.

In real life, Brandon Gaudin and Charles Davis commonly calls day games on CBS (usually AFC matchups). Greg Olsen usually does day games on Fox (usually NFC matchups), while Brock Huard is an analyst for Fox. Mike Terico usually does Sunday Night football on NBC. Kate Scott is the regular announcer for the Philadelphia 76ers baseball team, and has called some preseason NFL games. Which of these teams calls any given game in Madden's Franchise Mode is completely random, and the user can't even choose which teams gives the commentary for any given Franchise game. It isn't based on the day of the week, or on the time of day, or on which teams are playing. If you want a specific team to only call Monday night games, for example, you would have to start the match, then quit and restart until you get the commentary team who you want.

Even if it is random, the extra variety is welcome.

The half-slides from College Football 25 have been imported into Madden.

Madden also ported over the revised slide protection mechanics that allow for a half-slide, which is a welcome addition to the game. But for some reason, they didn't port the overlay that shows which blocker is going to block which defender. So I can't be certain if the play is going to be blocked the way that I want it to be, or if flipping the play will improve the blocking, or if motioning a tight end or fullback to a different position might create a better matchup or leverage advantage.

Madden also imported the new kicking meter and Read Option controls that were introduced in CFB 25. I'm already familiar with both these concepts from CFB, so I'm not having nearly as much trouble adapting to them in Madden. Unlike CFB 25, Madden does have the option to revert the kicking meter back to the classic meter from previous Madden games. No such luck with the Read Option controls though.

I often do skill trainer drills when I boot up a new Madden game for the first time, just to see if any of the new mechanics have changed the way that the game feels, or if there are any new mechanics that need tutorializing. I was pleased to see that, unlike College Football 25, Madden still has a Skill Trainer, and it's still being updated with new drills and content. For example, I don't recall the "Pocket Pressence" drill in Skill Trainer mode in previous years.

The tutorial for the new kicking meter is just a single text overlay, and the rest of the tutorial is just flat-out wrong.

I was less pleased to see that the Skill Trainer is still poorly-maintained and half-assed. The new "revamped" passing mode is not tutorialized anywhere, nor is the new kickoff rules and mechanics. The "updated" tutorial for the new kicking meter is literally just an extra text overlay inserted before the text from previous years' field goal and punt tutorials. The field goal kicking tutorial still claims that the kick meter will show the full arc and landing spot of the ball, and that the trajectory will sway with the wind -- none of which is still true. There's also no explanation of how the accuracy meter works, or of the overcharge penalty. So once again, EA is showing little-to-no consideration for tutorializing its new mechanics.

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Madden NFL - title

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.

Watch the full video on Youtube.

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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A gamer's thoughts

Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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