Is it just me, or did EA release College Football 26 really early this year? Last year (and historically with the NCAA Football games of previous generations), the college football game would release in late July, about a month before the college football season starts. This year, however, the game released on 7th of July, over a month and a half from week 0 of the college football season.
Not that the extra 2 weeks or so would have made much of a difference.
I waited a couple weeks and bought the game used (and $20 cheaper!) off of eBay. This was partly because the early release date blind-sided me. I wasn't thinking about football season yet. Heck, I hadn't even activated my fantasy leagues or confirmed that people were going to play again this year, by the time College Football 26 released! I was also cautiously optimistic about this game, but still wanted EA to prove to me that they could actually improve a product before I would give them any more of my money with a retail purchase.
Despite not playing the game until it had already received multiple patches, it still managed to fall far below my cautious expectations, and fully vindicated my decision to not purchase a retail copy.
EA Sports College Football's sophomore year is not something to cheer for.
I am genuinely dumb-founded by EA's lack of effort and care with this year's College Football release. I really did expect that with the highly-anticipated return of its college football game, EA would put at least a year or 2 of solid effort into making a good, polished product, in order to build up some consumer confidence and good will -- you know, before they flush it all down the toilet and go back to being EA.
But they couldn't even be bothered to do that! It's just business as usual for EA. Except now they're selling us two shitty, low-effort football games, instead of just one.
The same, plus some options
First and foremost, so many of the problems from last year's game are still present, so I'll refer you back to that review. Yeah, I did eventually figure out how the option controls work, and get used to them, and even come around to liking them in last year's game. But kicking is still mercilessly difficult without any options to make it easier or less forgiving. This is despite the fact that 26 comes with a smorgasbord of new options for tweaking the ways that things like Wear & Tear and auto-subs work (which does resolve one of my biggest complaints with last year's game). But they couldn't be bothered to give the user any customization options for the kicking game, other than the choice of whether to hold or tap the buttons (the same option we were given last year).
There are extensive customization options for Wear & Tear.
There's still no tutorials or Skill Trainer to teach kicking or other game mechanics. So you're still stuck going to open practice and having to self-teach yourself (through trial-and-error) how to kick, run the option, use the Do-It-Yourself Reverse plays, use the switch stick, and so forth.
I think there's also more flashing indicators to tell me when players are triggering or disabling their abilities, and maybe also when they have Wear & Tear. I'm not quite sure, because there's no in-game keys that tell me what all the U.I. icons on the field mean, nor are there any tutorials or training modes that explain what all the icons and symbols mean.
Coaching blind
The game's marketing talks a lot about coaching your team the way you want. There's a bunch of new options for customizing or adjusting how your team plays -- particularly on defense. You can add defensive line stunts to any play, can adjust the depth of individual zones, can adjust safety depth and splits, can prioritize defending the run or pass on RPOs, and more. This is all good stuff, but these coaching and customization features are hard to use.
There are a a variety of new defensive adjustments.
For one thing, it all has to be done within a match, since Dynasty still does not feature any gameplanning systems at all that would let a user customize your Coaching Adjustments permanently, or for a specific match-up. Without any kind of opponent scouting report, how am I supposed to even know which adjustments I should be making? The limited pre-play time before a snap gives little-to-no time to experiment with these things in-game, and there's still no in-game tutorials or training tools to teach how to use these new features (or even tell users where to find the new features). It all favors hardcore users who follow EA's promotional releases, know exactly where to find these new features, and who have the time to self-learn all these tools. There are no aides at all to help more casual users catch up. Hell, many casual users might not even know these features are in the game at all, since many of them are hidden in menus. I didn't know about any of them until I went back and skimmed through EA's deep dive.
Dynasty does not feel much different than last year, other than that there's a lot more rain in Dynasty games. If you're not playing in a dome, you should assume that it will be raining.
Rain is exceedingly common in outdoor Dynasty games.
The transfer portal is much more of a necessity, with double-digit counts of players leaving every team, every year. Recruiting is pretty much the same, plus or minus some U.I. polish, including a handy list of your team's current roster needs that is always displayed when searching the list of potential recruiting prospects. Other areas of Dynasty still feel under-developed or non-existant.
There's still no weekly opponent scouting, gameplanning, playable weekly practice, or playable off-season training camp. Choosing faces for custom players and coaches is still awful, with little-to-no customization options. At least there are more than just 2 shirt and pant options for coaches this time! But we still can't change hairstyles, facial hair, or add hats or glasses independent of the character's chosen face. And there's still no options to create female coaches or players (despite the fact that women have played in D-1 college football, and do currently coach, and despite the fact that last year's Madden added a handful of female coach models).
Nagging annoyances
There's also problems that I've started to notice after a year of playing College Football 25, which immediately annoyed me in 26. For example, the recruiting screen doesn't give an indication that all of a recruit's pitch interests have been unlocked, so I don't know when I should switch from "Send the House" to hard or soft-selling specific pitches. I have to go through every single prospect to figure out if I should change up the recruiting action. This feels like it defeats the purpose of this more streamlined, automatic recruiting interface. The U.I. does have a new indication for when a prospect is ready for a visit, but we were already able to filter by that in last year's game, so it's not really giving us anything new that we didn't have before.
Prospects are immediately removed from filtered lists before you can see the result of an action.
And another little annoyance that wasn't fixed is if you filter by "not fully scouted", and you scout that prospect, he is immediately removed from the list before you're even able to look at what the newly-scouted ratings and abilities are. Similarly, if I am filtering by "ready for visit", and I schedule a visit, that prospect is immediately removed from the list, even if I was still planning on doing more recruiting actions with that prospect. Stuff like this could be easily fixed if the U.I. was just programmed to not refresh the list until the filter is changed, the menu is closed, or the user presses some kind of "refresh" button.
And there's also problems from Madden that are replicated in College Football. EA added Formation Subs this year, but, just like in Madden, if you use a custom playbook, the Dynasty Mode's Scheme menu does not allow you to assign that custom playbook as your coach's playbook. This means that you cannot create formation subs for all the formations that are in your playbook, and can only create formation subs for formations from generic playbooks that happen to match the formations in your custom playbook. I guess that's what I get for expecting better from the College Football team.
Formation subs are in Dynasty, but do not work with Custom Playbooks.
The game is loaded with minor, nagging annoyances like this, that really add up.
The new features just don't work
And the addition of not-working formation subs kind of segues into the next major point: many new features of the game just don't work!
Take the aforementioned defensive coaching adjustments. I tried splitting my safeties wide and close in a match against Air Force, with the expectation that they would help against Air Force's pitch option. But when Air Force started burning me on post passes right up the middle (good on the CPU for identifying and exploiting this vulnerability in my defense, I guess?), I tried in vain to reset my safety splits to default. They just wouldn't go back, and any time I called any 2 or 4-deep shell, my safeties continued to use the wide splits and give up big plays up the middle. So I had to just stop calling those and stick entirely to Cover 1 and Cover 3.
Dynasty users can choose to manually spend player XP to progress specific player skills. This is nice, in principle, since the lack of any ability to direct the development of my players was one of my biggest complaints with the game last year. However, this is clearly not how EA wants people to play the game. By default, enabling the ability to manually progress players incurs a 25% XP penalty. Thankfully, EA did have the decency to include an additional slider to modify this penalty, including being able to reduce it all the way to zero, if you want to allow yourself (or everyone in a multiplayer Dynasty) to be able to develop your players as you see fit.
Users can choose which skillsets to upgrade for players in Dynasty.
Furthermore, the game's U.I. is simply not set up for this either. The weekly update screens that normally show recruiting progress, coach XP gains, and pitch changes, does not show player XP or level gains. XP or unspent skill points also do not show up in any sort-able column of the roster screen, so I cannot sort by players who are ready to be manually leveled. There's just nothing anywhere in the U.I. that gives easy access to information about when players are ready to be leveled. If I want to manually level players, then I would have to scroll through my entire roster every single week in order to look for players with unspent skill points who can be manually leveled.
But I gave up on using the manual progression setting because it seems to be completely broken, and players just don't gain any experience at all. Midway through a Dynasty, I changed the setting from automatic progression to manual progression, and noticed that my players stopped gaining XP, and nobody on my team earned any new skill points. So I started a new Dynasty file, with manual progression enabled from the start (with the 25% penalty, just to see how much impact it would have). This time, after about 2 games, my players once again stopped gaining XP.
The game penalizes users for manually progressing players.
Nobody on my entire team gained a single point of XP, let alone any new skill points for almost an entire season! This was despite going through an entire season, winning 10 games, playing in the conference championship and a bowl. Not even the receiver who broke a school receptions record gained any XP.
The only thing that I can think of that might have broken experience gain is that my internet was very spotty while I was simming these Dynasty seasons. That shouldn't matter though, because I was playing a single-player, offline Dynasty. Surely, not having an internet connection doesn't break offline single-player! Right? ... Right?! ...
EA also made a token effort to address another of my long-standing complaints with its game: the lack of a proper Longsnapper positional rating. I've been asking for a Longsnapper rating for years! So imagine my disappointment when I booted up a Dynasty, went to set my depth charts, and found that all my players had a Longsnapper rating of 0. In fact, every player in the entire nation has a Longsnapper rating of 0 in Dynasty mode! Either every player's Longsnapper rating gets reset to 0 when the roster is imported into Dynasty, or the Dynasty U.I. is broken and shows a "0" instead of the actual rating. In any case, I still have no idea who the best Longsnapper on my team is.
If it is the case that the Longsnapper rating is reset to 0, then this rating doesn't seem to actually do anything. I didn't have any problems with botched snaps in Dynasty, despite my Longsnapper's rating showing as "0". I even tried exiting Dynasty, going into Open Practice, and subbing in a player with a 0 Longsnapper rating to test field goals and punts. I ran 25 of each, and they were all executed perfectly. Not as single bad snap, or even a block. I even tried deliberately whiffing on a bunch of extra field goal attempts to see if maybe a really bad whiff by the user might result in a botched snap (which was one of my suggestions for how a Longsnapper rating could be implemented). But no, the snap was perfect, and the kicker just shanked the kick.
Everyone in Dynasty has a Longnsapper rating of 0, which is meaningless anyway.
I'm pretty sure that the same has always been true of the Returner rating that has been in the game for years. Both these special teams ratings seem to be entirely meaningless and superficial, and have no impact whatsoever on gameplay, because EA couldn't care less about simulation football -- let alone simulating special teams.
But even if the Longnsapper rating itself did work, the ratings still feels half implemented. Longsnapper ratings (as meaningless as they are) do not show up when scouting recruits, nor do they appear in any of the skill upgrades for linemen, tight ends, or any other positions. So you can't recruit a dedicated Longsnapper, nor can you develop an existing player into a Longsnapper. Heck, the Longsnapper rating doesn't even appear in the list of ratings when you edit a player's ratings! That's how half-assed and incomplete the implementation of this feature is.
Another new features is the return of a Trophy Room to display all the rivalry, championship, and bowl trophies that you've won throughout the game. But this doesn't work properly either. The game erroneously awards random bowl trophies when playing regular Play Now matches.
Worse yet, the Trophy Room just sucks. It's just a bunch of small, static images of each trophy. There's no 3-D model for you to rotate and zoom on the trophy to get a good look at it. This is despite the fact that there are brief cutscenes of players celebrating with the trophy after the game, which means that EA absolutely has 3-D models for every trophy that they could easily have slapped into a model-viewer. But they couldn't be bothered. And even though the trophy screen shows which profile, Dynasty save file, and game mode that you played to win the trophy, it does not include final scores or box scores (or difficulty level) -- and it definitely does not save highlight clips or screenshots from the game, or anything cool like that. You know, the kind of stuff that NCAA Football used to do, 20 years ago, on the PS2, with its "Instant Classics" feature.
Trophy Room is bugged, and only shows small, static images of the trophies.
And old features don't work either
But the real kicker, for me, is that this game is also full of old features and mechanics that just don't work anymore either. It only took 1 year for EA to find ways to break legacy code.
The absolute worst broken feature, and the single thing that comes closest to making me not want to play the game at all, is how broken the Custom Playbooks are. Custom Playbooks have always had problems in Madden and in last year's College Football game. But this year, it just flat-out doesn't work.
I spent hours adding plays and rating play-call scenarios for a custom playbook, only to find that the game apparently completely ignores my custom play-calling preferences. Regardless of what plays I've added to the playbook, and how I've rated them for any given scenario, the play-call screen only gives me a handful of [shitty] plays from the base playbook. This bug makes playing the game with a custom playbook almost impossible, since there simply isn't enough time to sort through formations and plays to find the play that you want, unless you absolutely know your entire playbook by heart.
I spent hours making a custom playbook and gameplan, only to discover my gameplan is ignored anyway.
And honestly, I shouldn't have to spend hours each year creating the same (or very similar) custom playbooks every year. Why can't I just import my Custom Playbooks from last year? The playbooks just don't change enough on a year-to-year basis to warrant having to rebuild an entire playbook and gameplan from scratch every year.
Surprisingly, gameplay is something that feels like it took steps backwards. Yeah, the launch of College Football 25 had a lot of problems with defensive pursuit that lead to way too many explosive runs. This was eventually fixed and tuned to feel much better. But EA decided to double-down and dramatically over-tune defensive pursuit to make running the ball feel almost impossible in 26. Linebackers and safeties react instantly to runs, and fill the gaps before the QB has even handed the ball off, rapidly shed blocks, and pursue laterally with ridiculous speed and efficiency. There's just no room at all to run, and defenses all feel like they have 12 or 13 players on the field against the run, all of whom feel like they have 99 speed.
Running the ball is exceptionally difficult.
This problem is especially frustrating because there is nothing that the user can do to relieve this problem. There are no sliders for Run Pursuit or Run Reaction Time. Increasing the Run Blocking slider doesn't make much difference because it's the unblocked players at the 2nd and 3rd levels who are causing the problems here. Lowering defensive Tackle sliders seems to help a little bit, but it also leads to too many breakaway plays due to broken tackles. As someone who loves to pound the rock, if running the ball in a football game does not feel good, that is always a deal-breaker -- and running the ball in College Football 26 does not feel good.
One upgrade that I really like is that the user can now flick the right stick up after contact to make the ball-carrier attempt to reach out for extra yardage. This is an upgrade over a similar feature that was introduced into Madden a few years ago (and promptly removed a year or 2 after). In Madden, this happened automatically, without any user input. In College Football 26, the user has to actually trigger this with a control input, and there's a risk / reward element, since it increases the risk of a fumble. Thus, there's a new strategic element to this feature that wasn't included in the failed Madden implementation, which shows clear signs of EA learning small lessons from its past failures.
The user can flick the right stick to reach for extra yardage, at the risk of fumbling.
I do wish this mechanic were mapped to a button other than the right stick though, since I have years of muscle-memory that have trained me to flick the right stick at the moment of contact in order to try to trigger the "truck" animation and cause my player to fall forward. In past games, there was no reason not to do this, but now, if my stick flick is slightly too late, I risk unnecessarily reaching the ball out and possibly fumbling. It's not really the fault of College Football 26 that past Madden games taught me bad habits. I'll just have to try to un-train this behavior.
There's also still far too many interceptions that are the result of offensive receivers being completely unwilling to come back for the ball or to jump up to high point a ball that should be contested, but which is a clean pick by the defense. Calling Cover 2 still feels like an invitation for the opposing QB to burn your defense with a deep pass, even though real life Cover 2 is specifically designed to stop downfield passes. Calling Play Action is still an invitation to get sacked. And so forth.
There's other, annoying problems that really hurt the appeal of this game for a simulation player. The CPU is frustratingly resistant to subbing in its backups in blowouts, which is something that is far more important to do this year due to players now having a "Season Health Bar" and a "Career Health Bar". Taking Wear & Tear (or worse yet: an actual injury) during garbage time now cuts into a player's seasonal and career longevity, making it harder for a player to finish a season or to stay healthy for the rest of their career.
CPU won't sub in backups during blowouts, incurring unnecessary injuries to starters.
This game is more of a blowout than it looks, because the CPU had just scored back-to-back TDs vs my backups.
More generally, the new Season and Career Health Bars do not seem to be tuned for 15-minute quarters. Despite the extensive customization options for Wear & Tear, there are no settings to tune how quickly these health bars deplete. It's impossible for a running back to make it through an entire season with how quickly their health bars deplete (unless maybe he has the "Workhorse" trait). Despite operating with a 3-back rotation, my main running back was down to about a third of his season health bar only halfway through our schedule. However, defensive players rarely fall below 80 or 90% on either bar. I'm not sure how (or if it's even possible) to tune the sliders so that running backs deplete their health slower, while defenders deplete their health faster.
I also experienced a lot of performance problems with the game. There was some occasional frame stuttering in last year's game, but I'm seeing frame drops happening consistently after the ball is snapped, during no-huddle situations, and in a few other scenarios. Dealing with an opponent's no-huddle was hard enough without having to deal with frame and input drops.
Seriously, why isn't there a dedicated Gameplanning scenario for dealing with the No-Huddle in the Custom Playbooks?
There's also a lot of weird problems with pre-play adjustments and U.I.. Zooming out to view overlays like Wear & Tear, Composure, and blocking assignments seems to trigger some pre-play audible or hot route animations that lock me out of snapping the ball. Flipping plays during away games seems to create weird delays in which everyone stands around for a few seconds before casually moving to the new alignment. This often results in a Delay of Game, but if it doesn't, it always ends up being a False Start. So you just cannot flip plays in away games. It doesn't matter how "loud" the stadium is; you just aren't allowed to do it without a False Start.
Flipping a play at the LoS always seems to incur a False Start in away games.
Tackle for loss
And all these problems are when the game is actually working, which is not often. This game frequently crashes or stutters. Worse yet, it apparently crashes elements of the PS5's underlying operating system, including background processes such as gameplay recording and streaming functionality. And because PS5 background processes crash while playing this game, when the game crashes, there's no way for the user to report the crash or submit recordings. I'm assuming that EA is aware of the issue, but it sure as heck didn't come from any crash reports from me, because I was never able to report a crash. I can't even close the game or exit back out to the PS5's main menu!
This game causes the PS5 OS
and background processes to crash.
At one point, the game crashed so hard that I couldn't even force restart the PS5 using the power button on the console! I had to un-plug the console from power in order to restart it, and then wait for a database restore. I just hope this doesn't permanently damage my console. I've never seen a PS4 or PS5 game crash the underlying OS. This is absolutely inexcuseable! And since College Football doesn't have in-match saves, I can't even restore and progress my Dynasty. This problem single-handedly renders College Football 26 entirely unplayable.
When all is said and done, College Football 26 just does not feel good to play. The on-field action is jankier than last year, with consistent framerate drops. There's still a lot of stuff that is missing from the game, and the stuff that is here often just doesn't work. It's just awful. And to be clear: this is not just a simple matter of the game not feeling like it has improved enough. College Football 26 legitimately feels worse than College Football 25.