Over the years we have continued to add more and more team-specific plays, formations, audibles, and the like, but one of the biggest things that we hadn't nailed was that the CPU teams didn’t play the same way that they do in real life. For example, when you were playing against the Vikings they wouldn’t utilize RB Adrian Peterson enough and would quickly abandon the run for the pass. Knowing that well over half of our audience plays offline games exclusively (mostly in Franchise mode), this year we made it a point to concentrate on getting teams to call plays that focus on their best players (while still differentiating team playbooks with unique team specific formations and plays). For some teams like the Vikings and the Falcons, that may be through the running game, while others like the Patriots and Saints, you obviously expect them to air it out a lot more.
To accomplish this, we used our Play Designer tool to totally re-vamp the "AI Groups" to change the way the CPU calls their plays. An "AI Group" is basically the same exact concept of a bucket of plays a team takes into the game geared around game situations. These situations include all the normal football situations like 1st and 10, 2nd Short/Medium/Long, 3rd and Short/Medium/Long, 4th and Short/Medium/Long, Goal Line, and many others. The AI Groups also cover all the “Special” situations like Special Teams plays, QB Kneel Downs, Conserve time (No-Huddle plays), Waste Time (when CPU is ahead and tries to run the clock out), and Hail Mary calls. In previous years, you'd see a much more generic smattering of plays in an AI Group - many of them would be balanced right down the middle between run and pass across all plays. The Head Coach 09 team did some great work and added some deeper support to tag exact plays and the percentages they should be run per situation. We zeroed out all of our previous situational numbers and started from scratch - making sure the CPU picked from a more team-specific subset of plays (no reason to have all those generic HB Dive plays in there if teams don't run them often).
Let's pick the Vikings for example. After researching the Vikings by watching all 16 regular season games, we found that out of 440 total first down plays, 271 (62%) were runs. With that in mind we really wanted to emphasize that the Vikings like to run the ball on first down and with arguably the best back in the league getting the ball, who can blame them! We set the Overall Run percentage in Madden NFL 10 to that exact number. Of the 271 run plays, 64 runs were outside (22%). So 78% of the time in Madden NFL 10, you can expect the Vikings to be bringing it downhill right into your face.