The Selfish Blog- What Would Make Madden 10 Nirvana For Me - adembroski's Blog

adembroski's Blog

The Selfish Blog- What Would Make Madden 10 Nirvana For Me

Posted on March 13, 2009 at 06:17 AM.

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Idle thoughts, wanders, and my own personal wish list. In generalities, of course. What I'm doing is taking Madden 09, adding what we know about Madden 10, and then decided what else I want to see to make it everything I hope Madden 10 is. It doesn't have to live up to all of this for me to buy it, but if it did, I'd hang a poster of Ian Cummings on my wall right between the Irish and American flags.

** Game Play

First and foremost is always game play. Without solid game play, everything else is a waste of disk space. If I wanted to sim 30 years of franchise mode, I'd be playing Front Office Football. So lets cover a few game play elements first.

The most important aspect of football is the trenches, and this is an area where nobody- no, not even 2K Sports- has ever come close to getting it right. On a purely physical level, the types of interactions I see on the football field need to be reflected in Madden. Hook blocks, double teams, traps, zone blocking, man blocking, pocket protection, moving pockets, everything. Do I expect all of that in one year? No, moving pockets is probably a complex AI routine that I can live without for a season, but double teams are important, and proper traps are fundamental to the running game. Overall, what I want to see is Madden lines have the toolbox that NFL lines have.

And defenders need to be able to counter this. I need 350lb tackles to be able to take on a double team and hold his ground, or bust up run plays in the backfield if the opponent doesn't respect his ability to do so. I want to see coordinated stunts and aimed rushes. I want to see ends setting up moves and then feinting them.

I really want to see the branching animation system applied to defensive line moves. I want to be able to come off the right end looking like hooking the tackle, but then club back inside for the sack.

To build on that, I want to see the defensive AI work as a coordinated team, not a gang of individuals all bent on punishing the ball carrier. Corners need to hold containment, linemen need to eat up blockers, and linebackers need to check and flow. This is simplistic, it's basic HS defense 101, but it'd be a start... just to see the defense play the run as a team.

That combined with the other game play improvements already announced for Madden 10 would make the game on the field something to get truly excited for. Now onto the extras.

** Franchise mode

Franchise mode- real simple here, folks... clone NFL Head Coach. That's right, damn near every bit of it. The draft, the media aspect, the method of signing coaches, the salary cap management, player personalities, live events, real time (or "turn based" day-by-day where everything resolves when you advance, which would make for a better online system), and most importantly team road maps.

Yes, team road maps. It didn't mean all that much to the player, to be honest, as he made his own decisions. But it was the fundamental backbone of brilliant CPU AI. The computer, other than a few bonehead trades during the draft (rare, but the head scratchers happened), was astonishingly intelligent, yet made mistakes in a way that made them seem human. This was because of the team road map combined with how the ratings system worked, with each team assigning an overall based on its personal preferences at each position, and the evaluation skill of its coaches. Potential was an unknown unless he was on your team, and even then it could have been flat wrong if your GM wasn't good at evaluating a player's potential.

The simple use of the team road maps concept would improve the single player franchise to an immeasurable degree.

Two other very important elements make up franchise mode. Player progression and generated/imported drafts.

Even if NFL Head Coach doesn't get copied and pasted over Madden's horrendous franchise mode, bringing in the basic concepts of progression from Head Coach would help. While I'm not a fan of performance dictating improvement, I don't mind, so much, the way it's handled in Head Coach.

Each rating itself (SPD, AWR, AGI, etc.) has it's own potential. How quickly it improves is based on two major factors- performance is one, yes, but the other is coaching. The fact that the player has a predisposed potential, and it requires the right choices by you, as the head of the organization, to bring about that potential, is one of the brilliant aspects of Head Coach, and should be brought over.

The Drafts themselves can ruin a franchise mode. I've never been a fan of importing NCAA draft classes simply because the classes are so ridiculously unbalanced and deep. I'm going to get an instant pro bowler in the first 3 rounds if I let my cat make the picks for me. What fun is that? Imported draft classes can't have flat penalties to ratings- the class needs to be re-calculated to run the gambit from potential hall-of-famer to training camp cut victim.

** Presentation

Third on my list of priorities is presentation and atmosphere. I don't bring this aspect up as much as I do game play and franchise mode, to be sure, but that's not because I don't care. 2K Sports has certainly taught me the value of great presentation, and it's a lesson EA needs to learn.

First and foremost is crowd noise. The sound itself is pitiful. A crowd of 30,000 in Madden sounds more like a crowd of 250,000 15 miles away. It's not cheering, it's just static. If the crowd dies down, their intensity doesn't change, just the distance they seem to be away from the stadium. Volume changes, pitch doesn't. I don't hear that collective "YEA---" as a player seems to be about to break out on a long one. I don't hear the excitement turn to disappointment when the play the fans see doesn't quite materialize. Maybe it's just me, but crowd noise is the most important aspect of atmosphere in a football game.

** Options

Finally, options. I need to be able to customize my game. I'll be honest, I almost turned on Ian last fall. I'd defended him to the hilt at MM and caught a lot of heat for it. I don't regret it, but for a brief moment last fall, when I learned there would be no CPU sliders in Madden 09, I almost broke. I almost joined the dark side. I was angry, confused, lonely, and frightened. Well, maybe just angry and confused.

Give me back my CPU sliders, and add more! We've got game speed and speed differential... great start. How about pursuit angles? Arm strength differential, passing range, fatigue rate, injury severity... everything you can tune, let us tune, that's basically what I'm asking. Give us the tools, we'll make the game what we want it to be.

So that's it. I don't think I'm asking much, am I?

Comments

# 1 Coach3K @ Mar 13

Great comments - I agree with just about everything! I'm a huge fan of Head Coach, even though it can be really overwhelming at first. I think some kind of port from that to franchise mode would be the best thing to happen to Madden since franchise mode itself!

I made some comments that kind of bleed over into this on the progression post you made the other day.

I think a lot of us gamers know what we want...it's just a matter of getting the product out of EA. Sadly, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.