Schedules and Announcers. Big time realism. - dougdeuce's Blog

dougdeuce's Blog

Schedules and Announcers. Big time realism.

Posted on May 20, 2009 at 07:44 PM.

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I haven't been this excited for a madden in my whole life! all the new things going into this game are getting me pretty excited. There are a few details though, that I think could really make this game amazing that have been missing from previous generations.

Schedule Generator (Monday Night Logic)

Every year I take the reign of the Green Bay Packers and put some serious hurt on my opponents. I get to the playoffs, storm through them, win a Super Bowl and what do I get? One Sunday night game the following year! I look down the league schedule and the 2-14 Raiders have 2 Monday night games.

This is not right. There should be more logic in who get the prime time games.

That being said...

Flex Schedule

The Sunday night game of the week now employs a "Flex Schedule" whereby the most intriguing match up of the week (within the guidelines) gets bumped into prime time. I understand that there may be some NBC rights issue, but this should be in the game. I would love to be 10 -2 and facing a 9-3 Vikings team and have the game understand whats at stake and give us the Sunday night game

Rivalry games

As of now each team has 3 rivals. Since I play as the Packers, my 3 rivals are the Bears, Lions and Vikings. These are my divisional opponents.. Of course they are my rivals, and deservedly so. The problem is that the NFL is more interesting than that. During the late 90's my Packers had a temporary rivalry with the 49ers and Cowboys because of all the big time games we played against each other. Now when the Pack plays the 49ers today, I don't think of that rivalry as still existing, but when Steve Young was their QB he and Brett used to air it out, and there was definitely a hyped emotion about those games.

This being said, I think that there should be room for rivalries that come about during our franchise.

If I play against the Panthers in the NFC championship game and it goes down to the wire, then play them in the regular season the next year and it goes down to the wire, and then face them again in the playoffs, there should be even more emotion to that game than there would be under normal circumstances. This matchup should take on a "temporary" rivalry.

Implementation: I believe that aside from your "Divisional rivals" you should have 3 slots open for a rotational "temporary rivals"
This way there would be more emphasis on how our individual franchises had a life of their own. MUCH GREATER REPLAY VALUE!!!

This feature would be AMAZING if implemented into Madden. Probably difficult to do though.

Play call assist

Look, I love John Madden, but he's not part of my organization and I'm sure the NFL rules committee would come down on me pretty hard for soliciting play calling advice from Madden during the game.

I have assistant coaches on my team, please remove the ask Madden feature and simply replace it with Ask Coordinator / Coach, and have their individual play calling characteristics come into play. If I'm playing against the Steelers, I think LeBeau is going to blitz fairly frequently, and I think his CPU counterpart should as well.
I want more of an emphasis on the people within my organization, and less on the face of this game... Still love the man though!

Announcers

Take a page from MLB 2k9's "Zero stitch" commentary system. They implement the technique of placing the players name into the dialogue, not just before or after. It's one of the few things that game does decently, but it's by no means perfect. It's just the best example I can think of (i'm a 360 owner so you PS3 people out there might have an even better example than me)

Also I think they should be more aware of season long achievments, (tangent - just not LAST SEASONS ACHIEVEMENTS! Game one of every season after the first "Thats his 60th catch of the season, boy 60 catches says a lot about a player BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!" Save it for when he gets there Collinsworth.)
I would like to hear more commentary about players approaching milestones. A few years ago I would take Favre past the 420 Marino mark and didn't get the attention I felt he deserved. I think when you get within 10 (whatever stat) of a Career Record or maybe 5 of a season record, the announcers should start talking about it, not exclusively the record breaking play.
"and with that Touchdown Manning inches one closer to Favre's career passing touchdown record, needing only seven more to take his place in history."
This would add a nice touch to the game

That's all for now, this post is getting WAY too long.
What do you guys think?

Comments

# 1 njd.aitken @ May 20

Would love to see the announcers take more into account for upcoming milestones. Lance Berkman started this year with 288 homeruns, and in my MLB09: The Show franchise the announcers would talk about how he was "only 7 homeruns away from 300", "and with that Berkman has 298 homeruns on his career", that sort of stuff. It really gets you into the game.