OS: Yeah, I saw it’s more of a speed-bidding system this year for free agency. When you take part in this, is it more of a player-by-player thing where a clock starts for one player and then later on a timer starts for the next player?

Looman: Basically the way it works is that you go into a screen and every single free agent is listed there, and as soon as you press start and begin things, other teams start bidding on players. The timers start for the best players first, and they’re a little shorter than the timers for the [lower-rated] players. What you do from there is go down the list of guys, and if there is any guy that you want to increase the bid on and take the lead on, you just press a button on the player and that increases the bid.

There’s also a filter you can go to, so if you just want to look at the guys you have bid on so far, you can switch the filter to keep track of just those guys and then just watch those guys. And as teams are trying to outbid you, you can continue to increase the bid, and eventually CPU teams will give up near the end of the timer. At that point, you will have to decide if you want to spend more money than you expected to or just give up the player. Then once the timers on those players have run out and all the players have been bid on by other teams, you’ll go to the contract-signing phase. And that’s actually different this year, and it’s only different in free agency because once you finish and you go to that signing screen, you get to choose between a couple of different contract options. One would be back loaded, one would be flat across the board, and you can choose to sign that player to whatever type of contract you want. After that, it’s all over.

The thought process behind the new free agency this year was to make it faster paced, more interactive and a lot more fun. Last year’s feature got a little tedious at times, and it would even take a long time to simulate through it. We just wanted to make it quick, fun and really sort of make you make quick decisions as you targeted guys against the other CPU teams.

OS: Does it take out a lot of the negotiation process? Is it more basically meeting the demands or not now?

Looman: Yeah, that’s basically it. I mean you’re still negotiating when re-signing players or any other times you’re signing a guy to a contract. In free agency, I guess you could say the negotiation occurred during the bidding, so a guy definitely got what he wanted if not more than he was probably expecting. Once you get past that point, it’s more just about how the contract works out.

OS: Will certain players still not want to sign with you like in past Madden games because of certain criteria, or will players just go where the best money is now?

Looman: Everybody goes where the best money is. We talked about adding something back in because last year’s system had a little bit of that. The problem was it just was never really that clear when you would go to sign somebody. When you went to sign somebody, it just looked like they weren’t interested in signing with you, but if you offered them enough money they would eventually be interested. It was just tedious. As I’m sure you know, and all the guys on OS know, you had to toggle up the contract amount by an extra seven or eight million sort of like a guessing game. Then you would check and see if the player was interested yet. And if he wasn’t, then you had to toggle the contract amount up some more.

Eventually, we’d like to get something in there where players refuse to sign with you or something like that, but we have to be really careful when we do that and make sure it’s very clear why something like that is happening so it doesn’t frustrate the user. So if they desperately need a corner and Asomugha is sitting there in free agency, only some users just cannot sign him, they need to know exactly why and figure it out.

OS: Are there team-building stages in Franchise mode now? To be clear, will some teams play the veteran who is slightly better while chasing a Super Bowl, while another rebuilding team will play the rookie with the higher potential even though he may have a lower rating than some veteran?

Looman: Well, we added a lot of different things in there that sort of combine to create that type of effect I guess you could say. We added the player roles back in, which was a feature we had during the last generation. A lot of those roles affect the logic in the game. So if you have a guy on the team who has the role of “quarterback of the future,” a team won’t go into free agency or select a QB early in the draft because they’re trying to build around that QB.

We also rewrote all of our re-sign logic, and we added new logic that we haven’t had before, such as “cut dead weight” logic in the offseason. And what happens then is teams will go through the roster player by player and evaluate how they need to go forward. I think my example was that last year if the Redskins signed Donovan McNabb to a seven-year deal, our logic would make him stay on the team for seven years; they would never consider cutting him, and he would be there until 2017 as the quarterback of the Redskins. This year, what they’ll do is take a look at the talent on the roster, and they’ll factor in the fact that they could probably draft a guy early in the draft or potentially sign a free agent to replace a guy like McNabb, and so they’ll just cut McNabb at that point. They do sort of execute a lot more intelligently to build for the future, so yeah there’s a lot of that stuff in there that makes them a lot smarter.

OS: You mentioned the reintroduction of player roles, can you talk a little bit about how they change from year to year or why they change from year to year in the offseason?

Looman: Each role has criteria for a player earning or losing it, and it’s specific to that role. There will be some players we will be setting up initially in the default rosters to have roles; we can do that just like we set ratings. So for a guy like Peyton Manning or Tom Brady, we can set those guys to have the “franchise quarterback” role. Then once we get into the offseason, we completely re-evaluate those roles, and we check that criteria and determine based on a combination of ratings and different season stats if they get to keep that role or new players earn it.

One of the really cool roles we added this year -- we added like a handful, probably five or six new roles we never had in the last generation -- is the “playoff performer” role. This role is actually earned by the guys who have a great playoff run in your franchise. So if Tom Brady throws for 400 yards in both playoff games and the Super Bowl, and he doesn’t have the playoff-performer role already, once you get to the offseason he’ll earn that role, and the next year if you make the playoffs again, he’ll play better than he normally does. The majority of these roles do have an in-game impact, and a lot of them are very similar to what they were last generation [but they still have these interesting impacts].

There’s another one called the “shutdown corner” role, and that role on the field actually impacts the corner himself. It also impacts the defensive line -- makes them a little bit better because they know there’s a guy on an island out there who can handle himself so they get more pressure on the QB -- and it also impacts the receiver he’s covering and the opposing quarterback. It’s not a massive impact where the opposing QB won’t be able to complete a pass, but if he throws the shutdown corner’s way his accuracy will drop a little bit. So the roles have a real tangible impact in game; I think there are 25 of them like the playoff performer, including other new ones like the "trench warrior" role for guards, centers and defensive tackles.

OS: I was a little confused about how the rookie ratings will work this year because it seems like there will be unknown ratings for rookies now in Franchise mode. So will you know all of Cam Newton’s ratings at the start of your franchise this year, but you won’t necessarily know the ratings for the players you draft in 2012 and beyond?

Looman: Okay that’s a great question because that kind of leads into the expanded rosters and cut dates feature. So the way that gameplay mechanic works is that when you start the preseason, the first year any rookies that are on your roster, all of their ratings are going to be hidden in Week 1. So, naturally, if you want to go out to the main menu and look at Cam Newton’s ratings you can do that.

OS: Okay, so you can’t technically hide them completely I guess, but you can hide them in Franchise mode still? Of course, people can still just go out to the main menu of the game and just look up every rating for every rookie on his or her team, but I guess that's a necessary evil.

Looman: Yeah, we talked about hiding them completely, but it seemed excessive. We hide rookie ratings Week 1 in preseason. Every week that guy stays on the roster, we unlock a chunk of ratings and his overall becomes a little clearer. So initially you’re going to think a guy’s overall might be a 99. Then we’ll unlock speed, agility, throwing power maybe. Then the next week, that will bring his overall down to let’s say an 89. So you’re getting a clearer picture at that point.

But the majority of the feature is designed for future years. Basically, the way it’s going to work is, let’s say throughout year one you’re scouting a handful of players -- 25 or so guys. You’re unlocking ratings on these guys, you know a lot about the guys you really like. You get to the draft and you have the 15th pick, and you’re sort of targeting a QB that you think is going to go around 20. You get into the draft and teams start picking, and a guy that was projected to go fifth overall falls all the way to you. Now, because you didn’t expect him to get to you, and you thought he’d be gone by then, you didn’t really scout him much.

Still, you draft him at 15 and sign him, only you’re still not going to know what his ratings are. You get into the preseason, and you’re only going to have unlocked at that point what you’ve scouted so far. So if you have completely scouted a guy, when you get to the preseason you’ll have all his ratings unlocked. With the unscouted guy, you’re going to have to go through the four week preseason process to unlock his ratings.

OS: So I know you guys are keeping “dynamic player progression” somewhat under wraps until around E3, but can you talk about how it affects Franchise mode at least?

Looman: Yeah, dynamic player performance as a whole is a gigantic new feature for the whole game, but I can talk about the aspect that is exclusive only to Franchise mode. There are going to be two new traits that sort of define how this all works. And I know when people first read about it they’re going to think this is not that big of a deal, but it really does change Franchise mode more than any other feature we have ever added to it, so it’s really a huge deal. There’s two traits, confidence and consistency, that play a huge part in Franchise mode now.

Players are going to be rated anywhere between one of four levels of consistency. So Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are going to be at the highlest level of consistency. Guys like Cutler or Tarvaris Jackson -- guys you never know what’s going to happen with when you turn on a game basically -- will not be as consistent. So week to week, depending on their performance last week, their confidence is going to be updated. Let’s say Cutler throws for 400 yards, three touchdowns and has the highest confidence, when you get to the next game he is going to have a huge ratings swing.

Now, let’s say in our default rosters he is an 85 overall. If his confidence is really high, his ratings could go up to a 90 or a 92. If he has a bad game the week before, his rating could drop down to a 75 or a 73. The key thing to remember about this is that, regardless of whether they are hot or cold, every player’s ratings no matter the confidence level will change every single week. You could have a week where your starting corner is three points less in overall than he was the week before, while the corner opposite is two points higher. You know, the cool thing is that when we talked with the marketing team about this on how to present this, I think the tagline I said was “any given Sunday” because every game you play you are going to have a guy who is having a bad day. He might be struggling a little bit while another guy is playing better than expected, so every franchise game feels different than the game before.

So it really sort of lends itself to the strategy of drafting guys and signing free agents because it’s really up to you if you want to decide to draft an 80 overall guy that is really consistent, which means basically every single game you’ll get the same guy -- he could be a 79 or an 81, but he’ll typically be around 80. Or do you want to go out on a limb and sign or draft a guy who is really inconsistent, but has the ability to have a wide range of ratings and swings. So he could start as a 70, but you may get the 80 guy or you may get the 60 guy. Either way, we try to really be careful that the ratings swings don’t break the game. We kept our eye on the most inconsistent guys on a cold streak because we wanted to make sure you could still play the game with them, and really make sure it’s not so drastic you can’t complete a pass. But we also wanted to make sure it is noticeable so that if you’re playing with a Cutler, you don’t know what’s going to happen every week. You go into that week, you could get the good Cutler or the bad Cutler.