Losing NCAA Football hurts, but that loss can be mitigated by an excellent Madden.

There is no need to start this off with a lie…

The end of the NCAA Football franchise hurts.

People continually blasted the game with criticism after criticism, but negatives tend to speak louder than positives, especially in our genre. Most people weren’t fooled though: we were playing a pretty good college football game every year.

Instead of having the ability to transition into the next generation of consoles, NCAA Football has to hang up the cleats. At this point, there is some serious concern as to if there will ever be another college football game on the market again.

The O’Bannon lawsuit’s settlement has made it clear that the risks of making a college game in general significantly outweigh any kind of reward for developers at the moment. If there will be another college football game, then don’t expect it to come around for a number of years.

NCAA Football is no more, but EA Sports has an amazing opportunity.

A number of customers are likely to be lost who bought just NCAA Football, but EA Sports now has the opportunity to win a number of new fans over to Madden. There is no better way for the company to do so than to make Madden absolutely amazing in every facet on next-generation consoles.

Everything from the budget to former employees are at EA Sports’ disposal.

The company won’t devote all of NCAA Football’s development budget toward Madden, but EA Sports would be a fool not to throw at least a modest upgrade of money and talent at its fellow football game. Though more money won’t equal more time, the extra funding could be used to increase the number of developers on Madden’s staff.

Madden has already stated that its new Ignite engine will be able to pull different animations and actions from other EA Sports games. This won’t directly affect both NCAA Football and Madden, but it shows how the company is beginning to share ideas among different franchises.

Now’s the time to start sharing its resources and people.

Let’s take a look at how Madden can improve with NCAA Football’s departure.

Getting a good customization suite in Madden would give fans a way to potentially get some NCAA action.

Customization

The NCAA Football team sounded like they might have been doing something special in regard to customization before they were abruptly dismantled.

Owen Good’s article for Kotaku said that the team was working on being able to customize everything from teams and colors to stadiums. This seems familiar, but it sounds like they were doing it in a game-changing way. (Please excuse the accidental pun.)

In the past, NCAA Football has had Teambuilder and Madden has gone with Madden Share. While Madden Share isn’t bad, it doesn’t revolutionize anything in terms of customization.

If the NCAA Football team was truly working on being able to customize certain aspects of the game in a way that hasn’t been done before, then it would be ridiculous for Madden to not jump at the opportunity of being able to do something similar.

Sometimes it only takes an idea. An idea to spark something greater than what is seen as ordinary or normal. Perhaps NCAA Football’s ideas for customization will end up being implemented into Madden at some point down the road.

It would certainly be a step in the right direction.

Adding a college senior mode into a career mode would be a great way to add some depth as well.

Depth

This might get a bit abstract for a second, but hear me out.

NCAA Football’s Road to Glory mode allowed the player to compete in a full high-school season before accepting a scholarship to college. This feature started out relatively shallow, but eventually allowed the player to customize the schedule and edit who was on his high school roster. If they wanted to go into tedious detail, the player could create something similar to one of
their years playing high-school football.

How does this apply to Madden?

Imagine having the ability to play out a senior year in college before getting drafted into the NFL. EA Sports doesn’t have the rights to the names or likeness’ of specific universities anymore, but it would only be a matter of time before players created teams pretty close to their real-life counterparts.

If EA Sports gave people the tools to share those teams with others (Teambuilder anyone?) then Madden would have a miniature college universe associated within its career mode.

Now, this is only one of many ways that Madden could integrate parts of the NCAA into its game. For example, Madden could even use the NCAA’s new playoff system as a part of the career mode changes listed above if they wanted to.

Having a development cycle that only lasts for a year definitely hurts the amount of work that could be added to any one game. A large jump in depth would have to come over the stretch of multiple years.

The end result could be pretty special if Madden’s development team took enough time with it.

Giving players more options, like a coordinator cam, would be highly welcome.

Options

Say what you will about NCAA Football 14 and its occasionally unbalanced gameplay, but you can’t tell anyone that the addition of camera options wasn’t more than welcomed.

The coordinator camera allowed for a view of the entire field from a top-down perspective. It was a great new camera angle that allowed the player to see the game in a different way.

As much as I respect the Madden franchise and what they did with Madden 25, its decision to bring the camera out then zoom in as the play takes place was a poor one. The worst part is that the development team had an easy way for fans to not get mad and reject the change.

They just needed to have Madden 13’s camera as an option, and give the player the choice of which one they wanted.

It’s all about options, options, options and Madden has done a poor job of giving the player the tools to tailor the game toward how they want it.

While we’re talking about camera angles, can anybody on Madden’s staff say something about a custom camera? I might be an optimist, but I’m still holding out hope for this option to one day take place. EA Sports’ NHL series has a perfect one. It doesn’t seem like it would be too hard to bring over to the football field.

Would the addition of some of NCAA Football’s staff bring all of these changes? Probably not. If they did, then it would probably take quite a while to accomplish.

The point is that bringing in more minds to work on the Madden franchise will only lead to more options.

It’s something that everyone will benefit from.

At the end of the day: We get Madden, and that has to be good enough.

It’s Up to EA Sports Now

NCAA Football’s departure will be felt for years to come. A new college football season always tends to make people want to play a college football game.

Unfortunately, we no longer have one to play.

We must now rely on Madden to quench our football thirsts. This means that Madden can’t simply do its best to slowly improve year after year.

It’s time for Madden to start improving drastically.

EA Sports made the decision to end one of its highly regarded football franchises. Now it’s their turn to make the other one exceptional.