Madden 23 Patch #3 Review and Community Feedback

[ChaseB]

Last Thursday, EA Sports released a highly anticipated Patch #3 for Madden 23, and fans worldwide...

Written By: Josh Houtz

Click here to view the article.

[ChaseB]

And a big thanks to everyone contributing in the original Patch Notes thread

[CCRolly]

Up until this patch I was one of the very fortunate ones where I could access everything with no issues. After this patch, I can't get into almost any of the Challenges, keep getting the error pop-up. Beyond frustated.

[BadAssHskr]

What is Madden if it doesn't accurately represent what we see on the field on Sundays?

Madden needs to scrap it all and just be MUT, Competitive mode, and Franchise. They should all play Exactly the same.

Whatever happens in Madden when you select to play Competitive or MUT should still represent actual NFL football, and if selecting those modes flips a switch that shuts off penalties, injuries, and what ever else cheese these guys prefer to play with is just fine wiht me.

NFL football needs to be the heart of the game, period. Features need to work. Stats need to be saved. The draft has to be playable.

I feel like M23 does a great job on the field. If it's not great, in my opinion it's about as good as its ever really been at least of recent.

What i'm saying here, NFL Football has to be the heart and soul of the game. The gimmicks they keep throwing at it need to go, make an arcade game or whatever.

Franchise
Competitive
MUT

I cannot for the life of me understand how someone can pick up madden, want to play Competitive, a competitive Money game, yet not understand that the rules physics, etc of football are all the same.

Get on with it already EA.

And one other thing, if you're not going to make your week to week game start deal work, just get rid of it!

All that said, I'm playing a single person cloud franchise, I'm going to sim the draft, force myself to create yet another story line for for my franchise, and just hope I can continue playing multiple seasons. Never mind the fact I won't be able to build the team I'm wanting to build because i'm afraid to get stuck in the draft loop, and the better option is to keep playing rather than throwing it all away.

[Hooe]

I personally have a high tolerance level for dumb things happening in sports video games at various levels and strive to find workarounds to keep the game enjoyable for me year-round. However, I draw a hard line at bugs which impact my ability to make sustained progress through the game.

The Madden community has thrown the word "game killer" around a bunch over the years at issues of varying level of severity, the various complaints ranging from the totally legitimate to utterly ridiculous. I submit that there are at least four actual "game killer" bugs in Madden NFL 23 (which are all called out in this article but I repeat here for brevity):

• Cloud Franchise mode draft infinite loop
• Offline Franchise mode save data corruption after several years
• Ultimate Team progress resets of various flavors (ex. Field Pass progress rewinding, Monster Maker account locks, general progression rewinding)
• Face Of The Franchise not playable past one season

Literally every major mode on offer in Madden 23 except The Yard has a major progression-blocking issue. The actual lost progress I have endured recently with my online Franchise, and the threat of lost progress looming over any potential future time investment into the game, has absolutely destroyed any patience I usually offer Madden every year.

Tiburon has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of the many Madden NFL early adopters who run online leagues, create Franchise vlogs, stream MUT pack openings, or otherwise promote for free a game they otherwise want to enjoy. On the field, I actually find that Madden 23 is a joy to play, but the major issues surrounding every major gameplay mode has me considering putting it on the shelf for good. If my progress in the game isn't going to be maintained, why do I even bother?

I really hope that this fundamental issue of rebuilding trust between players and the game's ability to reliably save and load progress is something that media outlets - such as Operation Sports, Sports Gamers Online, and whoever else writes about sports video games with laser focus - hammers Tiburon about in Madden 24 and EA Sports College Football preview media access next year. I need to know that these upcoming football games are at the very least going to respect my time if I'm going to play them at all.

[lions2k9]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

I personally have a high tolerance level for dumb things happening in sports video games at various levels and strive to find workarounds to keep the game enjoyable for me year-round. However, I draw a hard line at bugs which impact my ability to make sustained progress through the game. The Madden community has thrown the word "game killer" around a bunch over the years at issues of varying level of severity, the various complaints ranging from the totally legitimate to utterly ridiculous. I submit that there are at least four actual "game killer" bugs in Madden NFL 23 (which are all called out in this article but I repeat here for brevity): Cloud Franchise mode draft infinite loop Offline Franchise mode save data corruption after several years Ultimate Team progress resets of various flavors (ex. Field Pass progress rewinding, Monster Maker account locks, general progression rewinding) Face Of The Franchise not playable past one season Literally every major mode on offer in Madden 23 except The Yard has a major progression-blocking issue. The actual lost progress I have endured recently with my online Franchise, and the threat of lost progress looming over any potential future time investment into the game, has absolutely destroyed any patience I usually offer Madden every year. Tiburon has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of the many Madden NFL early adopters who run online leagues, create Franchise vlogs, stream MUT pack openings, or otherwise promote for free a game they otherwise want to enjoy. On the field, I actually find that Madden 23 is a joy to play, but the major issues surrounding every major gameplay mode has me considering putting it on the shelf for good. If my progress in the game isn't going to be maintained, why do I even bother? I really hope that this fundamental issue of rebuilding trust between players and the game's ability to reliably save and load progress is something that media outlets - such as Operation Sports, Sports Gamers Online, and whoever else writes about sports video games with laser focus - hammers Tiburon about in Madden 24 and EA Sports College Football preview media access next year. I need to know that these upcoming football games are at the very least going to respect my time if I'm going to play them at all.

Well said.

[Rayzaa]

Looks like another year of Madden, another year of endless patches to fix the endless screwups by the devs.
YAWN...another year of not giving them my money.

Heck soon I'll be too old to be playing video games so C' Mon EA, get it together.
Ah who am I kidding asking that!

[Vmascarello]

This game and company is an absolute joke.

They tell people it's fixed and it's clearly not. I sunk hours and hours into Franchise mode only for it to corrupt out of nowhere just when I was really starting to get engaged with it.

The 'shot callers' must have never played a Franchise game in their lives for them to torture all of their customers by having them sink their valuable time into this mode only for it to continue to corrupt for everyone out of nowhere.

They must not realize this whole Madden fanbase was built on people that play Franchise mode. Way before MUT was a thing. The people that spent money on this product were Franchise mode people.

And they still have not even developed the features we had in 2005. And if you can get passed that and enjoy it in spite of that, you get a corrupted file unexpectedly.

This is a joke and I'm officially done. I'll find other stuff to play. I tried to wait it out but it's clear that they do not care about this section of their customer base.