Madden NFL 25 Gameplay Roundtable (UTC)

[Danimal]

Quote: Originally Posted by roadman

Now that is an honest assement of where things stand. Nice find.

People are entitled to read and listen to anyone's opinions they wish and I don't know Corey at all so this isn't directed at him.

I didn't even know about this site existed until last week but considering who the founder is and how he behaved here last year. I'll personally have a hard time considering information posted their unbiased.

[Smoke6]

Quote: Originally Posted by NikeBlitz

This. Overall, very good read. EA has their feedback, let's see how this turns out ...

Quote:

Buckeye: Ball Hawk is still in the game which is horrible news for every realism based player. Being able to hold a single button and have a defender (yes even a defensive tackle) run into position and make an over the shoulder interception is a very bad thing. The probability boost of getting an interception by using Ball Hawk is crazy, from my personal experience its nearly 100%. We cannot have a realistic football game as long as things like this are there. At best we can hope for an “On/Off” toggle in CCM and other modes. Hopefully they can get it in there since I bring it up every time I talk to the dev team. Honestly MANY of us have brought this to them as an issue. we all need to FIGHT to have these things eliminated. At the very least make them be lower skill level only. Once you get to All-Pro or All-Madden they are unable to be used. I will say it now, if you use Ball Hawk… you are a chump.

I am not pleased about the part I bolded, it doesnt make sense to basically have a "focus group" of guys give their honest feedback only to see them get shunned while trying to help improve the game and check off one more complaint on the list for good reason. I wish Tiburon would understand that know one catches every pass thrown to them on either side of the ball and ballhawk is a feature that really has to go along with a few other things but this mind frame so far doesnt bode well for me.

But good read fellas and some enlighten stuff for me to think about these next few months. Game goes gold soon and im actually tired of "patch city" out of the gates with this game.

[Smoke6]

Quote: Originally Posted by Only1LT

Madden has always been behind in animations to it's competitors. It had worse animations than Joe Montana. Worse animations than Gameday. Worse than 2K. Worse than... well there isn't anything for it to be worse than now, but if there was, I can assure you it would be. The same goes for it's basketball games, tennis games, Baseball games.. let's just put it out there, EA Sports in general has a very bad track record for animation tech. And player models, but's that's a whole other can of worms. I have no idea how, because none of the others have anywhere near the resources put into Mo-Cap that EA does. Last gen animations at the very least did not suffer the OBVIOUS hitching in rendering that the current gen does, but that, in and of itself, doesn't make them realistic. It's just bizarre. They use state of the art motion capture to capture movement. What exactly is their technology and or process that it comes out looking the way that it does? I seriously can't see how it would be possible for a mo-cap actor to run hunched over like that without falling over unless he was in a wire harness... Maybe I'm onto something lol.

Not buying into this mo-cap stuff at all, EA just needs to suck it up and grab that natural motion engine and run from their. Its something that shoulda been done along time ago and since the Madden name holds soo much more weight, that engine and game gets lil to no shine and thats sad.

I dont care how early in production this game footage was in at the time, I still have a hard time understanding why they're not building on existing code with tweaks and updates to its features but instead goes full on re-write every cycle?

[roadman]

Quote: Originally Posted by Danimal

People are entitled to read and listen to anyone's opinions they wish and I don't know Corey at all so this isn't directed at him. I didn't even know about this site existed until last week but considering who the founder is and how he behaved here last year. I'll personally have a hard time considering information posted their unbiased.

I understand what you are saying and I agree with that.

There are some out of those listed that I will pay more attention to.

[Only1LT]

Quote: Originally Posted by Smoke6

Not buying into this mo-cap stuff at all, EA just needs to suck it up and grab that natural motion engine and run from their. Its something that shoulda been done along time ago and since the Madden name holds soo much more weight, that engine and game gets lil to no shine and thats sad.

I would have loved to have seen this happen.

Not to get too far into comparing the two, but I think that Euphoria in BackBreaker had a ton of more potential than the Infinity Engine. And before anyone gives me the obligatory post about how buggy BB was, I agree, it was. IE was buggy too though. The difference is that everyone, for some reason, is OK with giving Tiburon as much time as they need to get IE perfected, but Natural Motion had to get it right the very first time and they didn't even have any kind of budget.

I can only imagine the kind of Football game that could have been produced from all that potential of Euphoria, if it were handled by a team that actually knew the first thing about American Football.

/rant.

[Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Only1LT

Madden has always been behind in animations to it's competitors.

Predictably, I disagree with this statement as a blanket fact.

In particular, anyone I ever played football games with on Gen-6 consoles (PS2/XBOX) preferred Madden to other football games from an animation perspective because it was perceived as more fluid and less jerky, notably when the ballcarrier was running. The technology before that point wasn't good enough for any game to have "good" animation or for there to be any useful comparison, IMO.

[Only1LT]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

Predictably, I disagree with this statement as a blanket fact. In particular, anyone I ever played football games with on Gen-6 consoles (PS2/XBOX) preferred Madden to other football games from an animation perspective because it was perceived as more fluid and less jerky, notably when the ballcarrier was running. The technology before that point wasn't good enough for any game to have "good" animation or for there to be any useful comparison, IMO.

Not sure why you said "predictably", but maybe there is some background to this that I'm not aware of.

In any case, not sure how anyone can look at PS2/XBOX Madden and say that it animated well, let alone animated better than that of it's NFL 2K counterpart, so I guess all I can say is, ok lol.

As for the point that past generations can't be judged because they were too primitive? I don't get that. 8bit graphics are terrible in retrospect, but that doesn't mean that there aren't 8bit games that look better than others.

Graphics and animations can be, and should be, up for comparisons to games from that same era, regardless of when they were made. I can't see any circumstance where this would not be the case.

[Trick13]

Quote: Originally Posted by Only1LT

In any case, not sure how anyone can look at PS2/XBOX Madden and say that it animated well...

In terms of "moves" most of the PS2 era games were bad, but as far as running animations - just running straight - PS2 Madden05-07 are still far and away smoother and more anatomically correct - guys on those games don't look like they are trying to race to the port-a-potty - all hunched over like Quasimodo and such.

I don't remember which Madden for sure but a PS2 Madden had a pretty good realistic body lean when turning - only problem was no foot-planting.
You can disagree all you want but the running animations for every game we have seen this gen are terrible, especially when you look back at 05-07 Madden on PS2.