The Broncos' Defense Dominated Super Bowl 50, But Can't in Madden

[Hooe]

To put an exclamation point on Roadman quoting my post and my longtime frustration with this invalid criticism of sports games that keeps coming up:

At a paltry 122 MB, Undertale won at least seven 2015 Game Of The Year awards.

Video game disc footprint literally is not correlated with video game total-package quality at all. Period. The end.

[bcruise]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

To put an exclamation point on Roadman quoting my post and my longtime frustration with this invalid criticism of sports games that keeps coming up: At a paltry 122 MB, Undertale won at least seven 2015 Game Of The Year awards. Video game disc footprint literally is not correlated with video game total-package quality at all. Period. The end.

Or for something "closer to home" on a sports gaming site, Rocket League is only 5 1/2 GB. 1/5 the size of Madden, and it was in the running for several OS awards this past year.

[Hooe]

To speak to the article Chase wrote - while things like formation substitutions, defensive matchup assignments, defensive strategy adjustments, pre-play coverage shell changes (as opposed to disguised coverages baked into play calls like what Madden 16 does; this functionality is probably my favorite gameplay feature from APF 2K8), and tiered play calling would all definitely be nice to have, no single one of them - heck even none of them in combination - will mean much once the ball snaps if the AI defenders aren't actually thinking like real NFL defenders do.

Madden's defenders have no concept of gaps, gap integrity, or run fits in run defense. Zone coverages in Madden all have defenders basically dropping to spots and not making any attempt to read receiver route combinations. I actually disagree with Chase about man defense; in my experience I've actually found 2 Man Under to be a pretty effective defense in Madden, particularly with press coverage; perhaps too effective. That said there's probably things Tiburon could do from a technique standpoint to clean up man coverage to make it more authentic as well.

Until the in-game behavior of defense changes, IMO one could have all the defensive adjustments in the world and it's just not going to matter, these exploits will keep popping up.

To be clear, I say all this and I've had a blast with Madden 16; to me it's obviously a better game than any of its predecessors, but I still think it's fair to say that it has a ways to go to get where we all want it to be. As it gets better, expectations will get higher.

[SilverBullet19]

Defensive assignments was something that I loved in the 2k series. Its been so long, I forgot it was ever even offered. Its sad madden doesn't have it at this point.

[khaliib]

The first thing that must happen is that EA must move away from the "football" being the main, if not only, determinate that drives/dictates what plays out during a play.

Everything (Procedural Awareness) seems to be driven by the current location or desired end result of the football.

Example:
Instead of the Zone Coverage rating representing some form of AI Awareness of a players zone cover responsibility, it dictates how "quickly" a defensive player will react to the ball leaving the QB hand and run directly to the balls ending path-line, to animate out the end result of it being knocked down or INT'd.

This is the tandem animation that plays out even when the defensive players are on opposite sides of the field.

The offensive player doesn't drive a defensive players positioning/reaction to his zone being violated as he should, but the football location while behind the LOS (pocket vs rollout) then as the QB releases the ball, defensive players slide/shift to the path-line.

The ugliness of this is really seen when defensive players running with their back to the LOS are able to keep a perfect relationship to the WR every time as they are linked to meet at the end path of the ball.

This runs true for all other aspects of gameplay also.
- line play
- special teams
- tackling
- etc....

Currently, the football has everything "tethered" to it and until Procederal Awareness is redone to focus a little more on the players, getting the AI to utilize concepts to be more adaptive will continue to be problematic to say the least.

Not even the Camera Views can seem to escape this issue!!! (Broadcast view especially)

[Gridiron]

Quote: Originally Posted by X_isBringingSexyBack

Compression is one thing, but content still plays a part no matter what because you can only compress so much until it's detrimental to stability. The content itself is still going to show through a weight regardless, and at 19.78 gigs, that's still much lower than one would expect. It should also be pointed out that all of EA's sports games have smaller install sizes than SCEA's and 2K's, and one can make a case that the respective sports games of those other labels all contain more content than Madden. But I'm less concerned with that than I am with the AI issues particularly on the offensive line which to me gives the defense a lot of cheap successes by simply missing painfully obvious assignments and responsibilities, consistently.

Best point made here on this yo, and factual. Everything else is just background noise. Its not about quality that was never the point. Its about CONTENT, and some games have more than others, simple as that. I have no idea what some of these other posts are talkin about...

[razorkaos]

I agree 100% with the article.



But i don't think EA is unable to provide us a better, more "sim" gameplay: They just don't want to.



See, if this was an article about FIFA, it would still be true. I don't play NHL for more than 15 years, but i would bet it does have the same defensive problems.



These games are pro-offense by design. Defense is and always was left behind, mostly because most people prefer playing offense instead of defense. In both games, Madden and FIFA, this is a true statement.



These games are made for the masses, not for us. These games are made to appeal to an audience that doesn't like or even understand these sports: They just want to play with whatever team is the highest rated at the moment (which, for some reason, even have their weaknesses lessened for the game), spam the same 2-3 plays all game long and score a surreal amount of points/goals before the game ends.



So that's why i don't even have hopes of getting a product that really reflects what we see every sunday. They won't deliver, cause they don't need to. Their target audience doesn't care about this, they won't ask for these changes to be made, and as a result, we will still be a vocal minority that keeps asking for something they won't deliver.



I stopped buying FIFA for this reason, and I'll probably not buy Madden again for a long time. They don't make the game i want, i don't buy the game i don't want, case closed.

[Gridiron]

Quote: Originally Posted by razorkaos

I agree 100% with the article. But i don't think EA is unable to provide us a better, more "sim" gameplay: They just don't want to. See, if this was an article about FIFA, it would still be true. I don't play NHL for more than 15 years, but i would bet it does have the same defensive problems. These games are pro-offense by design. Defense is and always was left behind, mostly because most people prefer playing offense instead of defense. In both games, Madden and FIFA, this is a true statement. These games are made for the masses, not for us. These games are made to appeal to an audience that doesn't like or even understand these sports: They just want to play with whatever team is the highest rated at the moment (which, for some reason, even have their weaknesses lessened for the game), spam the same 2-3 plays all game long and score a surreal amount of points/goals before the game ends. So that's why i don't even have hopes of getting a product that really reflects what we see every sunday. They won't deliver, cause they don't need to. Their target audience doesn't care about this, they won't ask for these changes to be made, and as a result, we will still be a vocal minority that keeps asking for something they won't deliver. I stopped buying FIFA for this reason, and I'll probably not buy Madden again for a long time. They don't make the game i want, i don't buy the game i don't want, case closed.

I feel you, but Pro Football is pro offense. The fact that two teams with strong defenses made the Super Bowl doesnt change that, player. NFL teams rack up mad yards and points, QBs throw for a ton of yards. If the game was largely defensive it wouldnt actually be realistic at all.

The AI is the big issue on both sides of the ball in this game though. That and all the visual problems are the things they should be addressing but all they seem to care about is MUT, Draft Champions, and whatever the media complains about because they listen to the media more than their fans. I see them on Twitter telling people that they know their game is good because of Metacritic, and thats a joke because the top media sources that register a score on MC are made up of reviewers who are mostly casual fans of football and dont even notice all of these problems or even understand them.

They had one reviewer from IGN saying Madden was too realistic! He was dead serious too! And this is who Tiburon chooses to measure the games quality by??? Unreal.