Madden NFL 18: Blocking Blog

[DeuceDouglas]

EA Sports released a new blog today discussing the retooling of how Madden handles blocking schemes...

Written By: Chris Sanner

Click here to view the article.

[DeuceDouglas]

By far the best blog yet. Absolutely love this:

Quote:

Offensive Line Unit Awareness In addition to new pass protection tools, another common ask is about offensive line chemistry and awareness as a unit. In Madden 18, the aggregate awareness of the whole O-line will now impact their ability to recognize and pick up blitzes. The higher the average awareness rating of the offensive line as a unit, the better they will be at recognizing and reacting to blitzes that come up over the course of a game, including the always tough zone blitz schemes our players like to create by dropping defensive linemen into coverage while bringing heat off the edge. This feature starts to activate when the average awareness score of the five offensive linemen reaches 80. The ability to recognize blitzes scales. An 80-rated O-line will be able recognize heat about five percent of the time, whereas an O-line averaging 97 or higher in awareness will recognize the pressure on almost every single pass play. But there’s a catch. Any offensive lineman will tell you that the unit is only as good as it’s center. Thus, the Center’s awareness rating counts 2X relative to everybody else, and his rating will modify the total average up or down by replacing the AWR rating of the lowest rated lineman in the unit. If you want your O-line to play together and recognize those heaters in protection, you’re going to want to make sure you have that critical cog in the middle who can get his linemates on the same page. This extends to running backs when in protection. While not being calculated as part of the O-line’s AWR score, any pass blocking RB will have the same ability to recognize a blitz and react to it faster as his awareness score increases. The unit awareness in Madden 18 will make it critical to pay up for the AWR rating in MUT Salary Cap, keep your O-line strong in MUT Ranked and MUT Draft, and to stay on top of AWR progression in Franchise mode or suffer the consequences of having a unit that is not on the same page when picking up blitzes.

Actually making AWR matter is great and changes the way you have to progress players in franchise. Hope they do this a lot more with other positions and especially QB's.

[T4VERTS]

Quote: Originally Posted by DeuceDouglas

By far the best blog yet. Absolutely love this: Actually making AWR matter is great and changes the way you have to progress players in franchise. Hope they do this a lot more with other positions and especially QB's.

Agree completely, this is the kind of detail we are looking for. The awareness average across the line is a great first step towards "chemistry" of units for CFM. Many have wanted this for a long time, and hopefully this moves to other position groups like secondary, WR/QB, etc. I think making the Centers account for more of the average was a nice touch to emphasis the position.

Overall these sound like great additions!

[Hova57]

Maybe I'm getting too hyped but last couple of blogs to me adds so much the CFM experience. Really forcing building complete teams and progressing all players not just certain ones

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[SageInfinite]

Blog is full of good stuff. I wonder why they didn't mention being able to tackle while engaged in a block?

[deu22ces]

Agree, very nice blog. Sounds great. Also reads like someone with more of a football acumen wrote it. The others so far haven't. (sounds like Clint maybe wrote it since it's his specialty, but didn't see actual author credit given)

The trench is THE most important fundamental level in football; throws everything else off if it's not solid. I really hope we're getting to a nice foundation here that will start bringing it all together finally.

[BleedGreen710]

Wow that was incredible, they knocked this one out of the park. My excitement for the game just went up a lot! The average awareness of the offensive line and pass blocking backs mechanic is my favorite part of this. I want awareness to be a crucial rating and with this and the new awareness function of wide receivers reacting to contact I'm really liking the direction they're going.

[Dj_MyTime]

This and the Madden ''Love'' letter was the information I'd been holding out on. Adding draft boards to CFM, and emphasizing awareness, along with improved game-play IMO are easily considered as CFM upgrades as it changes the player progression dynamic.

Prior to all XP could be allocated towards PBK/RBK/IBL and traits for ''disciplined'' on young OL that had cheap XP costs and low awareness with little issue.

Now, you have to rethink that allocation all together in CFM, vets will once again be viable if for just the awareness alone with avg/good ability in pass protection.

This is great news!