Yes, that's all true. 100%. But for a football game especially, and I and Clint actually had a short talk on Twitter about this, it's hard for a person with football knowledge at the level a pro player like Clint does to be able to make a programmer who may not have that knowledge understand all of the nuances that a pro player is aware of to be able to play the position properly no matter how it's explained. The split-second decision making that has to be made with a level of knowledge of what to do in that moment is tough to translate from the mind of a pro football player to a programmer who doesn't have that knowledge. And some of it isn't even fundamental, it can be inherent to that player and that player does it a certain way because it somehow works for him.
And believe me, I'm not saying this issue is only with this development because this an issue that has to be dealt with in any development. I get that. But what makes me question what the focus is for this sort of thing with this team is when even basic football fundamentals are glossed over. I remember I was talking to Clint about the glaring issues with QB mechanics and running fundamentals and he just dismissed it as being too minor. That says to me that it may not just be an issue of programming--which we can both agree on--and that it may be an issue of development focus.
Granted, what they focus on internally often has to have differences to what we're focusing on externally, but I just want to see minor quality gaps addressed like QB mechanics or ball carrying fundamentals before they attempt going after the big ones; I want to see that they can get the basic things corrected before I can have faith that they can tackle the bigger issues. And this was my contention back in late 2010 when they started mentioning work on RTP at the office. I asked Ian "Why would you guys even consider that before addressing the core animation issues", and he was like "Man, there is a lot of buzz about real-time physics since Natural Motion made it a thing, so we need to get out in front of it" and then he proceeded to make a series of jokes about Backbreaker, but whatever... I was highly against it because I knew it was essentially throwing something new on top of something flawed, and we see how that turned out, and to make it worse it wasn't cheap and there was a ton of development focus given to it. What could've been accomplished had that focus been on cleaning up and correcting the mountain of animation issues the game has been carrying since Madden 06 (with some of those animations still in the game)? I have to believe it would be in a much better position than it is now.
Agreed.