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Key Areas of Improvement For Madden: Part V
  Submitted on: 12/10/2007 by Chris Sanner

We are now 1/20 of a century mark away in our quest to fix Madden. At this rate, we might make it all the way to Part 100 with all of the suggestions we have been getting! Here is the second part to my gameplay section. I am going to add YOUR thoughts in my next couple of articles so be sure to add your comments on here or on our forums.

  • So now that we've got the blocking fixed...what about the running game? I'm glad I asked myself this question because this is a part of Madden that really needs to be looked at. When you add in better tackles and a better blocking game you are already making the running game 100% better. When you add in animations such as broken arm tackles, trip ups, and the like you are starting to see a running game that is really starting to look good. What I'd like to see added to the running game outside of new animations is perhaps better representation of a running back's style. Right now we're doing pretty good in this department but I think we should definitely see it tuned a bit more.

    A final thought on this topic, when a guy breaks a 20 yard play in the NFL it is an exciting play..meaning it doesn't happen all that often. On the higher difficulties you should be really excited you took 1/5 of a football field in your favor when you make the plays. So hence, I think that by improving the basics this could easily happen.
  • Penalties..where art thou? I don't know if the reasoning behind this has to be the user would feel cheated by the computer if they had a game with tons of penalties called but it's just part of football. You should easily incorporate the possibility of a holding call with how good a blocking rating is. Pass interference could be handled the same way, as well as how it is called. Most times interference isn't called because players running into each other is a randomized event or a flukish thing. What I'd really like to see is the penalties called in a realistic fashion (most times there are 10-14 penalties a game at least) and in Madden they should be just as frequent.
  • Accelerated Clock-This is a small thing but I'd like to see something done such as what is done with NHL with 15:00 running of the clock at varying speeds. Or maybe just running the play clock down to a certain amount like Madden has done before. Either way it just makes the game feel more realistic and is a small but awesome touch.
  • Half Tackles, Half Sacks- With a better tackling system this is something that should go hand in hand with it. There's really nothing else to be said about this but once again "it's in the game."
  • Defensive Schemes- The defensive schemes in Madden definitely need work. We need to get away from specific plays and go more to schemes. Wouldn't it be cool to assign assignments to guys in custom plays and set an overall philosophy? And better yet, if we had a D. Coordinator hired we could easily have them bring in a philosophy and we'd have a certain set of plays we could call off of that. Just little things like that would go a long way towards Making Madden just grand.