Kodos
07-29-2004, 03:27 PM
Link. (http://www.maddenwishlist.com/editorials/madden2005.php)
Hands-on Madden 2005 Info -- 7/28/2004
Thanks to EA's Madden Community Leader program, the Madden Wishlist received a copy of Madden 2005 today. I'm going to try to post info as often as possible, but obviously I'm interested in playing. :-) I do plan to update this at least once a day, and I'll include timestamps to let you know when I wrote the update. You can go to the most recent update by clicking here.
If you have questions for me, I'll do my best to answer them. You can send them using this form.
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First post: 7/28, 6:00pm
So far I've mainly just been playing franchise mode. Later tonight I plan to re-run some gameplay tests, such as player speeds, QB accuracy slider affecting throwing power, player sizes, deep throwing percentages, blocking sliders affecting holding penalties, bump and run, etc.
So, I simmed through a season just to get to the offseason, and for the most part I was pleasantly surprised.
First is player retirements, pretty standard from last year. I didn't see anywhere to talk a guy out of retirement (ESPN has this feature, for what it's worth) but I wasn't particularly looking for it at the time either.
The added step this year is Restricted Free Agents, which comes after player retirements. RFA's are somewhat true to NFL form, with a couple of key differences. In the first stage of the process, you tender an offer to your player -- it can be one of three values. Depending on your choice of tender level, you'll get something different in return if another team signs your player. If you offer the lowest tender, then the compensation is a pick in the round that player was drafted in. The middle tender will get you a first round pick if another team signs the guy, and the highest tender gets you a first and a third. The tender amounts *do* increase in each year of franchise mode -- nice attention to detail on Tiburon's part. You are NOT able to offer a contract besides the one year offer, which is somewhat realistic, since most players at that stage aren't interested in longer contracts because they want to test unrestricted free agency the year after that.
After a minute or so, the CPU teams decide which of their players they want to tender offers. On those players that are given tenders, you can make a contract offer. (If they aren't tendered an offer, they become free agents, and you can make offers on them -- after the draft, of course.) But here's where the system breaks down, pretty severely. The problem is that players will take literally any offer you give them -- even if the amount you offer is less than their RFA tender from their current team. And, the current team -- or any other for that matter -- can't outbid you. So, once you make an offer, that's it -- he's yours. I'm assuming this applies to your own RFA's as well -- that you can't outbid any offers -- though to this point no other team has taken one of my players.
CPU teams seem slightly unintelligent about which RFA's they sign. One team took another team's 90 rated FB, and if I remember correctly, he had the high tender on him -- or at least the middle tender. And a first round draft pick is way too much to be giving up for any FB. I'll have to look into this more though.
After RFA's comes "resign free agents". It's essentially the same as last year, but morale plays a small role now. If you give a guy a low contract offer, his morale will drop. But this isn't implemented terribly well, since you have to make literally 20-30 offers before it has an appreciable change to his morale, even if those offers are ridiculously low. Remember, the Patriots pissed off Ty Law this Spring with just a single weak contract offer -- and it wasn't even all that weak of a deal, either. After those 20-30 bad offers, the guy's morale will be so low that he'll refuse to resign. It's not perfect, but it's at least a step in the right direction though.
Morale doesn't seem to play much of a role to start negotiations off, since so far for me, all players have had their morale at least 80% or so -- I've only seen one exception to that so far. That's fairly disappointing, since most players in real life will probably at least want to test free agency.
Furthermore, contract negotiations are made even easier by an "interest meter". So, when it comes down to it, you really don't have to worry about suffering hits to player morale, since you just put the contract at a value that he finds acceptable before you make the offer. So, the interest meter really removes any challenging aspect of negotiations that were added by the morale considerations. There should at least have been an option to remove this thing. Luckily a piece of paper covering the upper left corner of your monitor should probably suffice. (It's worth noting that ESPN has this feature as well -- negotiations are about the same in both games, in fact.)
Franchise tags were also added, which just amounts to paying the player a ton of money for one year. You can NOT adjust the "load" of the contract -- contracts are all back-loaded as they were in 2004.
So, in the end, contract negotiations took one step forward, and one step back. It's not any more challenging than 2004 was. For 2006, they need to get rid of the "interest meter" altogether (or, again, at least make it optional), also have morale be lower to start negotiations (prompting some players to want to test free agency from the start), and make morale take a bigger hit depending on the contract offer. It's disappointing, because clearly the technology is all there for them to do this, it's just a matter of tweaking some parameters.
Ok, so that was all a bit of bad news. Get ready to be happier though.
The draft in Madden this year is awesome. Simply awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I'm hesitant to write about it, since it's probably better that you realize it in all its glory for yourself. So, to that end, I'm throwing in a lot of white space after this paragraph, and also when I'm done discussing the draft, so you can skip this section if you want. But, I'll say this much: If you're a franchise player, Madden 2005 is worth having for the draft alone. Simple enough?
Ok, so I guess you decided to read about the draft. Don't say I didn't warn you.
First comes draft scouting, which is pretty much the same as last year. They did add "Top 5" and "Top Ten" designations though, which is a great touch. It's wonderfully implemented also, since those top guys, of course, don't necessarily go in the top. In the one draft I did, I saw one "Top Ten" guy fall to #22 -- Kenechi Udeze, anyone?
Next comes the draft. There are three speeds to the draft, and you can easily toggle between them with L2/R2 (perhaps too easily, in fact, since an accidental bump of the R2 button starts the draft on high speed). "Fast" is like last year's draft, everything just goes whizzing by. On "Medium", there are about 10 seconds between each pick, which lets you determine if you want to trade up or not. On "Slow" there are about 30 seconds between picks, giving you even more time to look around. You can effectively pause the draft by going to look at your rosters or by trying to work a trade.
While each team is "on the clock", you can scout who they're likely to pick using the right analog stick to scroll through information. It tells you what their team needs are at 2-3 positions, and also gives you the top 5 players they're likely to pick. They don't always pick from that bunch, though they usually do, and they don't always pick the top guy. Again, fantastic implementation. When it's your turn to pick, a draft advisor will tell you which player s/he thinks you should take.
As you probably already know, the CPU does trade during the draft. This is also fairly well implemented. There aren't too many trades, in fact, in the draft I did there were only two. But this is fairly realistic. Draft pick compensation from RFA's facilitates the trading process a bit, since two low 1st rounders are about equal to a upper-middle 1st rounder. So far I haven't had any trades offered to me, but as I said I've only done one draft. When a CPU trade happens, it notifies you by popping up a box on the screen.
The problem with having a dearth of players at WR and HB in later rounds seems to be completely solved in Madden 2005, which is tremendous. You don't have a huge run at WR and HB in the first round anymore, even though the number of players is about the same. After the draft is over, the game assigns "draft grades" for each team to tell you how they did in the draft, though the implementation here was not very good, since every team gets a grade between A+ and A- -- apparently grade inflation has found its way into Madden. The human teams do not have a draft timer (ESPN does have this feature), but there is a draft ticker like you see on ESPN the network during the real NFL draft, telling you who's been picked, and which teams have picks coming up.
All in all the draft was completely redone and it's truly fantastic. That said, it's not perfect.
First, a minor complaint -- the draft pick order is not correct; it's the same as it was in 2004. Here's what the draft order should be. Second, CPU teams seem much, much, much smarter about drafting based on need, but there are still some anomalies. The Lions had the top pick in the draft and took a QB despite having Joey Harrington (82 OVR, 24 years old or so) as their starter -- though to their credit, the guy they picked came out an 84 OVR or so.
Third, a more serious problem -- draft trading is still too easy. After simulating a few seasons, the Browns gave me the 6th overall pick for Drew Brees, rated 89 OVR and 31 years old. Also, in trading picks for picks, vertical trading is favored -- it's too easy to move up, but not easy enough to move down. I was able to snag the #1 overall pick for the 19th overall pick, the 19th pick in the 2nd round, and the 6th pick in the 3rd round. That's quite bad. Tiburon needs to look into using a more realistic draft pick trade value chart in Madden to rectify this problem. Any NFL GM who traded away the top pick for the garbage listed above would be unemployed at the end of April.
Finally, though the listing of speculative draft picks is terrific, I wish they'd have let us see the speculative picks for the next 3-4 teams making selections. Realistically speaking, if a team ahead of you is interested in a player you also want, they probably aren't going to trade down so you can move up and take him. You would probably have to trade with a team that's a spot or two higher than the team that's going to take your guy. But, this is another minor complaint.
After the draft you sign your picks, like in 2004. Not much change here, but you can not sort columns anymore to see who's your best overall, fastest, etc. Nice cheat in 2004, gone in 2005. ;-)
All in all the draft is really amazing in Madden 2005. As I said, not perfect, but still very, very well done.
Free agency comes after the draft again. Of course, most of us don't like it this way, but it is what it is. As advertised though, free agency is much harder this year. In my first free agency attempt, I was in need of an LE, and Michael Strahan came up in the lists, so I decided to target him heavily. I put in an initial bid, and after the first day passed, three other teams put in offers that exceeded mine -- not necessarily in terms of money, but more so in terms of team prestige and other factors. In fact, they overwhelmed me so much that no amount of money would sway him and I was forced to look elsewhere right off the bat. Fantastic! Player personalities really play a substantial role here, and at least at first glance, free agency was done very well this year. Kudos!
That pretty much covers the off-season. There were a few other franchise mode features of interest that I noted. In particular:
It doesn't look like you can turn off owner mode this year, which pissed me off. That said, I haven't touched any owner mode settings at all and it doesn't seem to have mattered much -- the CPU management is making me money and I'm nowhere near in jeopardy of losing my franchise.
Roster requirements are a lot looser this year. There's a minimum number of players you need, and then a minimum number of active players that you need, so guys on IR or guys holding out (which, by the way, I haven't seen any of yet, which is a bit distressing) do count somewhat toward roster requirements. The numbers are also lower in several categories -- you only need two QB's, 4 CB's, 4 WR's, etc.
CPU teams appear to play a bit tighter to the cap this year than last, but they still have lots of open space.
Cap penalty logic is still wrong -- if you cut a guy during the season in the last year of his contract, you take the cap penalty on THAT year's cap, NOT next year's as it happens in Madden 2004/2005.
And finally there are a few other points too major to get buried in a bullet point.
Progression is a lot different this year -- I have yet to get a handle on it fully. Players don't progress much at all at the end of the season, and instead progress during the season. You don't really see guys bottoming out anymore if they aren't starters -- at least at the WR and HB positions this is true, where the problems were largest last year. In general there seems to be a lot less movement in the ratings. Then again, Drew Brees did get up to an 89 on my franchise. The problem of certain positions exhibiting rating inflation (LB, FS, SS) and others exhibiting rating deflation (HB in particular) seem to have been worked on and perhaps solved. I've simmed through 7 seasons to check for this, and so far so good. I'll keep you all posted on that.
The Radio Show is actually nicely done -- better than I expected. It's actually somewhat entertaining, and hasn't realy annoyed me yet. :-) I can't really say the same for ESPN's Sportscenter and Halftime shows -- they don't add much to the game after you've seen them a few times. Bruno's show runs for about 5 minute segments between weeks, and comes on automatically. So, with 30 hours of recorded time, you can probably play for a good five seasons of franchise mode without hearing a repeat -- and after that, you probably wouldn't remember it from the first time anyway.
Lastly, I hate to end on a bad note, but this issue was too huge not to emphasize. Despite my better efforts at persuading the Tiburon staff otherwise, the cap space took a huge step backward this year. Last year the cap increased in the first few years by 10%, 9%, 9%, 8%, 8%, and 5% every year afterward. This year it's appalling -- 18%, 18%, 16%, 10%, 8%, 4% -- after that I haven't tested it yet. The real life cap increases at about 6% each year. It's possible though that contract values increase a lot more than they did in year's past, so I should check that out before getting all worked up over this. Here's a table that gives the cap values in Madden 2004, Madden 2005, and in real life:
Year Madden 2004 Madden 2005 Real Life (6%)
2005 88.55 95.00 85.33
2006 96.52 112.09 90.45
2007 105.21 130.02 95.88
2008 113.62 143.02 101.63
2009 122.71 154.47 107.72
2010 128.85 160.65 114.19
Perhaps a good note: ESPN's cap is arguably more screwed up -- it only increases by about 1% each year.
Ok, that's all for now.
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7/29, 7:00am
Just a few notes to start off the day.
I simmed through another first season, trying to pay particular attention to the e-mail part of Storyline Central. I still didn't really get any disgruntled players -- maybe Green Bay is just a great place to play, who knows. The e-mail system is fairly good. It's not anything spectacular, but it's a nice interface for finding out about your team.
Simmers will be happy to know that injuries in simulated games are about the same as last year. I have yet to find out how injuries in games are, though Tiburon say it's unchanged from last year.
A few things about franchise mode that I forgot to mention yesterday:
CPU teams are much more active in free agency during the pre-season this year, though not as active as in ESPN.
2nd day picks in the draft are essentially worthless as far as trade value, which is not quite realistic. I tried to move up 4-5 spots in the 2nd round by throwing in my 4th round pick, and nobody would take it, even though the trade value chart says that's a good trade.
While other teams are picking their players, you're not able to see your scouting notes from the main drafting interface. You have to stop the draft, go out to the main draft menu, and choose a special interface for looking at the draft results from the draft scouting. This whole process could be a lot cleaner and more user-friendly.
You can change the length of a contract offer in free agency, i.e., if some team bids on a guy first, you can offer him a longer or shorter contract on a subsequent bid, which you couldn't really do in 2004.
So far I've only seen picks for picks draft trades, no picks for players.
I started testing game play a bit more as well. Here are a few things I noticed:
Player speeds are the same as last year. I'm not too happy about that, but I expected it.
As a result, in my initial testing, it seems that sweeps and tosses were about as useless as last year. I didn't test counters yet, but my guess is it's no better. Rhetorical question to EA and Tiburon staff: How can you expect a blocking play to work when the blockers are too slow to get to their assignments? This problem isn't going to go away until you guys -- at least in an optional menu -- fix the player speeds. I'm going to test this more, and try to do a more rigorous comparison to 2004, but don't expect much from the outside running game this year.
The coverage audible behavior from 2004 was retained in addition to the player-specific coverage audibles, which is really good. So, you can still press ALL your DB's with two button presses like last year, or you can press your guys individually. Very nice -- I was worried that they may have taken that out.
I tested bump and run a little bit. It does seem that size plays a bigger role this year, but not much of one. In fact, bump and run results seem almost random this year. But, that said, that's a huge step up from last year, since last year it seemed like given any two players, you'd always get the same exact result. Ultimately it was the fact that the bump and run was 100% predictable that made it subject to abuse. So, it's an improvement from last year for sure. How much of one remains to be seen.
Finally I tested out the QB accuracy slider a bit, to see if this problem of the QB accuracy slider affecting throwing power got fixed. I'm still a little unclear on this. It seems like it has kind of been fixed, but the behavior of this slider is even more screwy. It seems that there are essentially two possibilities for QB accuracies: either the pass is dead-on-balls accurate, or it's 15-20 yards off target, literally, with very little ground in between. And adjusting the QB accuracy slider simply changes the frequency of passes in either category -- lowering the slider just gives you more passes that are way off target. This implementation seems awfully suspect to me. I don't see why we can't have a continuous range of possible "ball landing locations". As we turn down the QB accuracy slider, we should then see fewer passes be dead-on, or as I wrote in our passing article, the "typical radius of accuracy" would increase as you reduce the QB accuracy slider. But this all-or-nothing approach to pass accuracy has to go. But, all that said, it does seem like you can reduce accuracy this year without it screwing up the deep passing game.
That's all for now. More gameplay notes later today.
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7/29, 9:20am
This morning I decided to test out this alledgedly improved DB AI. Frankly I was highly skeptical, but after testing it out, trust me, believe the hype. The DB AI, at least so far as I can tell, is truly excellent in Madden 2005.
If you've been to this site before, you know that we've written some pretty scathing articles criticizing Madden. So, the opinions you see here are certainly not the consequence of a Pro-Madden bias. In fact, quite the opposite: I honestly expected Madden to be subpar and overhyped this year. But so far, it seems like I was quite wrong.
I ran a very simple test -- I went into practice mode, snapped the ball from the 50, and threw a fly/go route from Favre to Donald Driver. I tried to throw the ball when Driver was on the 30, so he caught it around the 10 or so. I did this on three difficulty levels -- Pro, All-Pro, and All-Madden, and against various combinations of coverage.
First I wanted to test the "shutdown corners" that have been touted in recent months. Shutdown corners in Madden, you say? Yeah, right. I ran "Man 2" with the Broncos, so that Champ Bailey and John Lynch were double covering against the deep pass. Pretty good coverage team, huh? I did 30 pass attempts on each difficulty level, and here were the results:
Result Pro All-Pro All-Madden
Catch 9 0 0
Deflection 12 29 29
Missed Throw 2 0 0
INT 0 0 1
Drop 2 0 0
Dislodge 5 1 0
Wow -- that's a drastic difference from Madden 2004, where passes were completed into double coverage against the best DB's all the time. On All-Madden, Driver never even gets his hands on the ball. Obviously there's a dramatic difference in difficulty level as well. The reason is that the DB's get a lot smarter as you move up in difficulty. They position themselves a lot better, and they make more intelligent plays on the ball. In double coverage, you'll often see one guy play the ball (namely, the CB standing in between the WR and QB) and one guy play the man (namely, the safety playing between the WR and endzone). There's no chance in hell he catches the ball against good players here.
Next I let Bailey play bump at the line, and threw into single coverage against Lynch. Otherwise everything was the same.
Result Pro All-Pro All-Madden
Catch 23 12 13
Deflection 5 9 12
Missed Throw 0 1 0
INT 0 3 1
Drop 0 3 0
Dislodge 1 3 3
Several things to notice here. First, there's obviously a huge difference between single and double coverage, and again, a huge difference between Pro and higher difficulty levels, though not much difference between All-Pro and All-Madden. These numbers seem quite reasonable to me -- Favre and Driver are obviously elite and very good respectively, and Lynch is not known as a very good cover guy. On the higher difficulty levels, the pass is completed about 42% of the time.
An important new feature this year is an animation that allows safeties to make a play on the ball even after they get turned around. They slow down a bit, reach back, and knock the ball down. Of course they don't do this always, but in Madden 2005, safeties were pretty much useless once you got them turned around and out of their backpeddal. Not the case anymore in 2005.
Next I wanted to do the same test with average coverage players. I found the Browns had two 85 rated DB's on that side of the field, McCutcheon and Griffith. Here are the double coverage results. I didn't test All-Madden here, because I was getting sick of running these tests, and All-Pro and All-Madden seemed pretty similar anyway.
Result Pro All-Pro
Catch 15 4
Deflection 8 25
Missed Throw 2 0
INT 0 0
Drop 2 0
Dislodge 3 1
Note that here -- against average coverage -- Driver catches 15-20% more passes on both Pro and All-Pro compared to his stats against Lynch and Bailey. In particular, he actually *caught* passes against the Browns on All-Pro, whereas Bailey and Lynch shut him down completely.
Repeating the same single safety coverage test with Griffith, I found the following:
Result Pro All-Pro
Catch 24 17
Deflection 3 9
Missed Throw 1 0
INT 0 0
Drop 1 1
Dislodge 1 2
Again Driver fares significantly better against Robert Griffith than he did against Lynch.
All in all, this is extremely impressive -- shutdown corners, at least in this one test, actually do shut down, higher difficulty levels really step up the Artificial Intelligence, and percentages in double coverage come down significantly. I'd like to get a better feel for the passing game before concluding that Madden's passing troubles are over, but I have a feeling that ESPN fanboys -- if they aren't converted by this alone -- won't have much room for argument this year.
A few other things I noticed while running these tests:
Defensive pressure on the QB is much greater in 2005. I cranked pass blocking all the way up when running these tests, and it often happened that I got sacked before Driver got far enough downfield (those data points were subsequently discarded). In particular, RE's seem a lot better at getting around their man and getting to the QB. This has been a big complaint in years past, and it may have been fixed in 2005.
It seems that the CPU does simulate the hit stick. If not, then maybe hits in general are just a lot bigger this year. In any case, Madden 2003/2004 look like high school ball compared to the hits delivered in this year's game.
Despite having not tested it extensively, I can already tell that bump and run is much improved. Champ Bailey kept Driver at the line for a long time, whereas McCutcheon couldn't really contain him with the bump very well.
I'd like to get some actual games in rather than this testing stuff, so I'm off to do that.
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7/29, 12:06pm
Just finished my first full game of 2005, 15 minute quarters, accelerated clock ON, on All-Madden. Sliders were all set to default, except penalty sliders, which were nearly maxed out.
So, just to give you some perspective, I'm not a Madden lightweight. I probably win 90% of my games online, I run the ball heavily, and of course I can prety easily dominate the CPU in Madden 2004. Not trying to brag, just trying to give you some perspective on what I'm about to say.
I got destroyed in this first game of 2005. I played as Green Bay against Carolina. Here are the box scores:
Stat Panthers Packers
Score 40 10
Total Offense 471 261
Rushing Yards 212 57
Passing Yards 259 204
First Downs 23 14
Turnovers 0 2
3rd Down 52% 21%
TOP 37:25 22:35
Several things to note:
I got crushed.
Those 57 yards of rushing I got are quite deceiving. 56 of those came on two plays, one of which was a 42 yard run. So, take out those two plays, and I had all of one rushing yard on 22 attempts.
Favre was 17 for 39, averaging 5.6 yards per attempt, and 13 yards per completion. This was really good to see, because this was the one stat that I could never get low enough in Madden 2004. Obviously this is only one game, but it may indicate the need for a stronger emphasis on a short passing game.
There were 145 plays run total; the NFL average is about 125 plays total. So, 15 minute quarters is probably again too long this year -- 13 minute quarters should be more realistic.
Note how the CPU racked up a ton of rushing yards, and totally dominated time of possession. That would never, ever happen on Madden 2004. So, it seems like the CPU's inability to run the ball has largely been solved.
There was not a single injury all game long. That's not good.
Now, I say this all with the following grain of salt: This is my first game of 2005. It's very possible that it may get substantially easier once I get better. But, it seems plausible that the sliders can be adjusted to the point that it will always be challenging. Also, if you happened to struggle against the CPU in Madden 2004, don't worry -- 2005 will still be playable, you should probably just start on Pro level, and perhaps also adjust the sliders. I'm confident that this year's version won't scare people off from being too difficult.
A few other observations from the game:
Defensive matchup screen won't let you put an LB on an HB. ESPN does let you do this. Neither game lets you assign a permanent QB Spy.
The crowd is much improved in 2005. It actually knows who the home team is. One thing that's cool is that it seems to be able to sense a big play happening -- like, DeShaun Foster broke a big run on me, and the crowd seemed to react once it became apparent that he was going to score, but prior to him actually scoring. They boo, both away team scores and also home team blunders.
CPU still has poor clock management. At the end of the game, they could have just let the clock run out, but they kept calling plays with 15-20 seconds left on the play clock.
Blitz lines are still poorly drawn. When you blitz the nickel CB, for example, he runs right at the LT rather than around him toward the QB, still, just like he did in 2004. Madden 2003 got this right, so it's unfortunate that EA/Tiburon doesn't want to fix this. Essentially it makes CB blitzes not very useful. We should be able to blitz these guys effectively -- the offense should have to counter either by getting the pass off quickly, or keeping an RB in to block. (As a sidenote, fixing the speed problem, ahem, would give the QB more time to pass without having to make the CB run directly into the LT.)
I did see one false start, but only one, and it was the CPU team. No holding penalties at all, even though the holding slider was set to about 90%, and there were a lot of running plays. One other face mask penalty or something. Two penalties all game long -- not good.
That's about all for now. Stay tuned, more later.
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7/29, 2:09pm
Played a second game against the Bengals, still on All-Madden, still on default sliders, but all penalty sliders are maxed out now.
Did a little bit better this time. It would have been closer had I not shanked 2-3 field goals. The kicking meter is a lot slower in 2005, and that takes some getting used to. My biggest problem now is that I'm finding it impossible to get any pressure on the QB with my front four. This is a standard problem for the Packers, but all the same, I control DL's manually, and I'm pressing all kinds of buttons and nothing's happening -- my guys just stands there. It's kind of weird. But, it might be a reminant of having played ESPN for the past week, where R2 does a spin move, and it's the most effective DL move in that game. I'm not sure R2 does anything in Madden, and I might subconsciously just be wailing on R2 to no avail. Anyway, here are the main stats:
Stat Panthers Packers
Score 40 20
Total Offense 444 332
Rushing Yards 126 181
Passing Yards 318 151
First Downs 19 14
Turnovers 1 2
3rd Down 36% 38%
TOP 29:29 22:31
Rudi Johnson averaged 4.0 ypc on 30 carries on me, which is great, and Ahman had 170 yards on 25 carries, including a 74 yard run. Without that 74 yarder, he averaged 4.0 as well, which is pretty realistic. Favre's passing still sucks, but it's just a matter of getting used to the new passing game. Again they beat me on TOP, which is awesome.
I saw two injuries in this game, one where the guy came back, and one where he was out for the game. So, I'm holding out some minimal hope that playing out games in franchise mode may actually be worthwhile since there just may be enough injuries.
I also saw more penalties in this game -- two holding, three false start, and a couple of face masks. Unfortunately they seemed to have ramped down holding significantly, because there were a lot of holding penalties called last year with maxed slider, and there are just not very many at all this year with the slider maxed. 120 plays in this game -- again, on 13 minute quarters -- which is fairly close to the NFL average.
Going to go test out the simulation engine now...
Hands-on Madden 2005 Info -- 7/28/2004
Thanks to EA's Madden Community Leader program, the Madden Wishlist received a copy of Madden 2005 today. I'm going to try to post info as often as possible, but obviously I'm interested in playing. :-) I do plan to update this at least once a day, and I'll include timestamps to let you know when I wrote the update. You can go to the most recent update by clicking here.
If you have questions for me, I'll do my best to answer them. You can send them using this form.
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First post: 7/28, 6:00pm
So far I've mainly just been playing franchise mode. Later tonight I plan to re-run some gameplay tests, such as player speeds, QB accuracy slider affecting throwing power, player sizes, deep throwing percentages, blocking sliders affecting holding penalties, bump and run, etc.
So, I simmed through a season just to get to the offseason, and for the most part I was pleasantly surprised.
First is player retirements, pretty standard from last year. I didn't see anywhere to talk a guy out of retirement (ESPN has this feature, for what it's worth) but I wasn't particularly looking for it at the time either.
The added step this year is Restricted Free Agents, which comes after player retirements. RFA's are somewhat true to NFL form, with a couple of key differences. In the first stage of the process, you tender an offer to your player -- it can be one of three values. Depending on your choice of tender level, you'll get something different in return if another team signs your player. If you offer the lowest tender, then the compensation is a pick in the round that player was drafted in. The middle tender will get you a first round pick if another team signs the guy, and the highest tender gets you a first and a third. The tender amounts *do* increase in each year of franchise mode -- nice attention to detail on Tiburon's part. You are NOT able to offer a contract besides the one year offer, which is somewhat realistic, since most players at that stage aren't interested in longer contracts because they want to test unrestricted free agency the year after that.
After a minute or so, the CPU teams decide which of their players they want to tender offers. On those players that are given tenders, you can make a contract offer. (If they aren't tendered an offer, they become free agents, and you can make offers on them -- after the draft, of course.) But here's where the system breaks down, pretty severely. The problem is that players will take literally any offer you give them -- even if the amount you offer is less than their RFA tender from their current team. And, the current team -- or any other for that matter -- can't outbid you. So, once you make an offer, that's it -- he's yours. I'm assuming this applies to your own RFA's as well -- that you can't outbid any offers -- though to this point no other team has taken one of my players.
CPU teams seem slightly unintelligent about which RFA's they sign. One team took another team's 90 rated FB, and if I remember correctly, he had the high tender on him -- or at least the middle tender. And a first round draft pick is way too much to be giving up for any FB. I'll have to look into this more though.
After RFA's comes "resign free agents". It's essentially the same as last year, but morale plays a small role now. If you give a guy a low contract offer, his morale will drop. But this isn't implemented terribly well, since you have to make literally 20-30 offers before it has an appreciable change to his morale, even if those offers are ridiculously low. Remember, the Patriots pissed off Ty Law this Spring with just a single weak contract offer -- and it wasn't even all that weak of a deal, either. After those 20-30 bad offers, the guy's morale will be so low that he'll refuse to resign. It's not perfect, but it's at least a step in the right direction though.
Morale doesn't seem to play much of a role to start negotiations off, since so far for me, all players have had their morale at least 80% or so -- I've only seen one exception to that so far. That's fairly disappointing, since most players in real life will probably at least want to test free agency.
Furthermore, contract negotiations are made even easier by an "interest meter". So, when it comes down to it, you really don't have to worry about suffering hits to player morale, since you just put the contract at a value that he finds acceptable before you make the offer. So, the interest meter really removes any challenging aspect of negotiations that were added by the morale considerations. There should at least have been an option to remove this thing. Luckily a piece of paper covering the upper left corner of your monitor should probably suffice. (It's worth noting that ESPN has this feature as well -- negotiations are about the same in both games, in fact.)
Franchise tags were also added, which just amounts to paying the player a ton of money for one year. You can NOT adjust the "load" of the contract -- contracts are all back-loaded as they were in 2004.
So, in the end, contract negotiations took one step forward, and one step back. It's not any more challenging than 2004 was. For 2006, they need to get rid of the "interest meter" altogether (or, again, at least make it optional), also have morale be lower to start negotiations (prompting some players to want to test free agency from the start), and make morale take a bigger hit depending on the contract offer. It's disappointing, because clearly the technology is all there for them to do this, it's just a matter of tweaking some parameters.
Ok, so that was all a bit of bad news. Get ready to be happier though.
The draft in Madden this year is awesome. Simply awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I'm hesitant to write about it, since it's probably better that you realize it in all its glory for yourself. So, to that end, I'm throwing in a lot of white space after this paragraph, and also when I'm done discussing the draft, so you can skip this section if you want. But, I'll say this much: If you're a franchise player, Madden 2005 is worth having for the draft alone. Simple enough?
Ok, so I guess you decided to read about the draft. Don't say I didn't warn you.
First comes draft scouting, which is pretty much the same as last year. They did add "Top 5" and "Top Ten" designations though, which is a great touch. It's wonderfully implemented also, since those top guys, of course, don't necessarily go in the top. In the one draft I did, I saw one "Top Ten" guy fall to #22 -- Kenechi Udeze, anyone?
Next comes the draft. There are three speeds to the draft, and you can easily toggle between them with L2/R2 (perhaps too easily, in fact, since an accidental bump of the R2 button starts the draft on high speed). "Fast" is like last year's draft, everything just goes whizzing by. On "Medium", there are about 10 seconds between each pick, which lets you determine if you want to trade up or not. On "Slow" there are about 30 seconds between picks, giving you even more time to look around. You can effectively pause the draft by going to look at your rosters or by trying to work a trade.
While each team is "on the clock", you can scout who they're likely to pick using the right analog stick to scroll through information. It tells you what their team needs are at 2-3 positions, and also gives you the top 5 players they're likely to pick. They don't always pick from that bunch, though they usually do, and they don't always pick the top guy. Again, fantastic implementation. When it's your turn to pick, a draft advisor will tell you which player s/he thinks you should take.
As you probably already know, the CPU does trade during the draft. This is also fairly well implemented. There aren't too many trades, in fact, in the draft I did there were only two. But this is fairly realistic. Draft pick compensation from RFA's facilitates the trading process a bit, since two low 1st rounders are about equal to a upper-middle 1st rounder. So far I haven't had any trades offered to me, but as I said I've only done one draft. When a CPU trade happens, it notifies you by popping up a box on the screen.
The problem with having a dearth of players at WR and HB in later rounds seems to be completely solved in Madden 2005, which is tremendous. You don't have a huge run at WR and HB in the first round anymore, even though the number of players is about the same. After the draft is over, the game assigns "draft grades" for each team to tell you how they did in the draft, though the implementation here was not very good, since every team gets a grade between A+ and A- -- apparently grade inflation has found its way into Madden. The human teams do not have a draft timer (ESPN does have this feature), but there is a draft ticker like you see on ESPN the network during the real NFL draft, telling you who's been picked, and which teams have picks coming up.
All in all the draft was completely redone and it's truly fantastic. That said, it's not perfect.
First, a minor complaint -- the draft pick order is not correct; it's the same as it was in 2004. Here's what the draft order should be. Second, CPU teams seem much, much, much smarter about drafting based on need, but there are still some anomalies. The Lions had the top pick in the draft and took a QB despite having Joey Harrington (82 OVR, 24 years old or so) as their starter -- though to their credit, the guy they picked came out an 84 OVR or so.
Third, a more serious problem -- draft trading is still too easy. After simulating a few seasons, the Browns gave me the 6th overall pick for Drew Brees, rated 89 OVR and 31 years old. Also, in trading picks for picks, vertical trading is favored -- it's too easy to move up, but not easy enough to move down. I was able to snag the #1 overall pick for the 19th overall pick, the 19th pick in the 2nd round, and the 6th pick in the 3rd round. That's quite bad. Tiburon needs to look into using a more realistic draft pick trade value chart in Madden to rectify this problem. Any NFL GM who traded away the top pick for the garbage listed above would be unemployed at the end of April.
Finally, though the listing of speculative draft picks is terrific, I wish they'd have let us see the speculative picks for the next 3-4 teams making selections. Realistically speaking, if a team ahead of you is interested in a player you also want, they probably aren't going to trade down so you can move up and take him. You would probably have to trade with a team that's a spot or two higher than the team that's going to take your guy. But, this is another minor complaint.
After the draft you sign your picks, like in 2004. Not much change here, but you can not sort columns anymore to see who's your best overall, fastest, etc. Nice cheat in 2004, gone in 2005. ;-)
All in all the draft is really amazing in Madden 2005. As I said, not perfect, but still very, very well done.
Free agency comes after the draft again. Of course, most of us don't like it this way, but it is what it is. As advertised though, free agency is much harder this year. In my first free agency attempt, I was in need of an LE, and Michael Strahan came up in the lists, so I decided to target him heavily. I put in an initial bid, and after the first day passed, three other teams put in offers that exceeded mine -- not necessarily in terms of money, but more so in terms of team prestige and other factors. In fact, they overwhelmed me so much that no amount of money would sway him and I was forced to look elsewhere right off the bat. Fantastic! Player personalities really play a substantial role here, and at least at first glance, free agency was done very well this year. Kudos!
That pretty much covers the off-season. There were a few other franchise mode features of interest that I noted. In particular:
It doesn't look like you can turn off owner mode this year, which pissed me off. That said, I haven't touched any owner mode settings at all and it doesn't seem to have mattered much -- the CPU management is making me money and I'm nowhere near in jeopardy of losing my franchise.
Roster requirements are a lot looser this year. There's a minimum number of players you need, and then a minimum number of active players that you need, so guys on IR or guys holding out (which, by the way, I haven't seen any of yet, which is a bit distressing) do count somewhat toward roster requirements. The numbers are also lower in several categories -- you only need two QB's, 4 CB's, 4 WR's, etc.
CPU teams appear to play a bit tighter to the cap this year than last, but they still have lots of open space.
Cap penalty logic is still wrong -- if you cut a guy during the season in the last year of his contract, you take the cap penalty on THAT year's cap, NOT next year's as it happens in Madden 2004/2005.
And finally there are a few other points too major to get buried in a bullet point.
Progression is a lot different this year -- I have yet to get a handle on it fully. Players don't progress much at all at the end of the season, and instead progress during the season. You don't really see guys bottoming out anymore if they aren't starters -- at least at the WR and HB positions this is true, where the problems were largest last year. In general there seems to be a lot less movement in the ratings. Then again, Drew Brees did get up to an 89 on my franchise. The problem of certain positions exhibiting rating inflation (LB, FS, SS) and others exhibiting rating deflation (HB in particular) seem to have been worked on and perhaps solved. I've simmed through 7 seasons to check for this, and so far so good. I'll keep you all posted on that.
The Radio Show is actually nicely done -- better than I expected. It's actually somewhat entertaining, and hasn't realy annoyed me yet. :-) I can't really say the same for ESPN's Sportscenter and Halftime shows -- they don't add much to the game after you've seen them a few times. Bruno's show runs for about 5 minute segments between weeks, and comes on automatically. So, with 30 hours of recorded time, you can probably play for a good five seasons of franchise mode without hearing a repeat -- and after that, you probably wouldn't remember it from the first time anyway.
Lastly, I hate to end on a bad note, but this issue was too huge not to emphasize. Despite my better efforts at persuading the Tiburon staff otherwise, the cap space took a huge step backward this year. Last year the cap increased in the first few years by 10%, 9%, 9%, 8%, 8%, and 5% every year afterward. This year it's appalling -- 18%, 18%, 16%, 10%, 8%, 4% -- after that I haven't tested it yet. The real life cap increases at about 6% each year. It's possible though that contract values increase a lot more than they did in year's past, so I should check that out before getting all worked up over this. Here's a table that gives the cap values in Madden 2004, Madden 2005, and in real life:
Year Madden 2004 Madden 2005 Real Life (6%)
2005 88.55 95.00 85.33
2006 96.52 112.09 90.45
2007 105.21 130.02 95.88
2008 113.62 143.02 101.63
2009 122.71 154.47 107.72
2010 128.85 160.65 114.19
Perhaps a good note: ESPN's cap is arguably more screwed up -- it only increases by about 1% each year.
Ok, that's all for now.
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7/29, 7:00am
Just a few notes to start off the day.
I simmed through another first season, trying to pay particular attention to the e-mail part of Storyline Central. I still didn't really get any disgruntled players -- maybe Green Bay is just a great place to play, who knows. The e-mail system is fairly good. It's not anything spectacular, but it's a nice interface for finding out about your team.
Simmers will be happy to know that injuries in simulated games are about the same as last year. I have yet to find out how injuries in games are, though Tiburon say it's unchanged from last year.
A few things about franchise mode that I forgot to mention yesterday:
CPU teams are much more active in free agency during the pre-season this year, though not as active as in ESPN.
2nd day picks in the draft are essentially worthless as far as trade value, which is not quite realistic. I tried to move up 4-5 spots in the 2nd round by throwing in my 4th round pick, and nobody would take it, even though the trade value chart says that's a good trade.
While other teams are picking their players, you're not able to see your scouting notes from the main drafting interface. You have to stop the draft, go out to the main draft menu, and choose a special interface for looking at the draft results from the draft scouting. This whole process could be a lot cleaner and more user-friendly.
You can change the length of a contract offer in free agency, i.e., if some team bids on a guy first, you can offer him a longer or shorter contract on a subsequent bid, which you couldn't really do in 2004.
So far I've only seen picks for picks draft trades, no picks for players.
I started testing game play a bit more as well. Here are a few things I noticed:
Player speeds are the same as last year. I'm not too happy about that, but I expected it.
As a result, in my initial testing, it seems that sweeps and tosses were about as useless as last year. I didn't test counters yet, but my guess is it's no better. Rhetorical question to EA and Tiburon staff: How can you expect a blocking play to work when the blockers are too slow to get to their assignments? This problem isn't going to go away until you guys -- at least in an optional menu -- fix the player speeds. I'm going to test this more, and try to do a more rigorous comparison to 2004, but don't expect much from the outside running game this year.
The coverage audible behavior from 2004 was retained in addition to the player-specific coverage audibles, which is really good. So, you can still press ALL your DB's with two button presses like last year, or you can press your guys individually. Very nice -- I was worried that they may have taken that out.
I tested bump and run a little bit. It does seem that size plays a bigger role this year, but not much of one. In fact, bump and run results seem almost random this year. But, that said, that's a huge step up from last year, since last year it seemed like given any two players, you'd always get the same exact result. Ultimately it was the fact that the bump and run was 100% predictable that made it subject to abuse. So, it's an improvement from last year for sure. How much of one remains to be seen.
Finally I tested out the QB accuracy slider a bit, to see if this problem of the QB accuracy slider affecting throwing power got fixed. I'm still a little unclear on this. It seems like it has kind of been fixed, but the behavior of this slider is even more screwy. It seems that there are essentially two possibilities for QB accuracies: either the pass is dead-on-balls accurate, or it's 15-20 yards off target, literally, with very little ground in between. And adjusting the QB accuracy slider simply changes the frequency of passes in either category -- lowering the slider just gives you more passes that are way off target. This implementation seems awfully suspect to me. I don't see why we can't have a continuous range of possible "ball landing locations". As we turn down the QB accuracy slider, we should then see fewer passes be dead-on, or as I wrote in our passing article, the "typical radius of accuracy" would increase as you reduce the QB accuracy slider. But this all-or-nothing approach to pass accuracy has to go. But, all that said, it does seem like you can reduce accuracy this year without it screwing up the deep passing game.
That's all for now. More gameplay notes later today.
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7/29, 9:20am
This morning I decided to test out this alledgedly improved DB AI. Frankly I was highly skeptical, but after testing it out, trust me, believe the hype. The DB AI, at least so far as I can tell, is truly excellent in Madden 2005.
If you've been to this site before, you know that we've written some pretty scathing articles criticizing Madden. So, the opinions you see here are certainly not the consequence of a Pro-Madden bias. In fact, quite the opposite: I honestly expected Madden to be subpar and overhyped this year. But so far, it seems like I was quite wrong.
I ran a very simple test -- I went into practice mode, snapped the ball from the 50, and threw a fly/go route from Favre to Donald Driver. I tried to throw the ball when Driver was on the 30, so he caught it around the 10 or so. I did this on three difficulty levels -- Pro, All-Pro, and All-Madden, and against various combinations of coverage.
First I wanted to test the "shutdown corners" that have been touted in recent months. Shutdown corners in Madden, you say? Yeah, right. I ran "Man 2" with the Broncos, so that Champ Bailey and John Lynch were double covering against the deep pass. Pretty good coverage team, huh? I did 30 pass attempts on each difficulty level, and here were the results:
Result Pro All-Pro All-Madden
Catch 9 0 0
Deflection 12 29 29
Missed Throw 2 0 0
INT 0 0 1
Drop 2 0 0
Dislodge 5 1 0
Wow -- that's a drastic difference from Madden 2004, where passes were completed into double coverage against the best DB's all the time. On All-Madden, Driver never even gets his hands on the ball. Obviously there's a dramatic difference in difficulty level as well. The reason is that the DB's get a lot smarter as you move up in difficulty. They position themselves a lot better, and they make more intelligent plays on the ball. In double coverage, you'll often see one guy play the ball (namely, the CB standing in between the WR and QB) and one guy play the man (namely, the safety playing between the WR and endzone). There's no chance in hell he catches the ball against good players here.
Next I let Bailey play bump at the line, and threw into single coverage against Lynch. Otherwise everything was the same.
Result Pro All-Pro All-Madden
Catch 23 12 13
Deflection 5 9 12
Missed Throw 0 1 0
INT 0 3 1
Drop 0 3 0
Dislodge 1 3 3
Several things to notice here. First, there's obviously a huge difference between single and double coverage, and again, a huge difference between Pro and higher difficulty levels, though not much difference between All-Pro and All-Madden. These numbers seem quite reasonable to me -- Favre and Driver are obviously elite and very good respectively, and Lynch is not known as a very good cover guy. On the higher difficulty levels, the pass is completed about 42% of the time.
An important new feature this year is an animation that allows safeties to make a play on the ball even after they get turned around. They slow down a bit, reach back, and knock the ball down. Of course they don't do this always, but in Madden 2005, safeties were pretty much useless once you got them turned around and out of their backpeddal. Not the case anymore in 2005.
Next I wanted to do the same test with average coverage players. I found the Browns had two 85 rated DB's on that side of the field, McCutcheon and Griffith. Here are the double coverage results. I didn't test All-Madden here, because I was getting sick of running these tests, and All-Pro and All-Madden seemed pretty similar anyway.
Result Pro All-Pro
Catch 15 4
Deflection 8 25
Missed Throw 2 0
INT 0 0
Drop 2 0
Dislodge 3 1
Note that here -- against average coverage -- Driver catches 15-20% more passes on both Pro and All-Pro compared to his stats against Lynch and Bailey. In particular, he actually *caught* passes against the Browns on All-Pro, whereas Bailey and Lynch shut him down completely.
Repeating the same single safety coverage test with Griffith, I found the following:
Result Pro All-Pro
Catch 24 17
Deflection 3 9
Missed Throw 1 0
INT 0 0
Drop 1 1
Dislodge 1 2
Again Driver fares significantly better against Robert Griffith than he did against Lynch.
All in all, this is extremely impressive -- shutdown corners, at least in this one test, actually do shut down, higher difficulty levels really step up the Artificial Intelligence, and percentages in double coverage come down significantly. I'd like to get a better feel for the passing game before concluding that Madden's passing troubles are over, but I have a feeling that ESPN fanboys -- if they aren't converted by this alone -- won't have much room for argument this year.
A few other things I noticed while running these tests:
Defensive pressure on the QB is much greater in 2005. I cranked pass blocking all the way up when running these tests, and it often happened that I got sacked before Driver got far enough downfield (those data points were subsequently discarded). In particular, RE's seem a lot better at getting around their man and getting to the QB. This has been a big complaint in years past, and it may have been fixed in 2005.
It seems that the CPU does simulate the hit stick. If not, then maybe hits in general are just a lot bigger this year. In any case, Madden 2003/2004 look like high school ball compared to the hits delivered in this year's game.
Despite having not tested it extensively, I can already tell that bump and run is much improved. Champ Bailey kept Driver at the line for a long time, whereas McCutcheon couldn't really contain him with the bump very well.
I'd like to get some actual games in rather than this testing stuff, so I'm off to do that.
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7/29, 12:06pm
Just finished my first full game of 2005, 15 minute quarters, accelerated clock ON, on All-Madden. Sliders were all set to default, except penalty sliders, which were nearly maxed out.
So, just to give you some perspective, I'm not a Madden lightweight. I probably win 90% of my games online, I run the ball heavily, and of course I can prety easily dominate the CPU in Madden 2004. Not trying to brag, just trying to give you some perspective on what I'm about to say.
I got destroyed in this first game of 2005. I played as Green Bay against Carolina. Here are the box scores:
Stat Panthers Packers
Score 40 10
Total Offense 471 261
Rushing Yards 212 57
Passing Yards 259 204
First Downs 23 14
Turnovers 0 2
3rd Down 52% 21%
TOP 37:25 22:35
Several things to note:
I got crushed.
Those 57 yards of rushing I got are quite deceiving. 56 of those came on two plays, one of which was a 42 yard run. So, take out those two plays, and I had all of one rushing yard on 22 attempts.
Favre was 17 for 39, averaging 5.6 yards per attempt, and 13 yards per completion. This was really good to see, because this was the one stat that I could never get low enough in Madden 2004. Obviously this is only one game, but it may indicate the need for a stronger emphasis on a short passing game.
There were 145 plays run total; the NFL average is about 125 plays total. So, 15 minute quarters is probably again too long this year -- 13 minute quarters should be more realistic.
Note how the CPU racked up a ton of rushing yards, and totally dominated time of possession. That would never, ever happen on Madden 2004. So, it seems like the CPU's inability to run the ball has largely been solved.
There was not a single injury all game long. That's not good.
Now, I say this all with the following grain of salt: This is my first game of 2005. It's very possible that it may get substantially easier once I get better. But, it seems plausible that the sliders can be adjusted to the point that it will always be challenging. Also, if you happened to struggle against the CPU in Madden 2004, don't worry -- 2005 will still be playable, you should probably just start on Pro level, and perhaps also adjust the sliders. I'm confident that this year's version won't scare people off from being too difficult.
A few other observations from the game:
Defensive matchup screen won't let you put an LB on an HB. ESPN does let you do this. Neither game lets you assign a permanent QB Spy.
The crowd is much improved in 2005. It actually knows who the home team is. One thing that's cool is that it seems to be able to sense a big play happening -- like, DeShaun Foster broke a big run on me, and the crowd seemed to react once it became apparent that he was going to score, but prior to him actually scoring. They boo, both away team scores and also home team blunders.
CPU still has poor clock management. At the end of the game, they could have just let the clock run out, but they kept calling plays with 15-20 seconds left on the play clock.
Blitz lines are still poorly drawn. When you blitz the nickel CB, for example, he runs right at the LT rather than around him toward the QB, still, just like he did in 2004. Madden 2003 got this right, so it's unfortunate that EA/Tiburon doesn't want to fix this. Essentially it makes CB blitzes not very useful. We should be able to blitz these guys effectively -- the offense should have to counter either by getting the pass off quickly, or keeping an RB in to block. (As a sidenote, fixing the speed problem, ahem, would give the QB more time to pass without having to make the CB run directly into the LT.)
I did see one false start, but only one, and it was the CPU team. No holding penalties at all, even though the holding slider was set to about 90%, and there were a lot of running plays. One other face mask penalty or something. Two penalties all game long -- not good.
That's about all for now. Stay tuned, more later.
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7/29, 2:09pm
Played a second game against the Bengals, still on All-Madden, still on default sliders, but all penalty sliders are maxed out now.
Did a little bit better this time. It would have been closer had I not shanked 2-3 field goals. The kicking meter is a lot slower in 2005, and that takes some getting used to. My biggest problem now is that I'm finding it impossible to get any pressure on the QB with my front four. This is a standard problem for the Packers, but all the same, I control DL's manually, and I'm pressing all kinds of buttons and nothing's happening -- my guys just stands there. It's kind of weird. But, it might be a reminant of having played ESPN for the past week, where R2 does a spin move, and it's the most effective DL move in that game. I'm not sure R2 does anything in Madden, and I might subconsciously just be wailing on R2 to no avail. Anyway, here are the main stats:
Stat Panthers Packers
Score 40 20
Total Offense 444 332
Rushing Yards 126 181
Passing Yards 318 151
First Downs 19 14
Turnovers 1 2
3rd Down 36% 38%
TOP 29:29 22:31
Rudi Johnson averaged 4.0 ypc on 30 carries on me, which is great, and Ahman had 170 yards on 25 carries, including a 74 yard run. Without that 74 yarder, he averaged 4.0 as well, which is pretty realistic. Favre's passing still sucks, but it's just a matter of getting used to the new passing game. Again they beat me on TOP, which is awesome.
I saw two injuries in this game, one where the guy came back, and one where he was out for the game. So, I'm holding out some minimal hope that playing out games in franchise mode may actually be worthwhile since there just may be enough injuries.
I also saw more penalties in this game -- two holding, three false start, and a couple of face masks. Unfortunately they seemed to have ramped down holding significantly, because there were a lot of holding penalties called last year with maxed slider, and there are just not very many at all this year with the slider maxed. 120 plays in this game -- again, on 13 minute quarters -- which is fairly close to the NFL average.
Going to go test out the simulation engine now...