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Disclaimer: Most of my experience with Madden is on PS2, although I have seen it on XBox 360. I have owned and played Madden 2005-7.
Yes they do. Then right before the next Madden comes out they talk about everything that was wrong with the last one and how EA is supposedly going to fix it this year. People don't understand that features are not gameplay. A new feature, even if it sounds really cool, may turn out to be more of a hindrance to realistic gameplay (if that's what Madden even wants, which is seriously debatable) than a benefit. I am not saying that all of Madden's features are bad. I think the lead-blocking is cool, and I actually believe that the game designers themselves are prevented from doing what they want to do by their bosses who are cost-conscious, but without a quality conscience.
Some features are misconceived, like the passing cone. I won't belabor this point because so many negative things have already been said about it by 2K and Madden gamers alike. The bottom line is: the gamer already has to scan the field for open receivers. There is no need to simulate this twice. A nice idea on paper, but it makes the gameplay worse and the game less fun.
Sometimes the designers seem to lack any understanding of the way in which gamers would want to use a given feature, like the playbook editor/play creator. I LOVED this idea, and I spent a couple hours essentially designing my own form of a 3-4 defense. Then slowly to my chagrin I realized that I could not use the playbook I had created anywhere except in exhibition games. Not online, not in my franchise, not in superstar mode. Nowhere! Now I suppose people play live with their friends, but many people (like myself) just don't have a network of Madden friends who come over to their houses to play live. I rarely ever play Exhibition mode, and from conversations with others, I have learned that I am not alone in this regard. In this case Madden created a feature that was potentially enjoyable, but essentially unusable, and I was that much more frustrated for having wasted my time creating a playbook I couldn't use anywhere.
Some other features end up being more gimmicks than anything else. The result is a buggy game where being a good player has little to do with football knowledge and everything to do with how well you can exploit the bugginess of the game. The Hit Stick is a perfect example. Sure it sounded like a good idea on paper, but in actual gameplay, it certainly is not realistic, and its use is one of the things that separates "bad" players from "good" players. "Good" players make every tackle with the Hit Stick and force fumbles. On offense, they use the Hit Stick repeatedly to break ridiculous amounts of tackles. "Bad" players, on the other hand, are those who simply have not figured out yet how to do this. It tells you something when you think to yourself, 'What would I need to improve to go from being a bad player to a really good player?' and the answer you come up with is "Perfect the use of the hit stick.'
Another example is Head Coach. The problem is a little complicated, but here is the summary: Every player's ability level is not an exact number, but a range, say 68-76. At any given time his ability may be anywhere within that range. So one of your goals is to get each player to play at his max potential, at 76 in this case. But another goal is to increase the ceiling of his rating, to get his max rating to go up from 76 to 78 or 80 or even higher. As it turned out, because of bad programming, unless you simmed all the practices in Head Coach, not only couldn't you increase the players' max ratings, they would steadily decrease each week, so that your team steadily got worse each week of the season, that is, unless you simmed every practice. Of course the question then becomes, "Why in the h3ll would anyone buy a game entitled Head Coach unless they wanted to be involved in the practices?!?" This reduced the game to the equivalent of playing an exhibition in 2K5 in the coach mode, which is not a bad feature, but do you want to buy a whole game based on what was a minor feature in another game? I do not think this was due to Madden's lack of understanding of the gamer though. Just a hastily released and poorly tested product with a fatal programming defect.
The point of all of this is that features may sound cool, but they do not always prove to be as spectacular as advertised. In fact with Madden, this is rarely the case. EA's programmers are average; their marketing team is incredible. Who else would think of creating a video of Donavan McNabb playing in the snow and passing it off as it it was actual game footage when the real game looked nothing like that. What other company could get away with such a thing? Madden seems to have a zoomed in philosophy of graphics and their marketing team does everything they can to show how realistic jerseys, drops of sweat, etc. look on the highest magnification, but what they don't seem to realize or care about is that being zoomed in on a player will probably not amount to more than 2% of your gaming experience. In other words, who cares how realistic the sweat beads on my O-lineman look if from the normal viewing angle/zoom his body looks cartoonish and if his muscles and limbs are out of proportion? Who cares how realistic the jersey on my RB looks if his movements are stiff and if he still does ridiculous things like swimming in place behind other players. Yet I can almost guarantee that every commercial you see will be some combo of footage not from the actual game, or a zoomed-in replay or fast game footage where you never see any continuous image for longer than 2 seconds, and especially where you only see it from "television" (replay) angles, never from the original angle you would see it from if you were playing the game (another production trick). All of these things make Madden look incredible on TV and in advertising shorts and commercials, but when you take your copy home, once the excitement of having all the players on your team wears off, the gameplay and the graphics are somewhat of a disappointment and often you can't quite put your finger on why this is, but after this excessive rant, perhaps this time you will be able to.
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05-23-2007, 08:04 AM
...its a shame but am glad 2k is coming out.
