EA Madden rant

I was pissed last year at EA when I first loaded up 13. When I read all the mediocre reviews about how 25 was still a lot more like 13 than 10, 11, or 12 I decided to spend as much time as I could getting 12 (and 13) to be as up to date as possible so everyone else who is fed up with EA recycling the same garbage year after year and slapping new promises of improvements only to let us down with basically every release since 04/05/06, something to play.

EA doesn't care about these roster updates. They don't care about me, they certainly don't care about you. They care about the money, the bonuses, and keeping their jobs (the board and corporate officers) by maximizing profit and minimizing costs. This means pulling features one year, just to re-introduce them in another.

X1 and PS4 releases of 25 are going to be more disappointing than 13 or 25 were on PS3 and 360. That's going to continue on Madden 15 too. Anyone arguing about how 25 got slight graphic improvements on PS3 is insane. Please realize that in looking at the game files for as many hours as I have now, they have changed almost nothing in the data parameters of the game for YEARS. 08/09/10 are nearly identical. 11/12/13/25 rosters are exactly identical. Nothing changed. Even Potential ratings (which supposedly got removed for 25) are still in the roster files. The Madden team is creating new menus every year, but mostly give us 95% of the exact same thing as the year before. Even cyber faces are only done for about 15 players each year. For 12 I only had to change about 30 faces from 25. That's about 15 guys updated each year. The worst part is that the 2K basketball games have literally well over 100+ cyber faces introduced or updated every year, and Madden is still roughly 95% generic faces. Even worse, I remember seeing a video years and years ago showing a videogame developer creating "realistic" cyber faces on a PC using their 3D modeling software. During the 30 seconds the programmer was shown editing the face, he was able to make drastic changes in the shape of the brow ridge, nose, and eye depth to the player model he was working on. Hell I remember making a Breton character in TES: Oblivion that literally looked like (at the very least) a digital relative of me. All I did was grab a single photo of myself and start moving face shape sliders around. Even my wife said "holy crap that looks exactly like you" after I finished. And I did that face in about 15 minutes. I'm not saying a cyber face only takes 30 seconds, or 15 minutes, but even if it took one programmer 1 full work day, and there was only 1 programmer working full time on it, why are there only 15 cyber faces being done each year??? That's an insane amount of under optimization.

The reality is that large release videogames make more money than moderate budget feature films do. EA "franchise" games get a Blair Witch Project-like budget every year, yet rake in Avatar-like sales. Madden 13 did over $82,000,000 gross......




......in its first week. How many millions do you think Madden 25 will do on PS4 and X1 leading up to, and just after, the holidays?

Anyway, rant over.