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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Looks like we're in for another long haulComment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Two years to add pass interference? Only Madden.
I try to refrain from insulting these guys, but how good can you possibly be at your job if one of the most basic aspects of football (penalties) takes you about a decade to figure out?Writer for Operation Sports
Gamertag (Xbox One): Bengerman 1031
PSN Name: BadNewsBen
Twitter: @BadNewsBenV
Twitch: www.Twitch.TV/Bengerman10Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Hold up, I'm going to post the interview in full, so people don't get anything misunderstood about what was actually said.
Q: In your perspective, what are the features that you're most excited about with Madden 25?
Rex: The one biggest thing we'd like you to take away from next gen is the team driving the stake in the ground about the direction we want to take this game with next gen. It's not necessarily the same direction that we have been going in on gen 3. That direction we're heading is firmly towards realism authenticity and a realistic representation of the sport. I think for many years Madden has been a great game and it's been fun for a lot of people, but it's definitely played more like Madden than realistic, authentic football and I think a lot of people still feel like they can't get a true simulation experience out of the game. This dev team is committed to giving them that game. Gen 4, this first year, I think you'll find is the most realistic representation of the sport that we have ever built. It's really just the tip of the iceberg about where we are going.
Q: We see a lot of the line play in Madden is not causing there to be many penalties. Is there anything on the horizon that would start to produce a higher instance of line related penalties?
Clint: For this year we did not make a feature surrounding increased penalties along the offensive line. From my own experience with this year's game and my own testing, what I've found is due to the horsepower of the new consoles, penalties do trigger more than they would have before, but it is good that you bring up the penalties especially on the offensive line because it's something that is on our radar and something we're looking to improve in our future games.
Q:Expanding on that, will we start to see more interference penalties on defensive backs and offensive penalties on WR's?
Rex: Yeah and that's going to be a little more complicated for us to take on. When you consider the way our catching system works and physics. Just kind of building a system around hey there was organic contact between them. We wouldn't be able to essentially control those outcomes so we have to kind of build towards the pass interference system. We have to kind of restructure the architecture of our catching system to support true pass interference penalties that we can actually build into the game and control them the way we need to control them. I would expect that you will see that if not next year(M15), then within the next two cycles (Madden 16) we'll get to that.
Q: Will things like bad snaps from the center or ls being mishandled by either punter or the holder for the placekick be in the next cycle or two for next gen?
Clint: That's something that we look at every year, the difficult thing is trying to come up with a mechanic that surrounds that so the user feels like they have some control of the outcome. The scenario I like to bring up is if you're playing in a tournament with $200000 on the line and you're about to go for the winning score and you have a bad snap and it's nothing you did on the sticks, but we just happened to throw one at you, like a bad dice roll. When we are able to come up with a mechanic to give the user some control over that, it's something we may look at.
Q: How does True Step affect every player on the field or does it just affect the ball carrier?
Rex: So the way True Step is implemented. True Step is a huge piece of technology, what we're doing with True Step is ripping out the old locomotion system and implementing a new locomotion system. True Step is light years beyond what we have ever done before. The amount of time it takes for us to take an assignment out of the game and replace it with this new locomotion system is fairly significant. So originally we set our target on ball carriers only, was the initial True Step. The team actually did a great job and increased their velocity over the course of the cycle and we were able to get it on all user controlled defenders as well. So what you'll see in the game shipping in a few weeks is True Step for all ball carriers including cpu as well as any user controlled player in the game on both sides of the ball.
Q: We've seen some of the pass rushing animations, from a defensive end perspective, look really good. If we're user controlling the DE and you go into one of those animations, do you have to let the animation run it's course or can you break out of it mid-animation to pursuit the QB?
Clint: You'll be able to break out of it if you're the one pass rushing, also the CPU AI can break out of it as well.
Q: Any improvements made to WR/DB interactions?
Rex: That can mean a lot of things. You have to think about all the different components of the feature, are you talking about press and release, behavior at the line or jam, are you talking about route running, hand fighting on the routes, or the interactions at the catch point? There's a lot of different factors of that feature. The one thing that will really jump out at you is with player sense and human intelligence at the DB position. You'll especially see this in zone coverage, the way defenders will react once the ball is thrown and break on the ball is really a lot more realistic. I think most people who played Madden 25 gen 3 felt zone was a little soft this year, but that is definitely not the case on gen 4. Zone defenders are brutally effective and will take much better paths to the ball, so their ability to break on the ball and target to their correct position to make a play on the ball or the receiver is vastly improved over what you've seen on gen 3.
Q: What about signature throwing and running animations?
Rex: My own personal opinion, I know the community really wants signature styles and animations specific to players. It's in our plan, however, from my perspective, I still feel like there's so many little issues within our animations with the pops, the warps, the slides, we have a lot of work to go to squeeze all of that stuff out the game. I'd rather make sure we nail the core animation quality in our game before we start talking about adding signature styles. Now that said, I don't think those two are mutually exclusive, I think we can work on both simultaneously, but we're still working on nailing our core fundamentals of football before we start going into expressions of individual style. All that said, our new animation system with step loco will give us a lot more flexibility and space to open up the door for us to do signature styles in the future. My first priority is make sure our animation quality is AAA and then we'll work on signature style.
Q: Are we going to see significant improvement in aliasing on next gen?
Rex: Yes, just like with any console launch, I don't think you're going to see all the benefits in year one. It's going to take some time for engineers and graphics artists to really figure out these rendering pipelines, decide where we're going to get the most impact, learn how to work with these boxes to get the best visual effects. From our perspective we really pushed a lot more of the investment for us, to make sure the game feels different, it feels smarter, feels more like football. 90% of our focus on our side (Gameplay developers) was how can we use this horsepower to affect the way the game plays and feels.
I'll post the rest of this interview later tonight.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
The true-step news was my biggest fear as soon as they announced it for current gen.
Why cant they just make a game where everyone on the field is following a normal movement pattern? This game will never play like a solid sports game until everyone on the field moves realistically.
Is there anything more important to a videogame then movement?
Very, very, very, very, disappointing.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Very promising interview. Good luck to this Dev team, I really like what you are doing. I find it promising that the tools are now in place to really get it done. If you guys (Dev team)are reading this ive only really enjoyed 2 versions of madden this entire gen and M25 is one. I look forward to seeing how you guys can continue to improve this troubled franchise in this new generation of consoles.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Sorry it came across that way, I just wanted people to know exactly what was said. True Step is for more than just the ball carrier so I wanted to make sure people at least didn't get that misunderstoodComment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Ok madden devs so making a realistic football game means only one person at a time can use true-step and follow realistic running patterns, while everyone else on the field defies it by skating, warping, Tron jogging, shuffling, etc ?? Wow thats half-stepping. I hear the talk and it sounds great but we've heard this before it's ortiz's and the last dev teams fault and they leave. Then it's Ian and his dev's teams fault then they leave, soon it will be Rex's fault. Sense a pattern here folks. Seems like lack of talent, lets get the cheapest guys to work on the game. The excuse of the first year and the graphics please. net gen games are out there and looking great. madden is a port so nothing ground breaking was done and it doesn't fly because the e3 trailer cam was talking about how people were blown away when they panned away from rg3 and people couldn't believe it was in game well I guess they should have stuck with their gut feeling cause it's not in game. Still doing pan outs of rg3 cam?? I doubt it you guys cant even stand behind videos released by espn which you provided wow it's not like it's a little release to YouTube it's espn COME ON MANComment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
Far more? It is the ball carrier and any user controlled player.
So 20 of the 22 players on the field are moving unrealistically.
This is why Madden feels so hectic and there is never any feeling of a true open field. The AI controlled players are skating, warping and moving completely unrealistically.
This makes the game feel like a bunch of ants warping to the ball no matter where they are on the field, or how out of position they are...Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
That part is easily misunderstood the way he said it. I'm still not sure exactly what he meant. I guess he means all players on the field, but why didn't he just say that? lol. It was confusing to me.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
"So what you'll see in the game shipping in a few weeks is True Step for all ball carriers including cpu as well as any user controlled player in the game on both sides of the ball"
Just like I said, any player the human player controls, I.e. ball carrier or defender, and the CPU
ball carrierComment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
So why is it a main feature if it's only ball carriers and human controlled defenders?... Seems like false advertising to me. Look at everything NBA 2k14 got in their launch title why couldn't Madden get a full version of a new "feature"? This is why people don't take EA seriously with what they say.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
I know some people are taking this admission of turning Madden game play into a complete NFL simulation taking a long time as an indictment of the talent of the dev team but I disagree. I think it's due to the systemic issues involved with developing Madden and this is the only way this team can accomplish it. I would never defend the Madden product because it clearly is what it is and speaks for itself but I don't blame these devs for seeming to do the best they can with what they have to work with.Comment
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Re: VSN Arcade Podcast scheduled to interview EA's Rex Dickson and Clint Oldenberg!
lol, I feel you and I'm not implying that anyone do so, heck I already stated I don't attend to buy Madden during this rebuilding. My point was that I believe given the history of the game and what info has been gleaned over the years about its' developmental challenges, this approach the current dev team is espousing is likely the only way to make Madden game play NFL realistic, under the circumstances.
If other studios are allowed to make NFL games in the near future, even though I wish this team all the best, I couldn't care less about Madden. However, if Madden is still the only NFL game about 4 years from now, I really hope this all pans out. lolComment
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