Pre-season games - meaningless?

[bucky60]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

People just lose me completely when they start trying to claim how easy it would be to do, they typically ignore 'little' things like the code is from a last gen game, and all of the other AI and complications that would likely go along with it. Same with 'give us options' as if options are free and don't require resources to add, maintain and increase complexity.

Well, a selling point of CCM/CFM was how they could add more features, more quickly, with fewer man hours by eliminating the duplication of effort. If this is true, then I think we should be seeing more progress each iteration from one game to the next. I expected more progress.

Here they are again, redoing something they just did last year. They are replacing XP generating practice with other forms of XP generation. They must have decided that last years wasn't very good. I think they could avoid this problem by just using the actual NFL as a guideline. If they would have modeled player progression after how progression happens in real life, they might not be redoing/replacing the same area after just one year.

[GiantBlue76]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

Well, a selling point of CCM/CFM was how they could add more features, more quickly, with fewer man hours by eliminating the duplication of effort. If this is true, then I think we should be seeing more progress each iteration from one game to the next. I expected more progress.

Here they are again, redoing something they just did last year. They are replacing XP generating practice with other forms of XP generation. They must have decided that last years wasn't very good. I think they could avoid this problem by just using the actual NFL as a guideline. If they would have modeled player progression after how progression happens in real life, they might not be redoing/replacing the same area after just one year.

Could not agree more. Nothing has changed in the career mode area from a development standpoint. Gameplay wise, Rex has attempted to put a stake in the ground on building on what they create instead of rip and replace (which is very commendable). Doesn't seem to have filtered to the career mode team. Every iteration is a redo. This is the 3rd year of CFM, and practice/development has changed all 3 versions. This particular version completely throws out last year's implementation.

Oh - and no one says building anything is necessarily "easy", but it's not nearly as hard as they want you to believe. There are other studios that are building things FAR more complex than the career mode of Madden in much shorter time spans with far less resources. Not to mention, CFM has been in development for 5 years as Looman stated they started developing it 2 years before it was released. That's a long time to still be behind other career modes. That being said, everyone is different, and some people are more accepting than others. Nothing wrong with it.

[mestevo]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

Well, a selling point of CCM/CFM was how they could add more features, more quickly, with fewer man hours by eliminating the duplication of effort. If this is true, then I think we should be seeing more progress each iteration from one game to the next. I expected more progress.

Here they are again, redoing something they just did last year. They are replacing XP generating practice with other forms of XP generation. They must have decided that last years wasn't very good. I think they could avoid this problem by just using the actual NFL as a guideline. If they would have modeled player progression after how progression happens in real life, they might not be redoing/replacing the same area after just one year.

You'd have a point if my reply wasn't referring to someone saying it should be easy to port code from NCAA on last gen consoles to current gen.

Oh - and no one says building anything is necessarily "easy",

It would be simple to incorporate as the programming code is very similar between the two games

[bucky60]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

You'd have a point if my reply wasn't referring to someone saying it should be easy to port code from NCAA on last gen consoles to current gen.

My point might not be refuting yours, but I still have a point.

I expect gameplay improvements to be a little more slow moving than career mode improvements. I very much believe gameplay is much more difficult to program. Every change made in gameplay effects stats generated and is a difficult balancing act.

The things I can see that need balancing in a career mode are progression, AI roster management (trade, draft, cuts, etc) and salary. Career modes are much easier to program than gameplay and we should be seeing greater strides in the career modes. If we would see this, a lot of criticism's would just disappear.

I really believe EA/Tib handcuff themselves by tying progression to stats since gameplay is so difficult to balance. They are trying to balance something (progression) on something that is inherently difficult to balance (gameplay stats), but it is also an unrealistic way to represent progression. I can see having playing time have some impact on progression.

I believe if EA/Tib would cut this tie they have with gameplay stats and base progression on real life variables, it would be much easier for them to balance progression and could be spending much more time creating more depth in other areas of career mode.

So my point wasn't really to refute you saying it would be difficult to take last gen NCAA code and incorporate it into madden. Sorry if it seemed that way. My point was that what you said should not be an excuse for madden not having these features people are asking for. Features that exist in other games of the same genre.

I do apologize because I wasn't clear enough on the intentions of my post.

[PPerfect_CJ]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

I haven't bought Madden in a couple of years, but what I really hated about preseason is the player cuts. The way the computer would cut REAL players and keep some of EA's fake undrafted free agents. Hope that doesn't still happen, but I'm guessing that it's probably still there.

[Hooe]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

I haven't bought Madden in a couple of years, but what I really hated about preseason is the player cuts. The way the computer would cut REAL players and keep some of EA's fake undrafted free agents. Hope that doesn't still happen, but I'm guessing that it's probably still there.

The fake undrafted free agents that were generated for teams during Preseason Week 1 only existed in Madden NFL 12. That feature hasn't appeared in any other Madden game. To that end, you have nothing to worry about.

[horrormaster]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

Although this is mostly meaningless to today's (or any Madden game since), the last time I played a preseason game was when there was no preseason games. On Madden '98 I would sign some of the free agents and play 4 games before I started a season (no franchise or dynasty was available), alternating between players through the game, every game. I found that certain players that had weaker ratings than others (no OVR in that game) performed better than those with higher ratings.

I honestly put way too many hours into that game.

[Indyboy180]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

So after looking into it, it looks like Madden 25 also had you repeat the same four preseason games over and over and over. This somewhat irks me, now yes at times you do play the same teams in the preseason (Lions always play the Browns, etc) but I'd like some variety. I'll probably ask somewhat with Access to look into it during open questions.

[PPerfect_CJ]

Re: Pre-season games - meaningless?

The fake undrafted free agents that were generated for teams during Preseason Week 1 only existed in Madden NFL 12. That feature hasn't appeared in any other Madden game. To that end, you have nothing to worry about.

Good deal! Sure happy to hear that.