What Are Your Thoughts on Madden's Franchise Mode as We Head Towards Madden 24?

[illwill10]

I agree that Madden would benefit from overhauling a couple areas of the game. I would love to see them skip a year and just focusing on building some of areas from the ground up. But that'll never happen with how the licenses work. It just feels like they are building upon a broken foundation. The problem is that it feels like Madden is too big to fail. No matter how Madden is perceived, it'll continue to hit benchmarks for sales. Madden has to hit certain benchmarks to unlock the extra year of this current license extension. I don't see a reason why they wouldn't.

I can understand the skepticism for those who think the next CFB game will be any different than Madden. I think the hope is that, outside of glitches, they did a good job with Recruiting/Dynasty and they still have a few members from that NCAA dev team on staff. For as revered as NCAA 14 is, I really didn't care for the streamlined approach to the game as a whole. They really dumbed the game down in attempt to make it more accessible to more gamers. They took away the complexity and depth of the game. But even then, I still got like 10 seasons in with my Dynasty. Football isn't a sport where you can streamline it too much without taking away of what it is intended to be. At the very least, the gameplay would have to really blow it away to get away with trying to streamline the off the field aspect. I do think it'd be easier to take a dumbed down approach with CFB than NFL. With CFB, as long as you got a good foundation with recruiting, coach carousel, College Atmosphere, and now transfer portal, those are the primary aspects of the sport you have to capture in order to represent it, even if it is streamlined. With the NFL, I feel there is so much more you can't skip out on. So as long as CFB can put the emphasis on recruiting, coach carousel, atmosphere, and transfer portal, it should be an enjoyable game. The Madden team could never really match the NFL atmosphere like the NCAA team could with the College atmosphere.

[MHammer113]

These are all really good suggestions. The thought process of skipping a year to make the changes isn’t going to happen nor should it need to.

The one thing I truly do not understand is how the NFL, which controls so much of their product can sit by idly as their “simulation” game is far from it. I understand sales are good for Madden but I do believe that the game is a bit embarassing from a simulation experience.

[JoeRodgers1175]

I’m actually enjoying franchise mode (lowered expectations and whatnot) but here are a few things that bug me and need to be fixed:

- The playoff picture screen is incomplete. The brackets are fine, but there should be a second screen that shows division leaders, current wild cards and teams still in the hunt.

- The start times of all playoff games don’t change year over year. The No. 1 team in the NFC always gets the late Sunday night divisional game and the night conference championship game. Mix it up. There’s also no Monday night playoff game, even though that started last year.

- The playoff broadcasts are all jacked up. I’ve heard multiple times during the postseason when they show the injury report that teams should rest players to make sure they’re ready for the playoffs. Two issues: obviously that line of script shouldn’t be in the playoffs, and Madden doesn’t even give us the option of deciding whether to play players and maybe risk injury. They’re either healthy or out.

- There’s a few other audio bugs that bother me. For example, they keep calling Week 16 the penultimate week of the season. It hasn’t been that way for two years! Update that!

But again, the biggest priority is making sure the mode is playable and that current features work as intended.

[Kanobi]

Better gameday and between-game presentation would go a long way in bolstering the enjoyment amd replay value of CFM.

People often champion Madden 2005 not for its gameplay or depth but for the Tony Bruno show and the life it breathed into franchise mode. Same for NFL2k5 and its ESPN-saturated franchise and GameDay presentation.

EA has two prime examples (besides Deuce's manifesto) from 19..NINETEEN years ago of precisely how to enliven CFM and the game as a whole. There are no excuses.

[malky]

I agree with most, presentation has went WAY DOWN HILL, all they have to do is go back a few years to Madden 17 and 18. Half the stuff they had in those versions have disappeared.

[jmch1990]

Changing my original answer:

After this past week, the biggest thing is trust.

I no longer trust the mode to just work, and because of that I cannot justify spending my money on it.

Unless there is a massive change in how Madden handles their servers and their comms (they literally told people to play the mode when doing so is what corrupted the files), I don't look forward to anything anymore because I won't be buying it. It's as simple as that.

[Dagan]

And, if I may, I will piggy-back off of the last post.

I, too, need to trust that each mode isn't so tied to the others per any coding or servers somehow. More than ever, I think it is beyond obvious how much these different modes need to be their own, completely different games without any coding link. When they fix Franchise, it would be its own thing/game and not somehow screw up MUT, or vice-versa, etc. etc. Online and Offline, I seriously wish would be completely different things, too. Yeah, I understand that I will still have to DL updates and such to an offline game, but there's a ton other BS online that I can't stand and just don't want or need at all, ever. The online game should be just a differently coded and/or in-the-cloud game, stay there and never interfere with or infect/affect my offline experience whatsoever. If it was an impossibility, I wouldn't mention it, but it's very, very possible, and it's looking like it's pretty necessary for the very, very near future.

I also mentioned several times in other threads, this is all exponentially more possible now, with the fact that games don't require physical purchases much anymore. I don't see why they couldn't just become the first company to up and say that they won't sell physical copies without pre-order (therefore they are print-on-demand, like books sold through amazon, et.al.) and just make the cost savings immediately. The point being that the argument of not doing the above suggestions over complications to sales overhead - that argument's strength is lessening past 1% already, seems to me. I mean, what consoles are even being bought/sold lately? The digital ones. You can always argue nintendo, I guess, but you can't argue it for Madden.

The biggest thing overall is that all of what I've mentioned seems like the way obvious, best business move to boost and secure profits and into a foreseeable, long, stable future, that it could have been for a few years already, and they just don't see it. I mean this in terms of whomever is truly in charge of said decision, too. The tip top boss man/lady. They are dropping the ball.

[JoeRodgers1175]

Fix FA logic.

In the 2034 offseason, the Chargers didn’t re-sign 36-year-old Justin Herbert. OK. I can see that.

Herbert lands with… Buffalo, where a 38-year-old Josh Allen is still going strong. So I used my secondary account to take control of Buffalo and trade Allen to a QB-needy team.

Ugh. I wish the player tags mattered in free agency.