Post Launch Interview With Madden Creative Director Rex Dickson

[JayhawkerStL]

Quote: Originally Posted by howboutdat

But again,another yearly sports game is doing it..... so its more than possible, and should be what they do.Otherwise, based on his responses, we just have to eat the fact we will never really get a sim football experience we are looking for. They can not really please all 3 crowds with 1 single game style , it just can not be done.It really is the best option they can go for .If NHL can so can ,and should,Madden.

The NHL game is a perfect example of why it doesn't work. No one believes that the game is sim. The sim players still complain and pitch a fit. Players that admit they prefer arcade are ridiculed by the Superior Sim Sports Fans, even though they represent the vast majority of people that actually buy the games.

Worse, when casuals don't like a sports game, they play something else. When sim sports gamers don't like a game, the are ultra vocal about it and trash the game across the internet.

We are just in the Uncanny Valley era of sports games. They look so much better that it just exposes their weaknesses to the sim players that see the realism, but fail to understand exactly where games are at.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by PeoplesChampGB

No it doesnt. You can have tiered playcalling, wind and snow affecting fieldgoals, tuning adjustments under the hood for AI (which they do anyway) for sim. You can have one button passing, simpler controls for casual. You can have increased pass protection, deeper bombs, crazy one handed catches for arcade. You don't have to completely recreate the game like you are suggesting.

Certainly not picking on you when I say this, but I'm responding to the mindset in your text shared by many here:

The problem is: the "tourney" / "freestyle" players - those are the words used most commonly nowadays to described those who come to Madden for the online PvP experience, the Madden Challenge, etc. - who you are presumably proposing the "arcade" style toward - they do not want that "arcade" experience. They don't want NFL Blitz. They play Madden because it is Madden, not because they want to square-peg something else into the round hole Tiburon has provided for them. They want more ability to personalize their own recognizable and brand able game play style (many of the more popular and skilled people in that scene are also YouTube personalities), so adding more authentic depth to mechanics like play calling and personnel deployment is beneficial for them as well.

Their approach to how they build their game plans and strategies takes a different angle than "sim" players - they observe what works and doesn't specifically in the video game and apply what they learn from that specific training, as opposed to only sourcing strategy from the real world. There's no better example of this than the FB Dive offense that one of the Madden 16 Championship competitors implemented and rode all the way to the tournament finals at EA Play this year. That said, the tourney crowd recognizes that this sort of offense isn't realistic, it's not what you see on Sunday, and they want Madden to tone this down, to be increasingly more representative of the NFL product they watch on TV every Sunday, just like we do. As long as the game allows these not-realistic strategies to be successful, however, they are going to keep using them, because it serves their competitive interests.

Again I offer that the tourney crowd is a huge asset to Madden becoming a more "sim" game because they will do their damnedest to find the weaknesses in the game's AI and exploit those weaknesses for cash prize winnings. As Madden continues to try to legitimize itself as an e-sport, what with the $1,000,000 Madden challenge this year and all, ensuring that all the exploitative mechanics are completely stamped out of the game is going to be paramount for Tiburon. The e-sport community exposing those exploits will only help in the long run.

[335TDC]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

Certainly not picking on you when I say this, but I'm responding to the mindset in your text shared by many here: The problem is: the "tourney" / "freestyle" players - those are the words used most commonly nowadays to described those who come to Madden for the online PvP experience, the Madden Challenge, etc. - who you are presumably proposing the "arcade" style toward - they do not want that "arcade" experience. They don't want NFL Blitz. They play Madden because it is Madden, not because they want to square-peg something else into the round hole Tiburon has provided for them. They want more ability to personalize their own recognizable and brand able game play style (many of the more popular and skilled people in that scene are also YouTube personalities), so adding more authentic depth to mechanics like play calling and personnel deployment is beneficial for them as well. Their approach to how they build their game plans and strategies takes a different angle than "sim" players - they observe what works and doesn't specifically in the video game and apply what they learn from that specific training, as opposed to only sourcing strategy from the real world. There's no better example of this than the FB Dive offense that one of the Madden 16 Championship competitors implemented and rode all the way to the tournament finals at EA Play this year. That said, the tourney crowd recognizes that this sort of offense isn't realistic, it's not what you see on Sunday, and they want Madden to tone this down, to be increasingly more representative of the NFL product they watch on TV every Sunday, just like we do. As long as the game allows these not-realistic strategies to be successful, however, they are going to keep using them, because it serves their competitive interests. Again I offer that the tourney crowd is a huge asset to Madden becoming a more "sim" game because they will do their damnedest to find the weaknesses in the game's AI and exploit those weaknesses for cash prize winnings. As Madden continues to try to legitimize itself as an e-sport, what with the $1,000,000 Madden challenge this year and all, ensuring that all the exploitative mechanics are completely stamped out of the game is going to be paramount for Tiburon. The e-sport community exposing those exploits will only help in the long run.

Good points, but I think stamping out all exploits is a pipe dream, and one that the dev team shouldn't be OVERLY concerned about. It will leave them chasing their tails instead of focusing on CORE GAMEPLAY, like OL play and realistic collision results.

Hearing Rex talk about the WR dropping the open pass in a Madden tourney and how that kind of stuff concerns him makes my hair stand on end. You said it perfectly: these tourney players TAKE THE GAME AS A GAME, WITH ALL ITS EXPLOITS AND INCONSISTENCIES, and work it. That should be the end of it. The core Madden audience wants the dev team working on real football improvements.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by 335TDC

Hearing Rex talk about the WR dropping the open pass in a Madden tourney and how that kind of stuff concerns him makes my hair stand on end. You said it perfectly: these tourney players TAKE THE GAME AS A GAME, WITH ALL ITS EXPLOITS AND INCONSISTENCIES, and work it. That should be the end of it. The core Madden audience wants the dev team working on real football improvements.

That's not quite the whole story. The tourney players want to play real football, and they also want to be properly rewarded for playing the game at a high skill level.

If a tourney player throws up a bomb to Paul Richardson on a play-action he's been setting up the whole game, he doesn't want to see Richardson to drop the pass unless he's well-defended. If he throws a pass to Richardson into the teeth of the defense, that's obviously user error, and Richardson should drop it. If he throws that pass to a wide open Richardson who doesn't have the Drops Open Passes trait and he still drops it, that's what gets infuriating. That's perceived as the game deliberately overriding the user's skill level, and it undermines the legitimacy of Madden as a game of high-level turn-based and real-time skill.

As long as Madden continues to position itself as a legitimate e-sport, this is something Tiburon must be concerned about. Any mechanic which takes the outcome of the game out of the hands of the two users on the sticks harms the competitive nature of the game. Rex is absolutely correct to have concerns about this.

A simple roster edit solution for the "sim" audience for this example might be to change the Drops Open Passes trait to Yes for the vast majority of the NFL receiver population.

[JayhawkerStL]

Quote: Originally Posted by 335TDC

The core Madden audience wants the dev team working on real football improvements.

I think you might be overestimating who the core Madden audience is.

[charter04]

Quote: Originally Posted by 335TDC

My stomach turned every time I heard the head dev use the phrase "bad value proposition." Especially when referring to fixing OL play. UGH. The one thing I took from this is what I think a lot of people fear: that the dev team wants to make good football choices, but they ultimately bow to this wishes of the corporate higher ups.

Of course they have to bow to the people they work for some. Doesn't everyone? I don't understand how you thought any thing else was true. This isn't a shocking revelation

[charter04]

Quote: Originally Posted by SmashMan

Same here. I run a decent amount of overloads and haven't encountered nano detection yet. Of course, with the Bears D I'm also just happy when I get a guy that breaks through.

I've only had it happen to me once the whole time I've played the game.

[CM Hooe]

Closing this thread to redirect any further discussion to the new news post: http://www.operationsports.com/forum...7-4-verts.html