EA Targeting Madden NFL 21 Title Update #3 To Arrive on September 10 - Here Are The Details

[Steve_OS]

The Madden NFL 21 team is currently working through the testing and certification phase for title...

Written By: Steve Noah

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[Hassan Darkside]

3 patches already lol

[BaylorBearBryant]

Where is the fix for the Squads QB glitch? Are you kidding EA? How do you screw something like that up and not make it priority #1?

[YabaDaba]

Patch notes for a patch that’s 10 days away? Has that ever happened with Madden, or any EA Sports game?

Between that and the onslaught of free game codes on Twitter today, it seems clear to me that the Madden PR team is in overdrive to clean up what’s quickly become Madden’s most toxic release.

[CM Hooe]

There's a lot of good and frankly necessary stuff in this update.

Aside from that: "frienderboards" is a really dumb word.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by YabaDaba

Patch notes for a patch that’s 10 days away? Has that ever happened with Madden, or any EA Sports game?

Ignoring any and all Twitter hashtags, there are a few things that are simultaneously true:

- Madden is one of EA's most important releases annually
- EA positions Madden as a continuously-updated live-service game now
- this year's release, thanks to a variety of reasons, came in hot; Madden 21 right now is notably unpolished, even by typical AAA sports game launch window standards

I assume one reason among many for announcing patch notes so early is to get ahead of the bugs they knew about as much as they possibly could to maintain confidence of the game's early adopters such as people on OS.

[YabaDaba]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

Ignoring any and all Twitter hashtags, there are a few things that are simultaneously true: - Madden is one of EA's most important releases annually - EA positions Madden as a continuously-updated live-service game now - this year's release, thanks to a variety of reasons, came in hot; Madden 21 right now is notably unpolished, even by typical AAA sports game launch window standards I assume one reason among many for announcing patch notes so early is to get ahead of the bugs they knew about as much as they possibly could to maintain confidence of the game's early adopters such as people on OS.

The 10 days advanced notice is still unprecedented though, or is it not? Screams of “clean-up on aisle 5”. The patch cleans up the bugs. The patch notes 10 days out cleans up bad publicity.

And I really don’t think you can separate the unprecedentedly early patch notes from the game’s poor launch state and public backlash. It’s all tied together.

The game launched last week. If EA is already having to “maintain confidence of the game's early adopters”, then the problems run far deeper than anything this individual patch could hope to fix.

[JoshC1977]

EA was pretty clear in pre-launch streams that there were things that would be addressed early in the post launch cycle. These aren’t things (at least gameplay wise) they are reacting to, those things would be a month out. Pretty clear to me that these are the updates they’ve been working on and that are referenced here.