I am still positive about the Madden team for trying to improve line play. Line play is the most difficult element to capture in a video game. I am hoping in the next couple of years the Madden team would continue to put time and resources on both side of the line of scrimmage.
2k8 is a nice model but I am hoping Team Madden will surpass 2k8 line play in the near future.
After playing alot of the better players in AP2K8 you come to appriciate how REALLY important the Oline/Dline interaction is in a football game. We often cry about DB's ability to cover in man or zone, but the engine that makes your squad effective overall and effects all that other stuff is how well your dline and oline are playing.
The 2K games enforce this because everything ties into it. The QB drops, the pass routes, are all tied into how well/bad the Oline can perform its job. That inturn affects your play calling, what type of squd you run with etc.
Madden the way it has played is a arcade game trying to emulate a football game.
I got a prediction. If Madden does manage to bring some of the football stuff spoken of here to their game, alot of guys in this thread crying about "2K aint fun, blah blah blah" are gonna be puzzled/crying when Madden 2010 drops. Because the style of gameplay that allowed them to make that game "FUN" for them aint gonna work in a game that does not allow alot of the BS we currently see in Madden games.
When you cant chuck a ball to a WR anytime you feel like it, when you cant throw the ball with high accuarcy any distance with 98% of the QB's in the game, when you cant scramble around the pocket at will, when you cant rocket catch, when you cant shut down run formations from dime/quarters, when you cant find your money plays, like you cant in AP2K8. The whaling and nashing of teeth will begin. They will sit in their corner with their joystick in their left hand and a bible in their right, wondering when did the world end and why were they not informed ?
In addition to the things that have been discussed here, one of the things that needs to change is the psychic ability of linemen on one side of the formation to peel back and pick up blitzers coming from the complete opposite side of the formation, which really neuters a lot of the zone blitzes. Like you'll have blitzes where you drop a DE on one side off, and bring a slot corner or safety off the other side, and the tackle that was originally responsible for the DE will, at the snap of the ball, turn and run at a perfect angle to pick up the blitzer.
If you play around with it, it's clear that the OL is basically psychic in it's ability to identify which players are blitzing and which aren't. You can counteract it somewhat by manually "fake" blitzing (rushing in briefly and then dropping back into coverage), and some plays have DEs who do those sort of assignments by default, which will cause the pressure to get there, but it's still ridiculous to watch an OT peel back and block a nickleback coming off the edge on the complete opposite side of the formation. And this will happen regardless of ratings, so it's not even a skill issue.
Last year (08) the blitzing defenses gave the OL huge problems because they didn't have slide protection. This year, they went way too far in making the OL able to recognize blitzes on the fly. They need to have the OL pass block logic basically be the same as last year, and add in the slide protections as they were implemented on last-gen.
I actually pointed this out at CD. I almost yelled actually. But got a hold of myself and one of the programmers and asked, "where is the procedural awareness for the Oline, there is no way he should be able to ...." He said in the final build it shouldn't happen. I'm waiting on this one because if it does grrrrrrrrrr.
05-20-2009, 05:20 AM
