I have much the same outlook......On the one hand Im glad the old school novelty of Madden is back with 12 and that the devs seem to want to provide a deeper/more authentic game to the core football junkies
I can see the effort to appeal to that base this year....with things like the franchise editing/bidding/scouting/....Authentic Broadcast Cams...DPP..and their attempts at improving Consecutive Hit Tackling/Zone D
But I think what this review and many others like are saying is.....
"The Paper isn't Complete...you just have a good rough outline again"
before, you could say the game wasn't even writing on paper....it was just "A drawing in the sand"
Thats how I viewed the Last Gen football games....like it was a great Rough Outline but it lacked the horse power of good tech to flesh out the body....That was ok at the time, but its 2011 now, more and more people want the game to evolve past the legacy issues and Madden Sterotypes
People are tired of saying "Thats just Madden being Madden" so much
That means not shifting focus again into some new marketing slogan, but doubling down in the areas that were focused on this year
It means investing serious dollars into just about every facet of the gameplay again
And you know what Im talking about mostly, this Review hit the big Areas.....that means the Legacy Issues
*A much more realistic/expansive movement system complete with Tons of animation variety for different speeds/cuts...Transitional Animations
FTW!!!The Zig Zaggng Arcade stuff has to get cut down immensely
Thats the biggest one^^^The devs are going to have to give a little in Player Control to make that work.....Thats an area where they have to man up and say yeah....little Timmy might have a harder time grasping when to use certain stick movements, but Players are playing/approaching the situation with a realistic plan now.....because the freedom to move out of that bad situation through Our "GameDesign" has now been limited
And thats the point of it, people are starting to get tired of having to always gameplan around the Madden brand of football.......Madden Strategies and Real life Football strategies need to look much more closely alike then they are today moving forward