One week after release, did Madden 13 live up to the hype?

[secondsolution]

So Madden has been out for about a week across the globe (including season pass) and my question is, did it live up to the hype?

In my opinion it didn't. This is partially my fault for hyping it up so much to myself, however I also believe EA played their part. The Infinity Engine is a great edition, I couldn't imagine going back to Madden 12 now as the physics makes the gameplay feel so much better. Unfortunately, the bad A.I ruins any impact that the IE made. I no longer feel challenged, seeing the computer run 30 times a game into the back of their centre and fall down became stale fast.

Connected Careers was what really made me excited, I watched all of the webcasts and videos of Josh Looman talking it up. I heard Josh say multiple times "WE WON'T PUT IT IN UNLESS IT IS PERFECT". Well that's a fine excuse to leave many loved features out, it was an excuse that I agreed with. I had no problem with sacrificing these features for a revolutionary mode that offline and online gamers will get hours of satisfaction. What I don't understand is that with this view of not letting anything in unless it is perfect does the mode launch with so many bugs!

In my opinion Connected Careers is a year away from being equal to the old franchise mode, the immersion that it was intended to bring is consistently broken by obvious bugs. Such as the twitter feed telling everyone they had a bad year because of a certain position even though you had just won the superbowl. A lot of these bugs were found within the first day or so users playing the game, so how did the developers miss them?

I'll finish my rant by saying this. With all my complaints, I do believe that Madden 13 is a step in the right direction, however I feel that they have tried to achieve too much in a rather small development cycle. My only hope is that this game is successfully patched to make it more enjoyable and that EA continues to build on what was done this year.

[BearClaw]

For me yes because i didn't expect it to be anything spectacular and didn't pay attention to an prerelease coverage, blogs, or videos. I went in cold and much to my surpass the game was incredibly good, FOR ME