Madden Is Turning 25 This Year, Time To Take The Training Wheels Off

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Broken Stixx

We should be allowed to toggle the training wheels on, and off shouldn't we?

In a word, yes. Anything added to help new players ease into the game quite obviously should be optional. The most recent examples of such additions into Madden I can think of are GameFlow and Strategy Pad, both of which are optional for more experienced players.

My comment was to merely state that I simultaneously think Madden is not doing enough to help out either group of players between the veterans and the newbies and should strive to do better to both ends.

[CM Hooe]

Another idea to the idea of "taking the training wheels off", and another thing drawn from Forza -

In Forza, difficulty is all based on the skill level of the AI. Putting the game on Hard doesn't give the opponent cars boosts in horsepower or enable rubber-band AI (a staple of some racing games). Rather, the game makes the AI race harder and with more skill. Rephrased: on Easy, the AI won't attempt corners at the maximum possible speed and is more passive in responding to aggressive passing attempts by the player, whereas as the difficulty increases the AI opponents drive faster around corners - still within the limits of the car, just increasingly closer to said limits - and they are more aggressive in defending their racing lines against the player looking to overtake.

It might be interesting to see Madden take such an approach to all difficulty levels. Tune the game once to how Tiburon wants it to play (leave sliders in the game, of course, everyone has their own personal preferences). Having done this, reconfigure all difficulty options to affect things like playcalling variety, the ability of quarterbacks to make pre-snap adjustments, the number of pre-snap looks a defense shows a player, and so forth; that is, no ratings boosts or penalties via difficulty adjustment whatsoever (All Madden is famous for ratings boosts to AI players).

For example, on the easiest difficulty setting, the AI's offensive playcalling could be completely predictable - 1st down run, 2nd down run, 3rd down pass, never blitz. On the hardest setting, the AI conversely would work hard to actively confuse the player with audibles, shifts, a variety of playcalls and formations, be more likely to call fake punts and field goals, and so on. Basically, have the difficulty setting affect the robustness of the AI's football strategy rather than the interactions of the players on the field.

Just a thought.

[SageInfinite]

The only problem with that is there is no short cut and Tiburon would have to put in some real work, lol. Are they up for the task? The AI in Madden seems like it hasn't been touched this whole generation.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by SageInfinite

The only problem with that is there is no short cut and Tiburon would have to put in some real work, lol. Are they up for the task? The AI in Madden seems like it hasn't been touched this whole generation.

I think it's unlikely we see such a radical modification for Madden 25, to be perfectly honest. Most annual sports titles don't really see wholesale changes to the AI even over an entire console cycle (I could be wrong, but I can't think of any), but some games are better able to iterate on the in-place base year-over-year than others. IMO it's probably more realistic to hope for major AI changes upon the jump to the next-gen consoles.

A particularly bad example is Yukes' WWE video games. I don't think the AI has fundamentally changed since the first one - WWF Smackdown - released on the PSX in 2000. The gameplay focus of that series has quite obviously always been multiplayer. To a lesser extent, I think a similar problem has held back the single-player experience in Madden as well.

[Big FN Deal]

@CMHooe, I couldn't agree more with that kind of approach and critical thinking when it comes to addressing issues in a simulation, you expressed in your next to last two posts. My question to you, as someone I believe to have interactions with EA football devs and software development in general is, do they take this kind of approach to problem solving when brainstorming for EA football games? I don't mean that as any kind of slight either, I am asking that in all seriousness because it confounds me.

We have various gamers all over OS and the internets at large, that while passionate about football gaming, don't spend months developing them throughout the year or focus on improving them for a living. Yet they can spend a few sporadic hours or days discussing issues with fellow gamers through various mediums and hash out some seemingly insightful solutions, that seem to evade those tasked with doing it for a living, for long stretches of time. I understand that perception is not unique to EA football games because I still occasionally rant to anyone that has known me for a considerable length of time, that I had been asking Taco Bell to provide a Dorito Taco since 1995 and am currently lobbying any major pizza chain that will listen to have a breakfast pizza on a biscuit or pancake crust, lol. However since this is a Madden forum, I am directing this at Tiburon and what you think might be the cause of this. Is it a group think, silo effect, can't see the forest for the trees kind of thing because they are too close to it all or what?

To be a little more clear on what I am, maybe unfairly, asking you, the instances I am referencing can't be explained with the oft used tangible developmental limitations, lack of resources, time, bugs, etc. Reason being, I am referring to things like, Tiburon coming to the same conclusion as everyone else that's paying attention, that there needs to be a bull rush animation in-game, having the necessary resources and going ahead to add it but motion capturing an animation that looks nothing like a football bull rush. We all make mistakes so I am really not trying to over criticize Tiburon but what they make gets seen/played by millions of people, what's your POV on how those kinds of things happen, considering you have a more personal connection with the process?

Anybody else with insights into game development feel free to chime in as well.

[CM Hooe]

Foremost, again, I'm not a GameChanger and I don't have contacts within Tiburon or EA Austin beyond a friend who just took a job there. Anything here is my opinion alone.

That out of the way, I think the issue with Madden is two-fold.

One, no way around it, the series fell flat on its face coming out of the gates on the current-generation consoles. I quite enjoyed M10, M12, and have throughly enjoyed M13, but I couldn't be bothered to touch Madden for the first three iterations on the console. Between the barebones reimplementation of the first version and then what I call a "Madden culture" development direction of the first few subsequent games (tournament mode, Ring Builder, Weapons), the goals of the development team simply didn't jive with the wishes of communities such as this one, and certainly not aligned with my interests in what I wanted from a football game.

Since the end of the Madden NFL 09 cycle, however, I think there's been a rather obvious shift in the intended direction of the game to a direction more based in reality. Features such as Pro-Tak, RTP, Game-Flow, etc., regardless of how successful they have been to this point, were all intended to make the football gameplay more fun by making it more realistic and more dynamic. Basically, the game started off as an arcade game and has been morphed over time into one more grounded in reality. However, switching gears in focus and design goals so drastically midstream likely means the current code base is poorly equipped to handle sweeping changes for a more sim-oriented direction without significant investment.

That flows into my second point, which is the reality of making a AAA game on the current consoles. Sports game devs have their work cut out for them; in ten months, they must deliver a high-quality game building upon the work of the previous effort yet differentiating it enough to stand on its own as a great individual game. Conversely, most AAA games outside the sports genre see development times of several years; the highly-lauded Bioshock Infinite was originally announced as an upcoming title in August 2010. From that perspective, it's incredibly easy to understand the complaints about lack of resources, lack of time, etc. etc. Any potential major game change likely must be vetted many times to make sure the team can get it done in the time available and in tandem with whatever other game additions and changes have already been agreed upon or mandated by high-level executives (speculating to this end, Ultimate Team in NCAA Football 14 comes to mind).

To this end, I have little doubt that there was a ton of teeth-gnashing at EA about Connected Careers mode internally when it was merely an idea on paper; what other system within the game has been introduced mid-cycle with two years of lead time before its first appearance? I'm guessing the same teeth-gnashing has likely happened before on the subject of, say, offensive line play and defensive line interactions with said new OL play. I'm also guessing any OL-DL wholesale overhauls are always been tabled because: A - it might take more than one cycle of effort to do it properly (a huge expenditure of resources), and B - OL-DL interaction isn't a "sexy" topic, if you will; it's not an improvement that Joe Gamer is going to immediately notice, so anything that Joe Gamer would notice as a "new" thing - be it lead blocking control, refined pass leading controls, real-time physics, a new playcalling interface, or any other more tangible gameplay addition / adjustment - always gets priority. The team probably feels hamstrung to an extent by the short dev cycle relative to other AAA games and ergo will tend to reach for the low-hanging fruit, with a few notable exceptions, each year.

tl;dr - I think the bad start to the series on current generation consoles and the realities of trying to overhaul a game annually are holding Madden back right now from what it could be.

EDIT - this is sorta off-topic from the original purpose of the thread, so it might be worthwhile to branch off this discussion into a new one.

[Big FN Deal]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

...tl;dr - I think the bad start to the series on current generation consoles and the realities of trying to overhaul a game annually are holding Madden back right now from what it could be. EDIT - this is sorta off-topic from the original purpose of the thread, so it might be worthwhile to branch off this discussion into a new one.

Snipped it for size. I am not trying to be off topic and actually think this kind of ties into the thread title because I am inquiring about the potential mindset of those creating EA football games, that prevent them from seeing the seemingly obvious benefit of having more options to "take the training wheels off". I wonder if the bad start of the series may somehow be the cause of some lingering bad habits and concepts to approaching how to solve football issues in the game.

Another example, which I posted earlier in this thread is concerning hidden ratings, where the devs openly admitted they could easily add it. No design complications, resource issues, etc, they could do it tomorrow but chose not to because they felt it would be too difficult to evaluate players for those that want it. This was in a podcast in response to a gamer submitted question, about an option that there is obviously some interest in by more than just a handful of gamers and they just decide no to the OPTION, because those gamers don't really want that without some other scouting interface. What is that? lol

[hanzsomehanz]

@CM Hooe I would love to see your feedback flourish in the next gen consoles. Your posts captured the essence of how difficulty should and could be translated in Football and the broad spectrum of sports gaming.

My takeaways
*AI that is affected by aggressive v passive tendencies
*AI that is predictable vs very unpredictable

The logic is seamless and I appreciate that.

Cheers!

*The use of sampling Forzas difficulty mechanics went well with my undetstanding of how that same difficulty sysyem could carry-over to Madden.

Sent from my SGH-I727R using Tapatalk 2