Graphics question...

[tinpanalley]

I'm playing on 360. Just played the game for the first time yesterday. I do like all the UI and presentation, it's fantastic and to my eyes a lot less busy and confusing than Madden of years past. To be fair, I've only ever managed maybe 10 complete seasons of Madden since the first ones I played on PC around 1990. It's just that FIFA and NHL (watching and playing) tend to take up my time in the autumn/winter.

To my question... Is it just me or is there a degradation of gameplay graphics? Is it possible that to get certain features and physics in that they've had to actually lower the graphics quality? Because I could have sworn that previous Maddens looked better than this. I have seen, in just the one game I played, PS2/XBOX era clipping and compositing issues. There are bizarre head turns, robotic canned animations and I don't recall seeing anything this bad in terms of player faces in recent years. In fact it reminded me of playing 2K hockey when it got near its end in the previous generation of consoles. I haven't seen anyone else mention it so I thought I'd ask. I used to go into replay mode just to look at the amazing graphics quality and textures of uniforms and face detail and when I did the same yesterday there were certain things I looked at that could have passed for the kinds of graphics you see on really badly graphically developed games. The faces in create a player mode literally look like HD versions of the random heads you'd get on the PS2/XBOX.

If anyone sees the same or knows if there is any validity to this, I'd love to know.

Thanks!