My Madden 2005 Impressions

[Sigma4Life]

Hi Fetter, thanks for the impressions. I've got several questions for you.

1. Did they slow down the speed of passes this year. In 04, the speed of passes so great that you hardly had time to react to the ball. For example, to intercept a short pass, you literally had to press triangle BEFORE the qb even released the ball. Has this been fixed? I thought NCAA did a much more realistic job of this. In that game you had time to react to the ball after it left the qb's hand.

2. How is special teams? Last year's madden was a big dissapointment. Is special teams more like NCAA this year, where they form a wedge on kick off returns?

3. Do they put the right people on punt coverage? It was really dumb has madden 04 had offensive linemen covering punts.

4. Are the zones more realistic this year? I thought NCAA did a very good job with zone defenses last year. The players moved and covered their areas in a believable fashion. In Madden they would just stand there like poles.

As you can probably see, I liked NCAA a lot more than Madden last year. I'm hoping that Madden learned a few lessons from NCAA last year.

[TMaj1972]

Thanks, Fetter. Did any of you guys get any info on whether/how the draft has been enhanced? Not so much whether they are making it more of an "event" (like ESPN is supposedly doing), but whether we can get more accurate scouting reports (or ratings) for players so there's not so much guesswork. I don't want to deal with another year of 2nd round graded players with 47 ratings.

[backbreaker]

I'm just gonna say this and let it go, the hit stick is cool, if you are quick enough to pull it off. 1, you have to switch your defender to get there the ball carrier, in rapid succession you will have to flick the hit stick in the right direction to get the desired hit. Sorry Fetter to step on your toes, Cause I talked to the rep and 1 of the developers about the cumbersome task of pressing, a face button to switch and then applying the correct direction of the hit stick. My suggestion to him was to change the mapping of the buttons to the rt. analog stick a simple press to switch and click in the direction. He thought it was a better way too pull off the hit stick, simply because its so time based.

[SportsK1NG]

Do you really want the hit stick to be that easy to do so you can do it on every tackle? Maybe they want to reward you for following the play with a player without switch. Say If you are blitzing a LB on the weakside and you are contorlling him and the CPU runs to the strongside instead of automatically switching use the same LB you are controlling and read the run and go that way and lay the lick yourself.. I don't know. But if it was super easy to get a hit stick hit every time it would be bad.

[MoL2k]

I agree....I think the harder it is to use a certain feature (Ala "Hitstick") the less abuse of it.

From the videos. The game looks a little more fluid. But it is really hard to tell.

What needs to be done to make this game even better...is lower the ratings on the players. They did this with NBA Live '04 and I thought it was genius....

I only think that 4 to 5 rookies should ever be rated in the 70's...most of them should be in the 60's and lower....

Madden '05 looks really good to me.

[Fetter21]

1. Did they slow down the speed of passes this year. In 04, the speed of passes so great that you hardly had time to react to the ball. For example, to intercept a short pass, you literally had to press triangle BEFORE the qb even released the ball. Has this been fixed? I thought NCAA did a much more realistic job of this. In that game you had time to react to the ball after it left the qb's hand. - This is something that I really wanted to see improved, and in the version of the game we were playing it was just about the exact same as last year making it near impossible for people to react on D. That's a big reason Madden always feels like the offense is over powering.

2. How is special teams? Last year's madden was a big dissapointment. Is special teams more like NCAA this year, where they form a wedge on kick off returns? Not sure, sorry.

3. Do they put the right people on punt coverage? It was really dumb has madden 04 had offensive linemen covering punts. Didn't pay attention to this, again sorry.

4. Are the zones more realistic this year? I thought NCAA did a very good job with zone defenses last year. The players moved and covered their areas in a believable fashion. In Madden they would just stand there like poles.
-From what what we saw it looked about the same. From what we've heard you'll see a difference in the All-Pro mode, but we didn't see it so it's hard to say.

[Fetter21]

Quote:

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backbreaker said:
I'm just gonna say this and let it go, the hit stick is cool, if you are quick enough to pull it off. 1, you have to switch your defender to get there the ball carrier, in rapid succession you will have to flick the hit stick in the right direction to get the desired hit. Sorry Fetter to step on your toes, Cause I talked to the rep and 1 of the developers about the cumbersome task of pressing, a face button to switch and then applying the correct direction of the hit stick. My suggestion to him was to change the mapping of the buttons to the rt. analog stick a simple press to switch and click in the direction. He thought it was a better way too pull off the hit stick, simply because its so time based.

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Not at all, I'm happy you got some info on this cause I really didn't see much happen with the hitstick.

[LBzrule]

What position did you play on defense? If you played Linebacker, did it feel comfortable, or was it slippery feeling like last year? One thing I'm looking for is a game that I feel comfortable playing linebacker and last year in madden I just couldn't play it. Didn't feel right at all