My Madden 2005 Impressions

[Fetter21]

Gameplay is really hard to judge off of this built. Since clearly in what we got to play and see at E3 there was a major problem with the deep ball. We tried doing everything we could to see the QB just toss up a poor pass and they were still throwing accurate and fast. We were told by someone that spoke with the lead developer that this problem will only be in the lower difficulty levels, and if you're playing on All-Pro you'll not get away with anything like this, as well as the D will play a much smarter zone than what we got to see at E3 on the harder difficulty levels.

Franchise mode is somewhat adding a story mode this year. If players are unhappy about playing time they'll complain to your position coach, and you'll receive and E-mail from him. At that point you don't have to do anything about it, but if you don't the player's rating might drop. If the player keeps feeling like there is a problem he'll go contact the press and you could see this story popping up in the local or the national press. And eventually if things don't get better his rating will drop as well as he could demand a trade. All indications pointed to this being a lot of fun and a good addition to add some story to the franchise mode. You'll also get a Tony Bruno show each week where he'll talk about your previous game and take callers, so fans might call in talking about how amazing the team played, or just bashing you cause you couldn't get anything right in your big loss. There are suppose to be about 20,000 different stories that can come up, and it could also include your ticket sales dropping or fans being unhappy with you as an owner. One cool thing they added is that you can finally practice with your franchise team, so you'll have a practice mode with them, but I do not believe that practicing with them will increase their ratings in anyway, it should just allow you to get more comfortable with your team and try out plays you might other wise not wanna try in a game.

There will be online play, and tournaments. As far as leagues go, they're not talking about that right now. We asked every single EA guy we talked to hoping that someone might let something slip, but they were all tight lipped. From the sounds of things,I'm assuming they're gonna have online leagues, and that they haven't gotten all of that quite figured out yet and it's better to say we don't know, than say yes they'll be there, even if there's a 5% chance they won't. Again, that's just what I interpreted out of asking all of them over and over. "They're looking into the possibility of online leagues." At this point they don't seem to know or be willing to say much more about online play, but that announcement should come in June. Shawn did play a developer and I got nearly the whole thing on film, so that will be the Broncos vs. Chargers game I believe, where you can see what that'll look like, really it looks the same as multiplayer, but it says online in the bottom right corner and it has the replay or a shot of your guys in the huddle instead of the other persons playbook at the top (from what I can recall, but again you guys can see the videos soon hopefully). Not being able to notice much of a difference between online and multiplayer is a great thing since there didn't seem to be lag or slow down when I was watching the game.

Eddie noticed a slowdown on the PS2 version that would happen right after the snap, Shawn and other people always saw it, but people seemed to get in my way or I'd have my head turned every time that happened so I personally haven't seen it. Since it's only in the PS2 version I'd assume they'd have that fixed for release.

-The run blocking is still disappointing, and doesn't seem to have much change in this year’s build than in the past.

-Even on All-Pro QBs still should be able to rocket the ball as fast as ever if they're standing in the pocket, but on the run they said they'd changed that so it won't be nearly as effective.

-A very noticeable change to this years game is that now on Kickoffs the camera spins around when the kicker kicks off, instead of it happening when your reciever catches the ball. Shouldn't effect gameplay, but it'll be something everyone will see since it'll happen at least twice a game.

-I really didn't do much with the hit stick, so I can't answer questions on that part of the game.

[NYJets]

Thanks, good impressions.

[LBzrule]

Fetter 1 question. The defensive adjustments, out of all the gameplay vids from OS, gamespot, and everywhere else I've looked, when it is a head to head game, I don't see people using the defensive adjustments. Now my inital assumption was well maybe the users are forgettiing about them. But then I have to ask, are they hard to pull off in 2 player games because the 2nd player just gets to the line and hikes it and you have no time?

[SportsK1NG]

Hmm.. that is REALLY lame they didn't let you play on higher difficulties beacuse it is almost like 2 different games. Only Rookie/Pro someone who barely knew how to play should have success most of the time just because the CPU is programmed to be dumb and your AI is programmed to be smart.. on All-Pro, All-Madden is where the realism comes in and they didn't even have it set on that for the demo. Oh well... we will have to wait.

[dieselboy]

Quote:

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NYJets37 said:
Thanks, good impressions.

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[deejay8595]

1.Did you try the hitstick?
2.Did you see more varied animations throughout the game?
3.Was there challenges online?
4.Did you try the pre-snap defensive playmaker?
5.How was the movement of the game?

[mjb2124]

Quote:

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deejay8595 said:
1.Did you try the hitstick?
2.Did you see more varied animations throughout the game?
3.Was there challenges online?
4.Did you try the pre-snap defensive playmaker?
5.How was the movement of the game?

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He answered #1 with his last sentence. No he didn't use it.

[wco81]

All the talk seems to be about the defensive hotroutes instead of whether the DB AI is any improved.

The observation that long passes were too easy to complete sounds like same old same old. It is true that Rookie and Pro levels are a joke as far as defenses go but it doesn't sound good to hear it still remains.

As for whether there is time to do all the presnap adjustments, one thing that would make a big difference is if they let you start making adjustments before the offense gets to the LOS. In NCAA, they forced you to wait, even to make offensive auds or hot routes. That had to do with Fairplay I believe, as it was different offline.

So you wonder what Fairplay will let you do in Madden, where there is more of a focus on strategy and presnap adjustments than in NCAA.

Plus, I think against certain players who do a lot of offensive presnap adjustments, you will obviously have time to react. For instance, in Madden 2003, you could motion and snap in the middle of the motion a lot more easily online than with Madden 2004, again, probably because of Fairplay. But of course there were still exceptions on some plays/formations and there was still the motion glitch.

Maybe the presnap stuff will end up being better on paper than in practice. But it's something we've been asking for and it's better to have than not.