How to Make Madden Appealing to Text-Simmers

[RaychelSnr]

Believe it or not, all text simmers are not complete snobs. Some of us enjoy taking a break from staring at statistics and doing a little button mashing. However, text simmers are a picky bunch. No matter how hard certain game designers try to woo us, we will probably never completely come over to the dark side. Simulation-style features may grab our attention for a while, and may even get us to acknowledge that games like Madden occasionally get a few things right.

But the only way text simmers will truly embrace an Madden-style game is if, well, it holds up against other text sims. We need realism, customization, challenges, meaningful evaluation methods and, yes, even graphics.

So I will use Madden 10 as our example. What would it take to turn Madden into a top-flight football text sim while at the same time maintaining its position as the king of football games?

Read More - How to make Madden appealing to text-simmers

[Pared]

Re: How to Make Madden Appealing to Text-Simmers

A lot of that falls within simming a franchise. Shouldn't an article in this vain also include a discussion for simming through a game, not just to finish it?

Give them an ESPN GameDay style setup and allow them to play the game without playing the game.

[teebee]

Gameday is mlb.com; ESPN is Gamecast FYI

[CreatineKasey]

I'm sure the franchise in Madden is unacceptable for text sim football gamers. Really, my biggest draw would be a simulation league against other users (no CPU). That isn't possible in Madden at the moment.

I'm more of the type who likes playing the games, though. It'd take some exceptional structure and features to get me playing a managerial-type mode... coach mode maybe.

[jyoung]

Head Coach was a great sim game.

Shame they haven't incorporated the sim engine from Head Coach into Madden.

Or the playbook creator, for that matter.

[Trooper]

Am I dumb for not knowing what a "text simmer" is?

[KBLover]

Re: How to Make Madden Appealing to Text-Simmers

Am I dumb for not knowing what a "text simmer" is?

Players who play games that are light on graphics but have a lot of depth/stats/strategy in them. Typically, these games are also very light on direct user control of players, if not no control at all.

Games like OOTP, Front Office Football, Football Mogul would fall under the "text sim" umbrella.

Football Pro is pretty darn close, though you could also control the action if you wanted. I guess that would be closer to coach mode in Madden with a much better sim engine.

Head Coach is also close. You have no control over your players and has a lot of depth. I guess you could call HC a "graphical text sim" as it did have a lot of text, just more graphical being on a console and such.

[dfos81]

Re: How to Make Madden Appealing to Text-Simmers

I don't know what kind of gamer I am but, I would've liked M10 even more if it gave us more randomness on the animations, cutscenes, etc. and also produced stats similar to what we see on NFL.com. and the l8r we get into the year the more the presentation should wow us. Pre-season, Reg-season, and playoffs(esp. the Superbowl) should all feel different both gameplay and presentation.

So these fixes
1. gameplay more animations/cutscene randomness
2. Simmed stats = to Nfl.com
3. Presentation, beginning, middle, and Superbowl.

I guess I'm the gamer that wants the gameplay and text/sim stuff to wow me equally. NBA Live 10 is a game that does that.

[Jono078]

Re: How to Make Madden Appealing to Text-Simmers

This is my sort of article!

The biggest thing missing from a true sim game is having the little stories of pre season battles, players not performing during the season and being benched.

Id like to see the "coaches clipboard" thing be upgraded with a bit of graphics and more newspaper look than just a bunch of boxes with text.

For the first one id like there to be big stories and if it's and injury it displays picture of that player, and what happened. And then asking you what you want to do just like in game when someone gets injured, I believe head coach did this too.

You just want all the big things to jump out at you like Head Coach.

Also as mentioned in the article, You can't sim seasons and be satisfied when you see outrageous stats. They need to be pretty close to realistic give or take a bit, but not by as much as we see in;

QB YPA - All to low and probably even completion %
Rushing Yards and AVG - Way to high, for everyone.
Sacks - Again to high, if they were even halved it would look much better but maybe a bit low.

Then you want an entertaining draft which sucks you in so you know the players you are going for, NFL head coach did awesome job of that.

Biggest thing as I said though, is for those of us who just simulate endless seasons is we need some stories to see whats going on around the league and within our own team, we want to know if we should go with that young player, cut the players affecting team morale, time to get a new coach etc.

[Jump]

Surprisingly, all the things you mentioned would not alienate the casual base at all. Win for everyone.

[Trooper]

Thanks for that man!

[SHAKYR]

This is a great article you had written. I totally agree with you. You made me smile when I read this, I feel this way about all my sports games especially boxing(Fight Night series).

The text-sim players want to play Madden, Fight Night, and other games but they want gameplay, depth, customization, and many options

[GlennN]

I'd be happy just with two of your points, as they are my prime gripes - ratings need to matter, and stats need to be within reason.

[jWILL253]

Catch 22: They make a real sim in Head Coach, but it lacks graphically. On the other hand, they have great graphics in Madden 10, but the franchise mode is lackluster.

Look at it this way: MLB 09: The Show's SEASON MODE has features that most other FRANCHISE MODES don't have; then, you go to The Show's Franchise Mode, and you're overwhemed. The Show is a great model to use as an example for a good Franchise Mode.

PS: Operation Sports has to do a better job of identifying REAL sim gamers. I played someone in Madden online that was an OS member that claimed he was a "sim gamer". But, all he did was call I Formation runs on offense, and 44 Bear blitzes on defense. And, when I was killing him with the Saints, he said I was cheesing.

Rant over...

[Cryolemon]

Surprisingly, all the things you mentioned would not alienate the casual base at all. Win for everyone.

Exactly. People (including some of the text simmers, just read some threads on the ootp boards) seem to think that text sims and games like Madden are mutually exclusive. They shouldn't be.

As I've said any number of times, a baseball game with OOTP's sim engine and MLB: The Show's graphics / gameplay would be the GOAT by far.