Greetings! I wanted to have a retrospective of Madden 25, which is the last Madden I have ever bought and the one I continue to play off and on to this day.
I have been a member of these boards going back to before Madden 10 was released, but have been living abroad since late 2011. I had to import my copies of Madden 12 and 25 (skipped 13) and would have to do the same with each other copy as they come out. Nothing i have seen from current generation of Madden has sold me on that idea, and Madden 25 has been so good that I have not felt the need to shelve it either.
With that background out of the way, I have seen comments and threads here at OS and around the internet disparaging all of the gen 3 games and over praising PS2 era Madden. I get it. I loved Madden 07 and 08 on my original Xbox too. It took Madden 12 and 25 for me to finally move on from 07/08, ESPN 2k5 and APF2k8.
The most important things for me in terms of how re-playable a football game is, especially against the computer AI are:
Madden 25 has this in spades.
A quality franchise mode begins and ends with the draft and free agency. If that is terrible, then the Franchise is nothing more than a schedule of exhibition games.
Free Agency
A great free agency mode is one in which you cannot just sign anybody you want by clocking on them and throwing money at them. Going back to gen 2 with Madden 07 and 08, players had multiple factors which they considered when signing with a team, and this saw a return in both Madden 12 and 25. While Madden 12 had a bidding war and ticking clock, Madden 25 actually had you offer contracts and make counter offers which players would consider and get back to you on.
The draft
Madden 12 was the first time we were allowed to trade future draft picks. It was also the first time the AI would trade with itself and offer the user trades. It did a close, though imperfect job of calculating draft pick values in accordance with commonly found draft value charts. It did this to a fault. You could exploit the AI through fair trades. "But Paul, how can it be an exploit if the trades are fair?" Good question. Well, by trading down, you can collect positive value through quantity of picks over quality of picks, then build up trade equity until you have 20 draft picks each season, using 10 to 12 of those picks on players and flipping the rest to keep the value train rolling down the tracks. With so many picks, you are going to hit more often and are able to build super teams quite easily. Also, and this is important, every team was willing to trade with you for even value.
Madden 25 put an end to this. It was frustrating at first, as I had gotten used to fleecing teams for value for two real life years (as I had skipped Madden 13). However, it quickly became refreshing after I stepped back and reflected upon the improved trade logic. If you offered a team an even value trade, they would say how they were interested but wanted more value. You could no longer fleece them for quality over quality in a straight up trade. You had to give up a lot of value on your pick to get multiple picks over time if you did a manual trade of draft day.
Rather, there was the addition of the "trade up" when it was not your turn, or "trade down" when it was your selection, and the AI would compile one to five offers for you to look at and choose from. Some offers were arip off for you and no worth it. Others were fair value or even advantageous, but not always, and not every pick could be traded. Sometimes you were stuck making a pick because there were no buyers unless you were willing to lose a ton of value in a manual trade offer.
As a result, in Madden 25, we got the following:
Finally, no draft is complete without a solid scouting process and branching story lines for the players.
Scouting
Madden on gen2 consoles (PS2 era) did not have much in the way of positional ratings and also lacked a proper scouting process. Sure, a WR had a catch rating and QBs had a throwing accuracy rating. However, gen3 Madden is when we finally got meaningful ratings such as man coverage and zone coverage to be compared against a route running rating. We finally got Power and Finesse pass rushing move ratings to compare against Pass Blocking strength and footwork. We got Block shedding to compare against Run blocking footwork and run blocking strength. We finally got ratings for play recognition and pursuit to replace awareness. there was a "Catch in traffic" and "Spectacular catch" rating which matters in game play. A guy like Brandon Lloyd would have 99 or even 100 Spectacular catch despite having a low base catch rating. This resulted in a real chance that he might pull off something awesome, while failing to execute on a simple in or out, just like in real life. I have seen him leap over defenders and make plays and drop a wide open corner route.
Well, what does this have to do with scouting? With positional skills, you could finally scout players beyond their athletic attributes and workout warriors no longer always made for the best players. Sure, having a fast LB is still nice, but on the PS2, you just needed speed and tackle to have a Pro-bowl LB. Now, with positional skills, you can scout and find out how well that LB is in pursuit, play recognition, getting off of blocks, rushing the passer, and dropping into coverage. When applied across the board, scouting became an important part of franchise mode during the season and in the post season before draft day, allowing you to build a draft board.
That was what Madden 12 brought to the table better than any version before it, and Madden 25 blew out of the water. Madden 12 let you scout players every four weeks, then had stages such as the combine, pro days, and individual workouts. The problem was that scouting locked the user out of learning several key abilities, and you could only meaningfully scout certain positions at each stage. For example, only offensive linemen were worth scouting in the regular season, as no other position was given meaningful reports... and linemen were not worth scouting at any other stage, as their blocking skills were only revealed in the regular season. You could never learn key skills such as route running for WRs or the pass rushing or block shedding skills of defensive linemen until individual workouts, which were limited to 5 invites total. So, while vastly improved, Madden 12 had an incomplete and flawed scouting process, though significantly better than the lack of one on PS2 era Madden.
By the time we got to Madden 25, brand new layers of depth were added to the process. Finally, every position could be scouted during the season and in depth. For a relatively small investment of scouting points, you could unlock letter grades for positional skills, or invest more to fully unlock their numerical rating. However, the letter grades never lied to you. Despite seeing "A?" or "F?" with a question mark, letter grades were always accurate within their respective ranges. The question mark simply asked where within that range the ability fell, not that they were really a lower or higher letter grade, which was what madden 12 would do to you.
Players with high letter grades could have an "average" or even "slow" development rating, meaning it was difficult to improve them beyond their starting skill, and players with lower letter grades would sometimes have "fast" or "star" development ratings, meaning that after a year or two, they had the potential to improve into elite top end players. This meant that just scouting the most NFL ready player could still mean overlooking a player with the potential to become something more with some time developing.
Last but not least regarding the draft, unlike Madden 12, the mock draft board and projected players can be wrong... by a lot. A player projected to go 26th in the 4th has been seen going third in the third round. Good players who were projected to go top five have slid down draft boards and fallen in he laps of other teams. This can be based on need and scheme as well as other factors discussed later. It is no longer so easy to just read a draft guide or trust your own board and snipe players from other teams, and it is possible that prospects you thought you might never get could fall to you. This delivers a combined experience unlike any prior edition of the game.
Schemes
Another layer of depth to franchise mode was the addition on "schemes" and player types. While I think it was introduced in Madden 13, which I skipped, Madden 25 continue this feature and it is a game changer. To this day, the AI still hunts for the best players to add to their roster, but the logic has improved immensely since the PS2 era.
In Madden 01-06, the AI simply looked at the OVR rating. It would start those with the highest OVR and cut those with lower OVR ratings if it needed to make roster space, or not resign backups with similar but lower overall rated player to save cap space. This would result in an 81ovr rookie QB getting cut in favor of an 82ovr 33 year old veteran and other such logic. Madden 07 and 08 solved some of this problem with player roles, by which rookies and young players with lower overall ratings would be tagged with traits such as "Future Star" and "1st round pick" and so forth which would boost their value to the AI above just their overall rating. If they failed to live up to their potential after a few seasons, they could even be given a bust or "under performer" tag, meaning it worked both ways. This was a bandaid solution though, as we still saw in Madden 12, the 49ers would cut 96ovr Navarro Bowman because they already had 99ovr Patrick Willis... along with other logical issues.
It was Madden 25 when I first saw schemes be used to better value the players on a team's given roster when controlled by the AI. a run stuffing 3-4 defensive end would be valued by a 3-4 team much higher than a 4=3 edge rusher. The trade value, how much they would pay to resign the player, and who they would target in free agency and the draft were all impacted by this.Teams began to act more and more realistically. This also carried over to the user, as even a casual player would see players rating based on the scheme you team runs instead of a generic overall rating.
I also think that this positive change for the game led to "problems" outside the game. Real life NFL players and fans like to complain about overall ratings. However, in Franchise mode (Connected Career Mode), their base/generic overall rating would be influenced by how their team valued them. A real life player would complain about being an 89, where in franchise mode they were actually a 94 or better... but nobody cared or seemed to pay attention to this. I think this played a role in later version of the games inflating ratings and what led to Madden 20's ratings stretch 10 years after Madden 10 already did this.
Finally, schemes have a big impact on scouting and the draft as well. The Ai will draft players which fit their scheme or fall within their scheme over players who do not when possible, and adding scheme allows the user to "filter" who they target in the scouting process.
I spend the first 3 or 4 weeks of scouting just unlocking every draft prospect's preferred scheme. Once they pass through that filter, I then scout the most relevant positional skills. These added layers of depth have Madden immeasurably better than any version which came before.
Relocation, retirement, weekly stories and more
In addition to all of the above, the AI can be allowed to relocate with a layer of logic applied. You can set it to all teams, but the default setting will not allow the likes of Green Bay to move, whereas other teams such as the St. Louis Rams have moved to different cities in different play-throughs of franchise mode for me, while other times they stay put.
Players will come out of retirement, including former players not in the default game such as Ray Lewis, while not guaranteed. It is not like Ray comes out after year one each time you play. This adds more depth,as a retirement may not mean the end of a career the first time around.
The news feed is deeper than Madden 07 or 08ever gave us along with a modern update with twitter and accounts which are stylized after the real life personalities depicted. For example, Skip Bayless says outrageous things and jumps on bandwagons.
There are predetermined handcrafted rookie players, but even they have branching story lines. In one franchise a player may get hurt while in another the same rookie will stay healthy. One may have a strong pro day or combine while another will not. Just because you have the same class does not mean they players will all have the same experience.
I have yet to touch on how important custom playbooks and game plans have on the experience by building quality books not only for yourself, but by using a second controller and setting a solid scheme for the AI can have an improved experience as well. There are some well made plays in Madden and some stinkers which do not live up to what they should do, such as a bug on a FB dive from the weak I two TE formation where the QB never gets it to him and always get tackled for a loss, or the famous "Engage 8" blitz which just begs to be thrown against for big plays. By building custom books and game plans, the AI no longer calls those terrible plays which gives the user incremental advantages, and instead can really bring a challenge.
Player traits and Dynamic Player Performance (DPP) from Madden 12 was still in the game, which also added another layer of variety in your game play experience and how player performed on the field. They could be hot and cold as well as "clutch" and so forth, making players feel even more different from one another than just the numbers assigned to them.
Conclusion
Madden 25 is by no mean a perfect game The fatigue system doesn't work well, the new physics engine from Madden 13 can look as ugly as ever at times, pass blocking is still unrealistic as guards and tackles will slide across the formation to pickup free rushers in an unrealistic manner, there are broken plays which have to be cut with custom playbooks.
I assume there are plays which can exploit the AI, though I never actively looked for any or know about them and use "Coach mode" auto-passing anyway. I could just take control and outperform any given QB, but would rather pretend I am the coach and am as helpless as Mike Holmgren was while watching Bret Favre either save the day or throw a game loosing pick. It also allows the player traits and DPP to matter.
At the end of the day, and the reason I have written this long thread, is in hopes to open the eyes of players who might have over looked or even write off this entry of the Madden franchise. i have seen many people say that PS2 era Madden was the best, when from my experience, it was outclasses in ALMOST every possible way. Scouting, drafting, free agency, player progression, schemes, player skills, animations, and more.
Moreover, from what i have read about Madden 15-20 on the PS4 has indicated that they are still inferior products on the whole. Until I find a gen4 Madden which can live up to the expectations of Madden 25, I see no reason to buy another version.
I have been a member of these boards going back to before Madden 10 was released, but have been living abroad since late 2011. I had to import my copies of Madden 12 and 25 (skipped 13) and would have to do the same with each other copy as they come out. Nothing i have seen from current generation of Madden has sold me on that idea, and Madden 25 has been so good that I have not felt the need to shelve it either.
With that background out of the way, I have seen comments and threads here at OS and around the internet disparaging all of the gen 3 games and over praising PS2 era Madden. I get it. I loved Madden 07 and 08 on my original Xbox too. It took Madden 12 and 25 for me to finally move on from 07/08, ESPN 2k5 and APF2k8.
The most important things for me in terms of how re-playable a football game is, especially against the computer AI are:
- A deep franchise mode
- Custom Playbooks and game plans which allow you to build schemes
- Having those plays and schemes matter
- Settings which respect player ratings
Madden 25 has this in spades.
A quality franchise mode begins and ends with the draft and free agency. If that is terrible, then the Franchise is nothing more than a schedule of exhibition games.
Free Agency
A great free agency mode is one in which you cannot just sign anybody you want by clocking on them and throwing money at them. Going back to gen 2 with Madden 07 and 08, players had multiple factors which they considered when signing with a team, and this saw a return in both Madden 12 and 25. While Madden 12 had a bidding war and ticking clock, Madden 25 actually had you offer contracts and make counter offers which players would consider and get back to you on.
The draft
Madden 12 was the first time we were allowed to trade future draft picks. It was also the first time the AI would trade with itself and offer the user trades. It did a close, though imperfect job of calculating draft pick values in accordance with commonly found draft value charts. It did this to a fault. You could exploit the AI through fair trades. "But Paul, how can it be an exploit if the trades are fair?" Good question. Well, by trading down, you can collect positive value through quantity of picks over quality of picks, then build up trade equity until you have 20 draft picks each season, using 10 to 12 of those picks on players and flipping the rest to keep the value train rolling down the tracks. With so many picks, you are going to hit more often and are able to build super teams quite easily. Also, and this is important, every team was willing to trade with you for even value.
Madden 25 put an end to this. It was frustrating at first, as I had gotten used to fleecing teams for value for two real life years (as I had skipped Madden 13). However, it quickly became refreshing after I stepped back and reflected upon the improved trade logic. If you offered a team an even value trade, they would say how they were interested but wanted more value. You could no longer fleece them for quality over quality in a straight up trade. You had to give up a lot of value on your pick to get multiple picks over time if you did a manual trade of draft day.
Rather, there was the addition of the "trade up" when it was not your turn, or "trade down" when it was your selection, and the AI would compile one to five offers for you to look at and choose from. Some offers were arip off for you and no worth it. Others were fair value or even advantageous, but not always, and not every pick could be traded. Sometimes you were stuck making a pick because there were no buyers unless you were willing to lose a ton of value in a manual trade offer.
As a result, in Madden 25, we got the following:
- The AI would trade with itself
- The AI would entertain offers to trade up
- The AI would offer he user trades for their selections
- All of these offers could and often would include future picks
- Hand crafted rookies and draft classes meant that gems could be buried in later rounds and had to be found with scouting and a little luck, where as gen2 Madden pretty much had players go in order of their OVR.
- Handcrafted rookies also avoided the problems of randomly generated players from the PS2 era.
- We even had story line players with audio recorded by Trey Wingo, Adam "Schefty" Schefter which played when they were drafted to give extra backstory and interest in the picks.
- There was a "live twitter feed" which updated after each selection. While old tweet stayed on the board and not every pick got a new tweet, it kept the draft from getting stale.
Finally, no draft is complete without a solid scouting process and branching story lines for the players.
Scouting
Madden on gen2 consoles (PS2 era) did not have much in the way of positional ratings and also lacked a proper scouting process. Sure, a WR had a catch rating and QBs had a throwing accuracy rating. However, gen3 Madden is when we finally got meaningful ratings such as man coverage and zone coverage to be compared against a route running rating. We finally got Power and Finesse pass rushing move ratings to compare against Pass Blocking strength and footwork. We got Block shedding to compare against Run blocking footwork and run blocking strength. We finally got ratings for play recognition and pursuit to replace awareness. there was a "Catch in traffic" and "Spectacular catch" rating which matters in game play. A guy like Brandon Lloyd would have 99 or even 100 Spectacular catch despite having a low base catch rating. This resulted in a real chance that he might pull off something awesome, while failing to execute on a simple in or out, just like in real life. I have seen him leap over defenders and make plays and drop a wide open corner route.
Well, what does this have to do with scouting? With positional skills, you could finally scout players beyond their athletic attributes and workout warriors no longer always made for the best players. Sure, having a fast LB is still nice, but on the PS2, you just needed speed and tackle to have a Pro-bowl LB. Now, with positional skills, you can scout and find out how well that LB is in pursuit, play recognition, getting off of blocks, rushing the passer, and dropping into coverage. When applied across the board, scouting became an important part of franchise mode during the season and in the post season before draft day, allowing you to build a draft board.
That was what Madden 12 brought to the table better than any version before it, and Madden 25 blew out of the water. Madden 12 let you scout players every four weeks, then had stages such as the combine, pro days, and individual workouts. The problem was that scouting locked the user out of learning several key abilities, and you could only meaningfully scout certain positions at each stage. For example, only offensive linemen were worth scouting in the regular season, as no other position was given meaningful reports... and linemen were not worth scouting at any other stage, as their blocking skills were only revealed in the regular season. You could never learn key skills such as route running for WRs or the pass rushing or block shedding skills of defensive linemen until individual workouts, which were limited to 5 invites total. So, while vastly improved, Madden 12 had an incomplete and flawed scouting process, though significantly better than the lack of one on PS2 era Madden.
By the time we got to Madden 25, brand new layers of depth were added to the process. Finally, every position could be scouted during the season and in depth. For a relatively small investment of scouting points, you could unlock letter grades for positional skills, or invest more to fully unlock their numerical rating. However, the letter grades never lied to you. Despite seeing "A?" or "F?" with a question mark, letter grades were always accurate within their respective ranges. The question mark simply asked where within that range the ability fell, not that they were really a lower or higher letter grade, which was what madden 12 would do to you.
Players with high letter grades could have an "average" or even "slow" development rating, meaning it was difficult to improve them beyond their starting skill, and players with lower letter grades would sometimes have "fast" or "star" development ratings, meaning that after a year or two, they had the potential to improve into elite top end players. This meant that just scouting the most NFL ready player could still mean overlooking a player with the potential to become something more with some time developing.
Last but not least regarding the draft, unlike Madden 12, the mock draft board and projected players can be wrong... by a lot. A player projected to go 26th in the 4th has been seen going third in the third round. Good players who were projected to go top five have slid down draft boards and fallen in he laps of other teams. This can be based on need and scheme as well as other factors discussed later. It is no longer so easy to just read a draft guide or trust your own board and snipe players from other teams, and it is possible that prospects you thought you might never get could fall to you. This delivers a combined experience unlike any prior edition of the game.
Schemes
Another layer of depth to franchise mode was the addition on "schemes" and player types. While I think it was introduced in Madden 13, which I skipped, Madden 25 continue this feature and it is a game changer. To this day, the AI still hunts for the best players to add to their roster, but the logic has improved immensely since the PS2 era.
In Madden 01-06, the AI simply looked at the OVR rating. It would start those with the highest OVR and cut those with lower OVR ratings if it needed to make roster space, or not resign backups with similar but lower overall rated player to save cap space. This would result in an 81ovr rookie QB getting cut in favor of an 82ovr 33 year old veteran and other such logic. Madden 07 and 08 solved some of this problem with player roles, by which rookies and young players with lower overall ratings would be tagged with traits such as "Future Star" and "1st round pick" and so forth which would boost their value to the AI above just their overall rating. If they failed to live up to their potential after a few seasons, they could even be given a bust or "under performer" tag, meaning it worked both ways. This was a bandaid solution though, as we still saw in Madden 12, the 49ers would cut 96ovr Navarro Bowman because they already had 99ovr Patrick Willis... along with other logical issues.
It was Madden 25 when I first saw schemes be used to better value the players on a team's given roster when controlled by the AI. a run stuffing 3-4 defensive end would be valued by a 3-4 team much higher than a 4=3 edge rusher. The trade value, how much they would pay to resign the player, and who they would target in free agency and the draft were all impacted by this.Teams began to act more and more realistically. This also carried over to the user, as even a casual player would see players rating based on the scheme you team runs instead of a generic overall rating.
I also think that this positive change for the game led to "problems" outside the game. Real life NFL players and fans like to complain about overall ratings. However, in Franchise mode (Connected Career Mode), their base/generic overall rating would be influenced by how their team valued them. A real life player would complain about being an 89, where in franchise mode they were actually a 94 or better... but nobody cared or seemed to pay attention to this. I think this played a role in later version of the games inflating ratings and what led to Madden 20's ratings stretch 10 years after Madden 10 already did this.
Finally, schemes have a big impact on scouting and the draft as well. The Ai will draft players which fit their scheme or fall within their scheme over players who do not when possible, and adding scheme allows the user to "filter" who they target in the scouting process.
I spend the first 3 or 4 weeks of scouting just unlocking every draft prospect's preferred scheme. Once they pass through that filter, I then scout the most relevant positional skills. These added layers of depth have Madden immeasurably better than any version which came before.
Relocation, retirement, weekly stories and more
In addition to all of the above, the AI can be allowed to relocate with a layer of logic applied. You can set it to all teams, but the default setting will not allow the likes of Green Bay to move, whereas other teams such as the St. Louis Rams have moved to different cities in different play-throughs of franchise mode for me, while other times they stay put.
Players will come out of retirement, including former players not in the default game such as Ray Lewis, while not guaranteed. It is not like Ray comes out after year one each time you play. This adds more depth,as a retirement may not mean the end of a career the first time around.
The news feed is deeper than Madden 07 or 08ever gave us along with a modern update with twitter and accounts which are stylized after the real life personalities depicted. For example, Skip Bayless says outrageous things and jumps on bandwagons.
There are predetermined handcrafted rookie players, but even they have branching story lines. In one franchise a player may get hurt while in another the same rookie will stay healthy. One may have a strong pro day or combine while another will not. Just because you have the same class does not mean they players will all have the same experience.
I have yet to touch on how important custom playbooks and game plans have on the experience by building quality books not only for yourself, but by using a second controller and setting a solid scheme for the AI can have an improved experience as well. There are some well made plays in Madden and some stinkers which do not live up to what they should do, such as a bug on a FB dive from the weak I two TE formation where the QB never gets it to him and always get tackled for a loss, or the famous "Engage 8" blitz which just begs to be thrown against for big plays. By building custom books and game plans, the AI no longer calls those terrible plays which gives the user incremental advantages, and instead can really bring a challenge.
Player traits and Dynamic Player Performance (DPP) from Madden 12 was still in the game, which also added another layer of variety in your game play experience and how player performed on the field. They could be hot and cold as well as "clutch" and so forth, making players feel even more different from one another than just the numbers assigned to them.
Conclusion
Madden 25 is by no mean a perfect game The fatigue system doesn't work well, the new physics engine from Madden 13 can look as ugly as ever at times, pass blocking is still unrealistic as guards and tackles will slide across the formation to pickup free rushers in an unrealistic manner, there are broken plays which have to be cut with custom playbooks.
I assume there are plays which can exploit the AI, though I never actively looked for any or know about them and use "Coach mode" auto-passing anyway. I could just take control and outperform any given QB, but would rather pretend I am the coach and am as helpless as Mike Holmgren was while watching Bret Favre either save the day or throw a game loosing pick. It also allows the player traits and DPP to matter.
At the end of the day, and the reason I have written this long thread, is in hopes to open the eyes of players who might have over looked or even write off this entry of the Madden franchise. i have seen many people say that PS2 era Madden was the best, when from my experience, it was outclasses in ALMOST every possible way. Scouting, drafting, free agency, player progression, schemes, player skills, animations, and more.
Moreover, from what i have read about Madden 15-20 on the PS4 has indicated that they are still inferior products on the whole. Until I find a gen4 Madden which can live up to the expectations of Madden 25, I see no reason to buy another version.
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