They'll never make franchise the main focal point. It's not where Madden's money is made. Never has been. It's always been about "new features" and of course gameplay with this product.
Making sure franchise works properly is probably the most important thing about franchise, and that's been their biggest hurdle for years.
What I'm not quite getting about this year's Madden is how things we've had for years in Madden just upped and disappeared, like the temperature control setting... What was the reason to get rid of it? Or why are the weather settings less varied than they've been in the past? What happened to light rain/snow settings?
The rational side of me says decisions like that were made because of code conflict. But the fan side of me says it was just overlooked for no good reason. Why? Because when I go into franchise (and I'm not really into franchise by the way), I see cold fields without snow but I can't select it in exhibition. I see the players breath in some cold games, but I can't make that happen in exhibition because there are no temperature controls.
Or take how you can't abort a highlight when creating highlights; you have to watch the entire highlight before you can select another highlight camera angle. Couldn't they have programmed a command to abort the highlight whenever you want? It's very frustrating.
Madden 09 is a good football game. But some of the omissions make no sense. The omissions get me more than the mistakes, lol.