[majesty95]

Wow, so much to address.

I'll start with the sales numbers. While they are troubling, the 750k current is early. However, I doubt many more copies will be sold when Madden releases so it could be indicative of a huge overall decline.

I, too, am concerned that NCAA may go the way of March Madness. However, I think by looking at the history of sales for the franchise, there is something there with this game. They just have to recapture it.

College basketball was considerably less popular than football and they had two companies making the game (which have both now folded). It's possible but I don't think that's their where this game is going. NCAA can and has been very profitable and it would be foolish to walk away from that.

As far as Madden not having draft class imports. That is because of the new connected careers. They wanted to have draft profiles for all of the players that would play into the Twitter feeds an what not and show all of that off. You just can't have detailed profiled for CPU generated recruits imported from NCAA (at least not as detailed). I expect we will see that make its return eventually. But I could see them leaving it out too since NCAA now has it's own draft feature.

Pertaining to the game being "broken", that is a term too easily thrown around. Broken indicates unplayable. There is nothing unplayable with this game. Is it perfect? No. Is it flawed? Yes. Is it broken? No.

I know there are people who don't even want to play the game because of the coverage (and I'm not far off. It's extremely frustrating). However, look at the poll on here about how satisfied people are with the game. For the most part, people are much more satisfied with 13 at release than they were with 12. That doesn't show in the sales numbers so that may show that OS is more of the hardcore gamers. But if that is true then the hardcore gamers are, by and large, happy as a whole (which I find interesting).

The thing you have to keep in mind is the trend we have seen lately. When they "fix" one thing, something else breaks. Why is that?

The easy thing to do is say that EA is incompetent. Is it really that simple? Then why is 2k having numerous issues that are getting worse each year? How about MLB The Show? New issues have popped up with that game and it's ratings are going down.

I revert it back to the game engine that they are working off of and the complexity of programming. The game engine limits them in what they can do. The complexity of programming hinders their implementation. Yes, they have been programming for 6-7 years on next gen, but they're still working off of an inferior game engine. It's like building a mansion on a mud.

That's why they fix one thing and another breaks. I can imagine that is terribly frustrating for them. With millions of lines of code all relating to each other in some way, good luck finding every bug and fixing it in a way that doesn't negative effect something else.

I've taken elementary programming. It's hard. People who are good at programming have said programming on next gen, especially PS3, is beyond hard. Having to program a game that works smoothly on BOTH systems...I can only imagine.

That's why I think the new game engine will finally get us going in the right direction. They have 6-7 years of experience now and know what their limitations have been and the things that have given them the most problems. They can use that to build an engine that not only better utilizes the capabilities of both systems, but also makes it easier for them to find/fix/address bugs and gameplay issues.

I'm not claiming that it will be perfect and certainly not flawless (this generation of games never will be). But I do think we are headed back towards the glory days of 04-07. For that, I think we can all get excited.