[rudyjuly2]

The first full Madden 13 patch is a big disappointment for me. While everyone was praising EA for what they did fix, they seemed to forget all the things that were absent.

For me the broken team tendencies was priority #1 and it wasn’t touched. Most teams in the game still choose to run roughly 80% of the time on first and second down. I played 1.5 games against the Patriots and Eagles and it was still the same as it was before the patch. If this didn’t bother you then you are lucky. It bothers me that all the teams have the same feel and it also makes the cpu too easy to stop. It robs the game of personality. Team songs still don’t play. I scored a TD at home with Miami and their team song is still absent for some reason.

Late game AI is still terrible. How can EA defend this? How can it be this bad after producing video game football for over 20 years? The cpu (Tom Brady) was losing by 6 with 18 seconds left and no time outs and they choose to run the ball from my 40. They actually got 20 yards and spiked the ball with 2 seconds left. So what do they do from just inside my 20 with only two seconds left? Bring out a 3 TE, 1 WR formation to run the ball of course. It’s beyond absurd.

While they may have patched the game so that the difficulty and sliders within CCM is the same as Play Now it still wasn’t good enough. The pass reaction slider still appears to do nothing. NCAA Football has a pass coverage slider that actually affects coverage. EA’s Madden team has not provided a tool to make the coverage easier or harder. Fail. FG kicking accuracy sliders are still only global which means the human player will continue to hit 100% of their FGs since the r-stick for accuracy means almost nothing and is way too easy. This wasn’t patched either.

I still saw the glitch where the game drops out of HD and looks fuzzy. It doesn’t happen often but no fix here either.

About the only positives I saw from playing 1.5 games were that the physics seems better. The players seemed to move smoother as well. I haven’t played Madden much lately since I’m so annoyed with the broken team tendencies. At this point I’d like to get through at least one off-season within franchise but I may just trade this game in and be done with it. If this was the best they could do with some obvious things like late game AI so bad, then I have lost a ton of faith in the Madden dev team. Frustrated right now.