[Dogslax41]

For anyone that has seen my posts I have been very critical of what we have seen in streams and videos. That being said here are my observations after playing one full game

Default all madden
Bengals (me) v Steelers
Won 23-20
15 min
Acceleration down to 16 seconds

Pros
CPU run defense is almost perfect. Night and day to ps3. On ps3 I could average 5ypc with my eyes closed. Not on next gen. I averaged right at 3 and that was a combination of getting stuffed 90% of the time a breaking two decent runs.
Second string back also got a good amount of carries despite me not touching auto subs

All madden difficulty has teeth. Blitzes are no joke they force you to either get the ball out quickly or take a sack. This combined with the run defense actually gave me a challenge, which did not happen on ps3. I either had to make the sliders so imbalanced it was cheesy or basically try not to pull away on ps3. Not so in this game. I actually had to work for the win.

Graphics do look much sharper than ps3. It's not a wow factor by any means but very noticeable

Foot planting and ball carrier movement is very very well done. Twitchy ball carrier was gone and I played on default speed, which I always played on slow to negate as much off this as possible on ps3.

Secondary play. Does not feel cheap at all. Curls are well defended by players breaking on the ball, not simply standing next to the receiver and waiting to make a play on the ball. Safeties played phenomenally breaking when necessary and resulted in one very natural looking pick

Online/dline play looked great. No more patty cake. Defenders actually made moves to break off blocks.

They fixed the player and play of the game. Both were accurate to what happened on the field

Post play camera angles are much improved. Nothing phenomenal but I would say they are where they should have been to begin with. Looks much more natural than before.

Player celebrations. No more player isolated by themselves in the opposite end zone. Celebrations had good camera angles that were almost cinematic but had other players around the celebrating player.

Cons
Living worlds. The sidelines had more graphical detail but ea basically cheated the system here to make them look interactive. Players do back away from the play as it's coming toward the sidelines but that's where it ends. I did not see any interaction with the ball carrier and in fact the game cut away very rapidly when a player in play went more than one foot out of bounds. It is very jarring to see and looks very unnatural. Foundation for the future but the awkward cut away does more harm than good this year.
Stadium noise. Again this feels like ea cheating the system. It feels like all they did was amp up stadium sounds and add the occasional situation specific reaction. No crowd swells. I intentionally threw a bomb to aj green to see how the fans would react. A 40 yard completion into the red zone yielded no swell and simply got applause upon completion.

Qb accuracy. Both the CPU and human qb at default are way way too accurate. Sliders will probably help this but Ben went 28/34 for 350 and dalton went 26/30 for 300. The qb accuracy issue is augmented by the receivers catching anything that comes near them.

Human blitz. I had 8 sacks 3 form my le, 4 from my fs and 1 from my mlb. Will need to be tweaked with sliders.

CPU late game clock management. I was up 23-20 steelers drove down to my 18 and had a timeout left, threw a short pass to the left flat and was tackled in bounds with 5 seconds left and ran a hurry up to spike the ball and snapped it with one second left and the clock expired.


In the end I was set on keeping the shrink wrap on it and returning it after seeing the streams yesterday. Seeing the debate today made me think what the heck, I'll give it a try and try to give some insight to others that may be on the fence. Is it a next gen title, in my opinion no. Does it play a much better and challenging game than ps3, absolutely. I am glad I decided to open it because I think that the improvements, especially they CPU run defense are solid enough that this game will provide me some enjoyment. But again if you are looking for a true next gen experience then I really don't think this is for you. If you kind of enjoyed the ps3 version but never found it a challenge, which I know many one here were in that boat, then you owe it to yourself to give this one a go because I think you will be satisfied enough.