[TTD71]

From both a creative and business point of view, the people at EA would be insane to even try to improve the game too drastically year over year. Even the idea of bringing to market a wildly better game on PS4/XB1 than PS3/XB360 is pie-in-the-sky dreaming until the installed base of consoles is more equitable...as long as there are still 10X more consoles of the LAST gen in the market, nothing for the "new" consoles is going to be allowed that can't be mimicked or mocked on the old technology....that economics more than anything else. The company is going to protect its assets, vigorously...and sad to say, making a great simulation game is not in their basic interests and never will be either.

We get exactly what you should expect from a monopoly - just enough "changes / improvements" to be slightly different and to be able to truthfully say that the game is not 100% the same - even if these so-called improvements prove to be utterly subtle and non-game changing in any meaningful way. The fact is that for many people who have been hardcore players for years, we'll NEVER see a switch that would be "enough" change to make this observation go away.

Gauntlet is a good example.

Its essentially not really "new"...its a rehash of older ideas that have been in various Madden releases since 2007. The skills trainer? The virtual Madden IQ? Practice mode with a real outdoor field (instead of that hideous airplane hangar in M25)? Hell go all the way back to Madden NFL 2003/2004 with the Training Camp drills. Gauntlet is nothing more than the latest attempt to "add" a "feature" without really having to do too much thinking.

Why would EA management even consider doing more than the bare minimum?

It costs money to do so - through time and investing in head count and project teams and deadlines. MUT is the money tree and everyone knows it. EA can try to deny that until they are blue in the face, but I believe whole-heartedly that the next time we'll see real change come to the game will be when MUT tanks or levels off severely and revenues decrease to a level that scares the suits. At that point (and not one day sooner), we will see a magical transformation of the Madden franchise that will finally resolve the "not this year" / "still trying to get that in" / "we're working on that for next year" litany of legacy issues.

The real solution is not to keep begging EA to change things for us...its to get them to allow us the tools to fix it ourselves. We are not the majority of the market (those who visit this forum or post about simulation or worry about the realistic representation of football in videogames). We are a distinct minority and as such we can't impact EA sales enough to make them change directions. Our best bet for a football sim is to have a PC version of Madden released and then have the equivalent of a Map Creator functionality that would allow the community to address the issues that EA will not or can not.

That is less likely to happen than winning the lottery though...