Re: Madden NFL 15 Developer Livestream Starts at 4:30 PM EST, Watch it Here
Agreed. I think a lot of us have prefaced our excitement with reserved judgment until the final product though. It is encouraging to see Madden's development direction at this point through an allegedly more fundamental approach to football mechanics, and acknowledging legacy issues. Perhaps the most important thing in any of this is the admission of the game's shortcomings and flat out terrible aspects from its developers, and professing a real drive to sort that crap out.
IMO having the devs admit these things, account for them, and express a desire to solve them over the long-term gives some hope as a customer that core gameplay has a long-term direction I'm interested in. The "Madden" style of gameplay has been stale to me for years now. I can accept some aspects taking a while to change because Rex and team are still confined to the revenue strategies of EA and the annual release cycle, but more detailed gameplay will freshen things up and get me more engaged.
The game may turn out to be a disaster, but still, it hasn't been often we've seen Madden devs host a livestream like this pre-release where they've shown gameplay, and "labbed" improvements for us, and even been willing to go into replay mode to show stuff off. We'll know fairly soon if this was genius marketing, but I don't see the logic in peddling this stuff to a small portion of the consumer base (the "hardcore" OS-type communities) as a marketing deception.
One other little aside. For the most part I was impressed with the collision detection in the box in the run game. It mostly seemed/looked quite fluid, and the RB navigated traffic quite well.
I think everyone is putting the cart before the horse here. We are all excited to see a team actually pushing in the right direction, but by no means has this football game eclipsed the games of the past even. There are still a lot of eye sores that are in Madden 15, even by the devs admission. The real proof is in the product and what gets delivered. Good will and transparency is great and all, and it is appreciated, but at the end of the day, we aren't going out for beers together or anything. The product is what matters, and it still has a long way to go. 
IMO having the devs admit these things, account for them, and express a desire to solve them over the long-term gives some hope as a customer that core gameplay has a long-term direction I'm interested in. The "Madden" style of gameplay has been stale to me for years now. I can accept some aspects taking a while to change because Rex and team are still confined to the revenue strategies of EA and the annual release cycle, but more detailed gameplay will freshen things up and get me more engaged.
The game may turn out to be a disaster, but still, it hasn't been often we've seen Madden devs host a livestream like this pre-release where they've shown gameplay, and "labbed" improvements for us, and even been willing to go into replay mode to show stuff off. We'll know fairly soon if this was genius marketing, but I don't see the logic in peddling this stuff to a small portion of the consumer base (the "hardcore" OS-type communities) as a marketing deception.
One other little aside. For the most part I was impressed with the collision detection in the box in the run game. It mostly seemed/looked quite fluid, and the RB navigated traffic quite well.
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