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Originally Posted by Cato06 |
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This brings me to my point. In order to keep me engaged in CFM you need to create that NFL atmosphere. It's needs to be deep, it needs to be detailed, it needs to be intense. Some of these ideas may seem Old school by now but it's also why we continue to ask for them year after year.
1) Presentation is the only way to create the world we live in when playing madden. I'm not talking about camera angles, or fans holding signs, or the weather effects, or pylon cams. I'm talking about pregame shows, legit halftime shows, post game shows, NFL draft presentation, and a Weekly sports center show. If you want people to be more engaged in CFM than you gotta start bringing the NFL world to them. I play CFM and other franchise modes to feel like I'm In my own little world of playing coach/GM. The reward for this comes through the presentation and making me feel like I'm actually living in that world. making us dig through multiple menus to find stats, draft prospects, standings, awards, injury reports is not making me feel immersed into the league. No one will ever feel immersed if we have to always look up every bit of info in our league. Bring the info to us through sports center type shows.
2) The playoff and super bowl atmosphere needs to be different from regular season. Dramatic intros to the game like NBA 2k does for its playoffs. Fans should be louder, have a screen shaking effect or something on every play. Show cut scenes of hyped up fans on big plays. Make me want to come back to the playoffs again. Make me feel like it's worth it to sign that big free agent the next season to get back to the playoffs. Gaining more XP is not going to make me want to keep playing the game. Getting myself back to the excitement of that big game is going to make me feel like it's worth playing over and over again.
3) How bout having some creative ideas like having the opening celebration on Thursday night when your super bowl banner gets lowered In your stadium after winning the super bowl. Little things like that make you feel rewarded. Not seeing the same on field celebration after the game over and over again. How bout let me walk around the raft or trolley car during the parade with the trophy. Have it be part of a special "sport center parade edition" during the offseason that's televised with sportscasters.
If you really have to go the "be rewarded with XP" route than maybe give us some sort of crib mode. Let us buy things to upgrade our coach/GM. Or maybe buy a team plane to help the team be rested or something. We could save xp to buy a trophy case or badges for our coach to convince players to sign, not retire, settle for less money, etc. just go the NBA 2k route I guess.
Bottom line is winning the super bowl in CFM is getting boring because it's the same damn presentation year after year. You guys don't change anything. You add pylon cams and act like it's this new big feature to presentation. Making CFM guys feel rewarded is not going to be through gaining reward points so we can buy our coach a new pair of shoes, we will feel rewarded by bringing us into a deep, immersive, detailed career mode that continues to surprise us and not be so predictive.[/color]
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All of this is why EA is moving away from focusing on CFM. It's artificial and pointless. If this is what you need to to enjoy franchise mode, I'm going say that you don't actually like franchise modes. You wasted three of your suggestions on glitz that helps you forget how bored you were getting through the season.
And for me, that's the real problem. While many of us have been playing franchise and sim sports games since you needed cards and dice, and then text sims, the market is different today. That's not a good or bad thing, it's just reality.
My personal belief is that once sliders became an essential part of sports games, franchise play became boring and stale. It's paint-by-numbers. For many, that game, adjusting sliders until you get the pre-approved results you were looking for is fun in itself. But what is impressive about winning a Super Bowl in a league you adjusted everything?
Throw in how ridiculously poor the AI manages rosters in all sports games, text and otherwise, it's not even impressive to build a cellar dweller into a champion. Honestly, this is why I mostly played in online leagues, as there was some sense of actual achievement.
But EA even ruined that by ditching custom leagues for this Connected crap. So if I play in a league with five other friends, I'm still stuck with crappy CPU AI for most of my games. All I want is a simple option to play in a custom league with say 6 teams, allowing for us to play 10 game seasons, and compete against each other.
As CM Hooe pointed out, this is part of why MUT's Salary Cap mode is a million times more interesting to me than a CFM league. We are playing with fairly equal teams, have an interesting process to building our team so that it matches how we want to play, and the continual content drops matches what is going on in the real NFL.
If you think a time consuming and grinding franchise mode is what helps sell the NFL, then you have completely dropped out of the loop. EA is selling video games, not simulation models for predicting real world results. They can sell hundreds of thousands (but probably less than 500K) copies of a true franchise sim. But they can hellions of Madden if it focuses on gameplay and superstars.
So if you can only play a sports game if you are a sim head, then it is back to the PC and text sims. But if you can play million other video game genres that bend reality to make things more fun, then maybe you could find the fun that many people are having with Madden right now.