This ^
M18 now has horribly ugly juke/spin/truck animations where defenders who are either in good tackling position or not even close to the ball carrier have this stupid ankle breaking animation triggered. Dudes falling all over the field while the rest of the defense literally starts walking/standing and wait until the animations are finished to finally react. Truck glitch is self-explanatory. Defenders are more psychic imo than last year. QBs about to get sacked finish throwing motion but keep the ball and take sacks instead of it just being a poorly thrown ball either high or low of the receiver. Putting players in motion end up creating completely illegal shifts because for some odd reason 2 or 3 other players decide to readjust when you motion someone. PA jailbreak screens are all a few yards closer alignments. The new weird route playart in stacked formations with guys running horizontal end up making guys run backwards at the snap and completely taken out of the play. Same thing happens with TEs and RBs on routes to the flat or block release routes. They just get stuck in the OL and can’t run out of it. Or get knocked 6 yards backwards. WRs react at the wrong times to press and end up taking way too long to get out their initial start because they trigger a press release when nobody even is trying to touch them. And the animation takes too long to carry out because everyone on the field runs at very fast speeds as it is and cover way too much ground. The endzone feels like its 4 yards deep sometimes (especially vs zone) because of that. It’s kinda funny that zone is a go-to defense in the red zone in madden cause you can play tight to guard the run and if it’s a pass the defenders FLY out and cover their zone. Yet IRL man is the go-to because it’s watching easier to break a zone in short yardage situations. There’s just so much things that are worse this year than last I can’t explain all of it in one post.
Things that are better: graphics (well, the quality of the old graphics were enhanced), commentary (sort of... online CFM is repetitive and seems to get no new content?) and the addition of new equipment. So that’s good at least