[Rebel10]

A lot of really promising quotes from Young, things I've been saying for years, especially related to how franchise games against the CPU largely feel like 16 consecutive games against basically the same opponent running the same offense/defense. Nice to see that they're noticing many of the same problems that franchise advocates have been complaining about for ~10-15 years.

I'm personally not confident that the team will deliver on the points that they're talking about, similar to last year's revitalized Franchise mode, which had almost no changes other than a UI update staring at a pretend coach looking at a computer screen. Make no doubt, the UI change was needed (and was another point I had criticized in the past, that Franchise mode didn't feel like a "mode" but just another menu tree), but it lacked a lot of the changes that they had talked about in the interviews.

Unfortunately it still sounds like so much of the game is focused around XP, which is one of those fundamental design choices/design philosophies that they either have to go all in on, or abandon completely, and personally, I think they should abandon the XP-driven system. Schemes was the perfect example of this in last year's game. Effectively the scheme system in Madden '19 was just an XP reward, or a much contested/discussed feature/non-feature in simulation games (I'm still not convinced whether the scheme actually changed simulation results or if we were trying to find a pattern in the chaos of the simulation engine), does your guy get 100 extra XP or not, can you inflate an AWR rating from 81 to 82 after four games, or after two games. Most of the design decisions around Franchise for the last... eh... 6 or 8 years (...?) have been around how XP is awarded and what XP does. Ultimately, I think they'll have to decide whether "XP" is really the fundamental motivation in progressing through a game, season, career, etc. They still have some competing non-XP systems like the arbitrary, buggy, unpolished, and meaningless "Legacy" score, something that seemingly hasn't been improved in the ~10 years since they introduced it (it's definitely gotten worse). I'd rather they go in that direction and move away from XP as being the central reward of the game, but I know that they still seem half-committed to XP and that's the world we live in and so it's unlikely to change anytime soon.

Quote:

This could change with the addition of superstar skills and X-Factor players, which we explore in great depth with this feature. This new pool of more than 70 new abilities isn’t meant to make Madden play like NFL Hitz, but rather accentuate the unique capabilities of the league’s star players. Patrick Mahomes now has unique animations that let him escape the pocket more quickly than his counterparts, as well as new abilities that raise his accuracy throwing on the run and across his body. Tom Brady can diagnose the defense quickly and find the first open target much faster than other quarterbacks. Ben Roethlisberger has a deadly pump-fake that can disrupt your coverages and spring his receivers open.

Things like this sound great, we just have to hope the team can execute on it. I'd love to play against a Mahomes-like player who has escapability and forces me to watch both the run and the pass, so I can't scheme the same way against Mahomes like I do against Eli Manning. But, the obvious question begs of whether the engine will work or not? EA hasn't delivered a consistently working product on day 1 or day 21 of Madden in years. Last, quarterbacks like Russel Wilson were supposed to have more manueverability and escapability, only to see every quarter back roll out of the pocket to their right, run up to the line of scrimmage, and then force an incomplete pass to the feet of a tight end in the flat or short zone over and over again. This "bug" was supposedly going to get patched with a "Day Zero" patch that never came, and if it did change it changed in unpredictable, difficult to reproduce, and not really positive ways. So, it's great to see the team talking about this, it's a much needed change to the game that is one of those things that should have been present in Madden 10 years ago, but it's good either way if we get it in Madden 2020... You just have to be skeptical of the team can actually deliver it, or whether, consistently, we're going to have a thousand threads again discussing whether QB manueverability is better on Rookie with tweaked sliders, All Madden with all sliders at 0, All-Pro with all penalty sliders set to 100 except for Defensive Holding which is set to 21...... Or some other symptom of a deeply flawed game.

Still, nice to see the effort to at least mention a lot of the long standing criticism of the game from it's longest-time fans. One positive is that they're actually talking about the game in April and May, something that barely happened in Madden '19 or '18. The story generator sounds great, same with gameplay differences from team to team. We'll see if the team can execute on them. I'm not optimistic about it, but I'm still open to progress and hoping to see that this year.