EA Sports Season Opener: Football Titles Preview

Preview

Madden NFL 11 Preview

Submitted on: 03/15/2010 by Steve Bartlett

San Francisco, March 9th, 2010 -- EA Sports invited members of the media to the open doors of the luxurious and serene Press Club in downtown San Francisco Tuesday night to get a sneak peak at this year’s lineup of titles. A number of games were featured on display in the classy, yet contemporary winery in the form of playable demos. I had the chance to get some developer walk-throughs on Fifa Soccer: World Cup 2010 South Africa, Tiger Woods 11 on both the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360, and I was able to view a live demonstration of EA Sports MMA with developer insight.

Before I dive into breaking down each title’s upgrades, first a few insights on the direction of EA sports football titles.

The GM of EA Sports Tiburon Philip Holt discussed the key approaches and outlooks for NCAA Football 11 and Madden NFL 11 with their respective developers during the evening’s 30 minute presentation.

Holt touched on how the fans of the two major series will shape how the game is made through fan insight and forum feedback. Holt emphasized the importance of the discussion occurring online on forums such as ours, OperationSports.com. Holt mentioned Madden NFL 10’s Developer Ian Cummings blog, and his response to lack of pass rush on the OS forums through patch updates.

Other trends that EA Sports has taken akin to are the number of users now connected online – a good 75 percent and higher for both Madden NFL 10 and NCAA Football 10 players were connected online at some point in their game play.

NCAA 11 Outlook

NCAA developer Roy Harvey spoke about the direction of this year’s title. A great emphasis is being placed on creating the most diverse and realistically executed variety of offenses that are on display every Saturday in college football. Harvey is targeting the unique college offensive systems such as the spread attack in attempts to reflect and mirror the NCAA authenticity in the game as close as possible.

Harvey stated that NCAA 10 featured over 5,000 teams created in the Team Builder feature and 87 percent of the game was played in franchise mode by gamers. Moving forward with these trends, EA Sports is using their immense data tracking and stats to develop the games in ways that make sense to the fans of the franchise. The number of stats they have is unfathomable – millions of numbers were gathered.

In summary, Harvey stated that NCAA 11 is going to focus on the authentic college offensive systems, the core game play of course, and they are looking to appeal to and capture the emotion of the college game.

NCAA 11 Screenshot – it looked awesome in High Def.

A Faster Madden

Jeremy Strauser of Madden NFL 11 was next in line for the opening presentation at the Season Opener. Strauser stated that Madden NFL 11 will be data driven – and once again touched on how the OS forum feedback is much appreciated (Got to enjoy the love we received in a packed house full of the game industries best editorials)

Strauser threw some crazy numbers around regarding the data tracked in Madden NFL 10. 173 million data reports are made per day in Madden. Cool note: 7.5 million interceptions have been thrown by Brett Favre.

Here is where it gets interesting. When playing Madden, stiff arms and truck/highlight sticks are being implemented on the fly by the millions in-game around the world. During my review for the game (8.5/10 second opinion), I found the success rates to be a bit random in nature, with my running backs breaking tackles occasionally on the truck highlight stick; but not always. Sometimes I would even have the momentum advantage and catch a defensive back off guard at a tough tackling angle, but I still would get tripped up. Other times, I would break through three tackles in a row with Beanie Wells. Confusing.

The data that EA has collected is being used to drive the current Madden updates, and Madden NFL 11. Strauser stated in Madden NFL 10, gamers had a 23 percent rate of success on stiff arms – very close to the target rate of 25 percent that the developers established.

On the other hand, the truck/highlight stick had a success rate of 46 percent – which is supposed to be a much bigger risk in using. The developers immediately addressed the success rates on these moves to put in one of the Madden updates.

It will be interesting to see how this affects player ratings – can we count on players having a success rate of 23 percent on his stiff arm, even if it’s the best stiff arm in the game by a guy like Peterson taking on a smaller defender? These approaches open the door to a lot of questions on how the ratings come into play that Strauser did not discuss.

Another nice stat was that with the 330 plays in the game, users chose to run on average a total of 13 while playing online. Harvey explained that while the average Madden game takes about 63 minutes to complete, the actual in time playing amounts to a total of 17 minutes.

The goals for Madden NFL 11 is to make the game simpler to choose the plays you want, a deeper game play experience, and quicker in its accessibility.

Madden NFL 11 Videos

Member Comments

# 21 KBLover @ 03/16/10 12:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheCreep


	That would explain the weird physics in Madden. If everything is based on a percentage, then the ratings will not have a big effect ya know. .

Not neccessarily.

(BC = Ball carrier, D = Defender)

If I make a formula that says, TRK success % = ((BC STR+ BC TRK) / 2 ) - ((D STR + D POW) / 2 * Angle Adj %)

Angle Adj % - if defender is head on 100% of D skill is used. If from the side, 50% of D is used, if from rear, 25% of D skill is used.

If BC STR and TRK is 100 and D STR and POW (hit power) is 50 and the contact is head on (100%)

((100 + 100) / 2) - ((50 + 50) / 2 * 100% )

100 - (50 * 100%)
100 - 50 = 50%

The BC would truck the defender 50% of the time.

But if the BC had 40 STR and 100 TRK and the defender was still 50's and still head on contact

((40+100) / 2) - ((50 + 50) / 2 *100%)

70 - (50 * 100)
70 - 50 = 20

The BC would truck the defender 20% of the time.

That's a big difference to go from a coin flip chance to a 1 in 5 chance, especially in a big situation like the goal line or to pick up a key 3rd down to run out the clock, etc.

If ratings don't have much impact, it has nothing to do with being percentage based, it's how the ratings are used (engine doesn't even check ratings, but mostly animations, etc) and the fact they are all packed together (not spread out enough).

# 22 ab2c4 @ 03/16/10 02:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HiTEqMETHOD


	"A great emphasis is being placed on creating the most diverse and realistically executed variety of offenses that are on display every Saturday in college football." So that means defense isn't a focus this year? I'd rather have their full effort going toward making the games feel authentic. The game has gotten very boring and dull for a title that's suppose to be based on a college sport. If they barely touched the presentation/atmosphere I'll pass on buying like I did last year.

This is exactly what I thought when I read that sentence also. Is this going to be another year of wide-open offenses and zero defense? I sure hope not. I pray to God that is not the case.

Please God, let there be good defense this year.

I also was concerned that 87% play franchise mode, so shouldn't they be putting the majority of time into making that better? Probably not, they are probably working on something online related.

Yes, as a fan of NCAA for the last 16 years........I AM GETTING FRUSTRATED! I just hope I am reading into this too much. Maybe they are putting 75% of their time into offline Dynasty mode and gameplay and just aren't mentioning it for some reason.

# 23 acarrero @ 03/16/10 02:15 PM

Sounds like an other year of minor tweaks. Seriously, these games have both become roster and patch updates. The engine has been the same for 10 years.

# 24 rsoxguy12 @ 03/16/10 11:57 PM

I'm kind of bummed out by this whole percentage thing. You can't generalize and say ALL running backs will stiff arm the defender 25% of the time. Maybe this is why all of the topics regarding whether rating really matter pop up so often.....

# 25 TombSong @ 03/18/10 09:34 AM

There are some fundamental things EA needs to address with the community and make clear on what their intent is.

1. How much of what a user does determines the outcome of an event and how much the game engine plays into that same event ?

2. They need to make CLEAR how what ratings effect on each side of the ball (offense/defense) and what are the counter ratings for each ability.

Example: 99 rated stiff arm HB charging towards a LB. What ratings do the LB need to be high in order to counter this HB's high stiff arm ? Is it tackling alone ? tackling plus the LBs weight ? Is it a counter move to the stiff arm thats initiated by the user ?(Dive tackle)

There is TOO much guessing and speculation surrounding stuff like this. Which leads to the confusion, frustration, misinterpretation of how the game behaves.

If I made a game I would want above all else for the people that play it to understand whats going on and how things work so that there is no mistaking the game as being broken or badly implemented tech.

I think this is also what leads to the yearly tourney champs being guys that can quickly identify the exploitable things in the game and figure out how to counter it, if there is indeed a counter.

This will be my 2nd year screaming from the mountain tops. Dont make the game so the "sim" guys dont have to learn to counter whats happening to them during a game. Bring them up to the level of the game so they KNOW what to do when they see events x, y, z happening during a game. Give the tools to play the Offense and Defense thats played in the NFL and show the community how these tools work and prove that they DO indeed work.

# 26 seriousluboy83 @ 03/18/10 10:33 PM

plain and simple...remove these %'s add them to the qb's only and find a good progression scale for everyone...this game can't get anymore unrealistic so just drop the %'s and let us go at it...all these %'s are doing is locking player up and that's why speed is still numero uno...that's why top reciever's are getting locked up by guys with 58 press ratings...plain and simple...drop these %...let the ratings determine the success and failure rate not you...EA...no wonder breaking outta pro-tak was so easy when it first came out...once everyone started to complain y'all decided to tune it done some huh???

# 27 NoFear @ 03/19/10 09:34 AM

I don't see what these "stats" are going to do to improve the game. So what if Favre threw all those picks, does that mean that they're going to make it so Favre is more accurate or something? I don't get it nor do I care really.

When are we going to see new info for this game? Last year there was a lot more info at this time if I'm not mistaken. AND whatever they do as far as giving us new info, I really don't want to see a bunch of lies. Remember the blogs on offensive and defensive line being fixed, and so much more life-like, etc.? Well o-line is terrible, and d-line is just as bad IMO. Although I'm sure some were satisfied with d-line play.

# 28 KBLover @ 03/19/10 12:06 PM

IMO, the problem isn't the percentages, it's that EA's formulas are screwed and/or their game engine isn't even looking at the ratings, but is more oriented on what animation triggers.

If a 58 PRS corner is winning too much vs a 80 RLS WR, that's not the fault of percentages, that's the fault of EA not using the RLS rating to make it play out more realistically. Instead it's just the CB being "checked" and if the CB wins, then the animation plays and then WR is like WTF? and can't move.

Of course, if the PRS rating isn't being checked either - well that's another problem. Again, that's not the fault of the game being percentage driven, it's the fault that the game engine isn't using ratings to calculate the percentages.

At the minimum there should be 2 checks (CB success, then WR release success), or better it should be PRS vs RLS = % chances of success by the CB. If failed, the CB is off balanced (trigger stumble animation), and the WR runs his route like no one was there for while the CB is stumbling (which could then be determined by AGI to see which animation plays - the just a little off balance one, or the fall on his face one).

That's the problem in my view.

As far as EA's mentioning these percentages - that's actually a GOOD thing they are looking at them, imo.

Why? Because maybe, just maybe they are looking at how the game is playing out and seeing their formulas are not working right.

If there were X% of successful stiff arms in the NFL, and Madden is way off of that, then that should be a sign that something isn't working right. Perhaps their formulas are too heavy in favor of the HB. Perhaps the TAK rating isn't being used (if the rating works like the slider then all it does is increase suction tackle distance). Perhaps it's the fact there's an ELU + SFA rating for the ball carrier but only, at best, the TAK rating for the defender (if all are equal weight, the ball carrier is getting 2:1 even if all ratings are the exact same)

So I'm looking at it as a potential positive. What they DO about it, that's what I'd like to hear. I also agree with the person who said EA needs to be forth coming with how it works - what ratings do what and work in what situations.

# 29 seriousluboy83 @ 03/19/10 01:35 PM

football isn't based around percentages...baseball is...there's no need to lock down ratings with percentages...except for the qb's, punter's, and kicker's everyone else should have free range ratings

# 30 KBLover @ 03/19/10 07:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by seriousluboy83


	football isn't based around percentages...baseball is...there's no need to lock down ratings with percentages...except for the qb's, punter's, and kicker's everyone else should have free range ratings

Just because basic football stats doesn't express stats as percentages doesn't mean players don't succeed a PERCENTAGE of the time. WR catch the ball a percentage of the time. HB break tackles a percentage of the time. OL win their blocks a percentage of the time. That's just part of the game. Simply because the stats don't say "AP broke tackles x% of the time" in his stat line doesn't mean he succeeded at 0 or 100%. That doesn't make sense.

The ratings simply should make those percentages express themselves...you know...like in baseball games - how do you think The Show can make players succeed at different rates? Rating vs Rating = % success.

How else is a computer game going to do it?

# 31 reo @ 03/19/10 08:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KBLover


	Just because basic football stats doesn't express stats as percentages doesn't mean players don't succeed a PERCENTAGE of the time. WR catch the ball a percentage of the time. HB break tackles a percentage of the time. OL win their blocks a percentage of the time. That's just part of the game. Simply because the stats don't say "AP broke tackles x% of the time" in his stat line doesn't mean he succeeded at 0 or 100%. That doesn't make sense. The ratings simply should make those percentages express themselves...you know...like in baseball games - how do you think The Show can make players succeed at different rates? Rating vs Rating = % success.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KBLover


	How else is a computer game going to do it?

If I remember correctly from an earlier thread, this guy along with another believed physics and numbers do not coincide in some sort of way.

# 32 seriousluboy83 @ 03/19/10 10:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KBLover


	Just because basic football stats doesn't express stats as percentages doesn't mean players don't succeed a PERCENTAGE of the time. WR catch the ball a percentage of the time. HB break tackles a percentage of the time. OL win their blocks a percentage of the time. That's just part of the game. Simply because the stats don't say "AP broke tackles x% of the time" in his stat line doesn't mean he succeeded at 0 or 100%. That doesn't make sense. The ratings simply should make those percentages express themselves...you know...like in baseball games - how do you think The Show can make players succeed at different rates? Rating vs Rating = % success. How else is a computer game going to do it?

ea isn't working this system like "the show"...ea's locking all players into a certain % instead of the player's having a individual %

# 33 sportugy @ 04/01/10 08:57 AM

I really don't care about anything other than realistic line play and smarter AI. Give me realism! something the ****** ********* got away from since they got the exclusive NFL rights!

# 34 Nav @ 04/02/10 12:41 AM

I'd like to see them fix all of the glitches the game contains online. I've played so many guys online that knew nothing about football but ran PA and threw it to the flats EVERY SINGLE TIME. Even if I put my corners in flat zone, they coast to the inside away from the RB or TE they see coming to they're coverage area. The defensive AI is just ********. I'm not that excited about Madden 11 just yet, when they announced fixtures for the games AI on offense and defense, I'll be jumping for joy.

# 35 MidgetOnaPony @ 04/02/10 02:52 PM

KB lover hit it on the head.
these %'s mean nothing, EA is still running this game based on what canned animations you can make happen for each situation.
man i hope im wrong...

« Previous 12Next »

More Links