Madden Producer's Blog

Whenever I find I blog I want to keep tabs on, I hit the subscribe button in FireFox. Guess what? His blog doesn't have an RSS feed. COME ON. RSS feeds are essential in updating your product. Get with the program. Anyway, on with the story.

A few days ago, EA sports' Madden producer, Ian Cummings describes what drives him crazy about Madden. Oddly enough, the pet peeves all directly correlate to the features Madden 08 employs.

Missing Features

What happened to defensive hot routes? The strip ball button? Man lock? Defensive assignments? I actually took part in designing all those features, and not having them in next gen totally sucks. We all know Madden 06 was not what we wanted it to be. In the face of ridiculous adversity, we did ship the game, which many other teams weren’t able to do. But to not have these features in 07, what is the deal with that?

Gang Tackling

This is next gen. NEXT GENERATION. How are players still clipping through each other? Why do all the defenders fall down like bowling pins when a tackle starts? Why do we not have swarming defenders piling on to tackles and cleaning up?

Fatigue. Ugh.

It’s bad enough that the Madden 07 shipped without fatigue and that it had to be patched. But even with the patch, fatigue is barely even a part of this game! I can’t think of too many things that are more important to a simulation of football outside of stamina and fatigue. It changes the way teams play on so many levels! What good is having a big bruising back without fatigue? What good is it to run a no huddle offense without fatigue? What about a ridiculously hot game in Miami or the thin air in Denver? Those are real life obstacles NFL players have to deal with…why aren’t they in the game? Also, why doesn’t fatigue update dynamically during a play? Vick can run sideline to sideline at full sprint for 10 minutes until someone gets open in Madden right now. That’s obviously less than ideal. And what about fatigued animations? I’d love to see players breathing heavy at the line, or taking longer to get up, or even struggling to run for those last few yards on a big kick return.

Pre-Play Cut Scenes

Why don’t the players run to the line realistically from the huddle in the gameplay camera? I loathe cut scenes most of the time, mainly because I’m totally out of user control. I can’t set up my offense or defense, and after I’ve seen those cut scenes once or twice I’ve had enough.

Later in his blog, He made excuses for the shortcomings of Madden 07. Excuses are like buttholes, everyone has one and they are full of shit.

Only one thing can make the alienated Madden Fan a believer again, and that is a solid product.

You can follow this link to read the excuses.