EA Sports determined to win gamers’ consent with ‘Madden NFL 23’
EA Sports determined to win gamers’ consent with ‘Madden NFL 23’: On an afternoon in late July, Clint Oldenburg delivered the honest truth about Madden NFL 23.
“We do not want to have to sell it ourselves. We want our players to sell it.”
The newest and the latest annual iteration of the series is often accompanied by a marketing push. It is boosted by the allure of another real-world National Football League season on the horizon. But even the largest promotional campaign in history is not in the capacity to generate the kind of organic buzz Oldenburg hopes will build around this year’s edition.
“We want the players that played the game and get the earliest copies of the game to tell all of their friends, ‘I love this game. You have to get it because I want to play it with you,’” Oldenburg said. “Ultimately, that is the biggest compliment we can get: players telling other people, ‘You have got to get this game.’”
When Madden NFL 23 was released to the public, the game-playing world would set out to render its judgment.
Pushing Madden forward
Recent editions of Madden have been the fans’ target online ire. More than 5,000 reviews are there on the site Metacritic of the PlayStation 4 version of Madden NFL 21. This has resulted in a user score of 0.3 out of 10.The PlayStation 5 version of Madden NFL 22 attracted 518 user reviews, and resulted in a score of 0.6. In July 2020, gamers got frustrated with stagnation in the series’ Franchise Mode.
A few fans’ complaints were being driven by nostalgia for older versions of the game.The desire to generate internet clout by piling on deserved the criticism they received. The game had become stale in many areas. The visuals did improve but the mechanics and functionality did not advance at the expected rate.
Over the past few years, EA Sports made changes to Franchise Mode. They overhauled the scouting element and added features like a playoff picture.
The Madden series stands as the only licensed NFL simulation game on the market. According to the numbers provided by EA Sports, plenty of people are still buying and playing it every year. If the series isset to accomplish the kind of word-of-mouth success Oldenburg hopes for, boosting its reputation will be key.
Recent Madden releases included new features that didn’t impress the audience. It included flashy, buzzy labels.
The difference and disparity with Madden NFL 23 is quite noticeable from the opening snap.
The main focal feature is FieldSENSE. FieldSENSE is a brand-new gameplay system where every on-field action is built across all modes. Players seem to have more control than ever before.
Player models’ display is remarkably different. The models are completely redesigned. They move with more precision and agility due to a movement-control function called 360-Degree Cuts.
Hit Everything is a feature allowing defenders to contact ball-carriers from multiple angles with multiple players. This feature increases the chances of forcing a turnover or denying an opponent from gaining additional yards.
Skill-Based Passing enables the players to place balls where only their targeted pass-catcher can reach them.
Branching animations boost variance across the action which in return increases the chances a Madden player will never experience the same game twice.
Most importantly, the game reflects real football.
“One of the biggest things that we heard from our fans was that they felt the game was, in their terms, animation-based,” Aaron McHardy, Madden’s executive producer, said. “What we interpreted [from] what they meant by animation-based … is that they feel like, a lot of the time, the game felt pre-determined, because you were locked into canned animations. That was a big one for us that we wanted to tackle.”
If you throw a pass toward a receiver with a defender nearby, you would not be able to predict what happens. The all-or-nothing outcomes have passed. Instead, defenders will be having multiple viable options. The options include:
- go for the pick
- swat at the ball
- attempt to jolt the ball free from a receiver’s hold.
“You have never really been able to throw that route in our game,” Oldenburg said. “Skill-based passing is gonna allow you to do that, plus a lot more.”
‘We listen to our players’
To understand why these significant changes were not inculcated in earlier editions of the game, one has to consider the nature of the development cycle of an annual sports simulation title. McHardy said, “it is like squeezing blood from a stone in a short amount of time.”
The development team did not ignore the Madden community’s requests and criticism in recent years.
“We listen to our players. We are scouring Metacritic. We are scouring forums, Reddit,” McHardy said. “Like Clint said, we have got to be thick-skinned, because some of it is scathing. We know that’s because people love the game so much, so we’re able to be thick-skinned about it and try to find those nuggets of truth. And we collect all of that up and ask ourselves what we know about the game. And what we think we can improve. And we put all that together and make lists. ‘OK, what are all the things we can do after this year with the amount of time we have?’ …”
“We know we have ideas beyond what we can accomplish in a single year. So how do you get to a complete picture? And what of that is the most impactful that is going to please the most people in a single year? And make sure we are not firing blanks anywhere. That we know that everything we go after is going to make a meaningful difference.”
To conclude matters, in 2020, the Madden team ran into the same all-encompassing roadblock resembling the rest of the world: the COVID-19 pandemic. The operations shifted from the team’s office in Orlando to remote, the challenges increased in scale. The industry’s shift from the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of consoles (Gen Four) to the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S (Gen Five) in the year 2020 made the climb grow steeper.
Due to supply-chain problems, it was difficult for Oldenburg to procure a game development kit required to work on the next-generation version of Madden NFL 21.
“When we initially started working on Gen Five, I think we had like six kits total on all the Madden teams, and it slowly grew,” Oldenburg said.
“To get my test kit, just for me to test the console version of the game, I had to go into the office … and I saw our IT guy had a Gen Five test kit sitting on his desk, and I said, ‘Can I take that?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, OK.’ And that’s how I got my Gen Five test kit during COVID, because they were so hard to find.”
Along with the aforementioned challenges, the Madden team faced another hurdle to clear. They were tasked with developing two adjacent versions of the game simultaneously. These versions should be designed in such a way that could be played on consoles from Gen Four and Gen Five. Thus, Madden NFL 21, the first to be available on Gen Five consoles, boasted no revolutionary changes.
The Madden team did not rest on its laurels. FieldSENSE has been in the process for a while now, and the Madden team managed to create it as a new foundation upon which the game’s home was to be built and get upgraded for years to come.
“You can see how this all works together,” Oldenburg said about the impact of FieldSENSE on the gameplay changes coming to Madden NFL 23. “One thing that Coach (John) Madden always cared the most about was the fundamentals of the game. Something like FieldSENSE pushes forward on the innovation side that every game needs. But for our players and our game, that’s just as important as the fundamentals.”
John Madden, the Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, was involved with the development of the game. The game had his name from its inception in 1988.
Madden was on the cover of the game until Madden 2000 was released. The company began to pick NFL players to feature up front.
The development team received a number of complaints about issues in Madden NFL 22. The complaints included overpowered quarterback scrambling ability and zone coverage deficiencies.
In response to these complaints, they added elements to properly execute coverage in Madden NFL 23 as per real-world rules. They also relaxed the special abilities of players. This made their immediate scramble attempts less effective. They upgraded pass-rushing in order to shorten the time available to release a pass.
“That is huge,” McHardy said, “because when you think about how people played the game last year and before, it was try to get to the quarterback, and when the ball went up in the air, you are switching and trying to look for the interception, which is not really what should be happening when you think about it.”
The goal was simple: adjust and improve the game in such a way that it plays closer to real-world football and give players the control they desire to make decisions of the outcome on the virtual field.
“To be able to make that change, to give defenses the ability to find different ways to get off the field, that was one of the goals when we talked about agency and control …” McHardy said. “It really changes the way that you’re thinking about approaching defense, which also reflects in play-calling and a lot of other things and brings a lot more of the strategy and chess match into the game.”
The improvements in gameplay around off-field action are heading in the right direction. EA Sports includes additional scouting upgrades in Madden NFL 23. Free agency possesses more depth and variety. Amateur general managers are responsible to contend with individual A.I. players who now carry motivations that stretch well beyond the dollar. The development team went on to reduce the size of playbooks.
“Some of these NFL trades that get made, there is not, like, a chart for anyone to follow to understand what the logic is,” Oldenburg said. “So as real life keeps evolving, franchise mode is going to keep evolving right along with it.”
EA Sports informed that they have fielded over 7,000 calls from players disputing ratings.
‘The rest comes in the proof in the pudding’
Unlike in past years, EA Sports will not sprint to the mountaintops to sell Madden NFL 23 to the world. Instead, they will be informing their players of new features and leave the verdict to them.
“We have made an effort to start to decrease the hyperbole that we use in our comms, in our messages about what we’re building,” Oldenburg said. “In the past, we got kind of in the habit every year of writing, ‘This is the best X ever,’ or, ‘This is the best in franchise history.’ We’ve made an effort to say, ‘That’s not for us to decide; that’s for the players to decide.”
“Just tell the players exactly what it is you’re delivering and let them decide how good it is for them, and I think that is starting to pay benefit, as well. Because if you come out and say, ‘This is the best thing ever,’ the only thing anyone can really say better is, ‘No, it’s not.’ ”
“If we continue to do that year over year, then when we tell people about what we’re building into next year’s game, we are hoping that they will get excited about it,” McHardy said. “The rest comes in the proof in the pudding.”
It is a video game and so things are expected not to be perfect. There are going to be release-week bugs, and there will still be areas in which players will want more. But after years of review sites and making potentially transformational changes to Madden, the newest iteration finally delivers on a few of these desires.
“They should go get this game because it is our tribute to Coach Madden,” Oldenburg said, “and it is going to play completely differently than anything you have come to expect in the last couple years of Madden.”