(Note: I wrote a list of all the things I wanted to talk about in this review/rant before I started the article, reminders, and it just kept getting bigger and bigger.)
Franchise
First I want to take a look at my favorite aspect of Madden, Franchise mode. By this I mean the offline franchise mode where you can build your dynasty or burn your team into a smoking heap (Raiders). I personally thoroughly enjoy this game mode as I love taking my Broncos, who are usually below average in the game, to greatness. This year the guys at EA Sports had promised that they had added numerous features and spent a vast majority of time making this and Superstar mode much better.To be honest I was super pumped for this game because of this reason. Two of the main game modes of Madden would finally be given some much needed addition.
So envision if you will my first time with Madden. I load it up, update the rosters (I didn't want Orton on our team) and started off my franchise. The first thing you see when your franchise loads up is a picture of your team versus it's next opponent and a background image of that city. That was it, nothing else. Since the first game is the first preseason game I thought maybe it would change over the season. It didn't. I can't tell you how much I was disappointed when yet again Franchise mode had missed on a key aspect of the game that makes it so fun. Note there is a menu system, but it isn't displayed and is opened through a few button clicks.
The reason I play franchise mode is not to play the games but to do all the other fun stuff. Sign players, draft players, hire coaches, watch those players I believed in grow and get better. There is nothing better in Madden then finding that guy who doesn't rate very good but you say 'hey i believe he may be great' and then watching him succeed. Following that underdog. The main stuff that is involved in running the franchise. The games themselves are a mean to an end. Want a perfect season? Sure I will play every game. But I am interested in the stats, what other teams are doing, the scouting, injuries, all that stuff. The problem is this Madden doesn't display that information in a timely and easy manner to use. You waste more time navigating then doing the things you want to do. Madden can do this effectively and efficient and has done it in the past. Maybe bring in someone that is an expert in user interfaces and understands how this sort of stuff should be done, as at the moment it is clear you do not know how.
The Stats hub is one example of this and I ain't a fan of it. Well I think it can be done better. There is a lot of time spent on not important screens with very little information. For example navigating to the season stats page for your team is done by numerous button clicks. Then there is other screens which are the opposite, they don't have enough info on them, like doing the owner tasks. You would think doing the owner activities would be an important part of franchise mode but it seems more like an after thought. For one doing stadium upgrades, you can select to do heaps of them but it never shows the teams total income or budget so you don't know if you are spending money you have or not. That is a problem if you are getting 20 million dollar jumbotron. Then you have ones like the coaches hiring screen. Which is small and compacted together. It is hard to find information on the coaches, like their ratings or their previous records with clubs and I thought this would have been important information in making coaching hires. These are all things that could be done better.
Moving on, after playing for several hours over a few days I had completed my first season and was deep into offseason scouting of players I wanted to draft. This is where I came across one of the first bugs I would have to endure while playing this game. I had just completed scouting players but before I wanted to start the draft I just wanted to go over the list of players and sort of design a plan of attack, who in what round etc. The screen that lists all the scouted players (and pretty much every other screen) has a progress button (it is start on the PS3) that should take you to the next activity in this case the draft. I stupidly pressed the progress button but instead of taking me to the draft it took me to the rookie signing screen which is the next thing you do after drafting your rookies. But to my horror it had skipped the draft completely and I had not drafted any players, so this rookie signing screen was empty. Can you imagine the rage Elway would be in if he had a week long bender and missed the entire draft and didn't get anybody? That was the state I was in. I couldn't believe the stupid logic of the game and the fact it hadn't even sim'ed me some players. I got nothing, that is not a fun game. So I was faced with continuing as is or reloading a save file. I went save file which was an hour back in game play. This is when I asked myself the question why doesn't this game have an autosave feature? Pretty much every other game in the last 5 years has had one and there are more than enough loading screens in Madden to add one, so why then isn't there? Therefore I spent the next hour getting back to the same point and continuing on with the game.
Cut days are a really cool new feature of the game but it would be great if they actual worked. On more than one occasion it would skip a specific cut day. A bit of background, during the preseason there is 4 weeks of games. Each week you need to cut down a number of players, the order is 4, 4, 8 and 4 players. Note: I had settings set so cut days was a USER task and not a CPU (computer) task. I don't like playing the preseason games, there is no real point to them in this game. So I sim that week. At the end of each week it should ask you to finalize cuts and it does for weeks 1,2 and 4. But week 3 the biggest cut day, it for what ever reason would sim through the week and since this is the biggest cut week of 8 players it is quite frustrating when your trying to evaluate players and want to keep some. What is even more frustrating was some times it does sim it and others it doesn't, it was an random happening. So another cool idea broken by a bug.
I thought signing naming rights of stadiums was quite funny. Why? Because no matter what company you sign with for the naming rights the names on the stadiums never change. Also there is no SAF@MH on the Denver stadium, it still has the Invesco field logos all over it.
Scouting I think could be done better or differently. As we know in the real world NFL teams have scouting reports on almost every people coming into the league through the draft, 300+ guys. But in Madden you can only scout 20 at most and is harder when you try to spread that 20 over more players at the different events. So the draft becomes more of a cr
