Madden 360
So here's what's bothering me.Another day, another two Madden 360 videos with lousy animation. Granted, the crowd, the stadiums, the new interface, it all looks excellent. The new player models? Tremendous.
And then they start to move, and you want to throw a brick through the monitor.
EA is paying $60 million a year for five years to have an exclusive NFL license. It's an incomprehensibly bad deal for EA from a financial standpoint. Even if they had to pay $15 million to get a non-exclusive license from the NFL (and I'm sure it wasn't that high), that's still a $45 million delta. There's no way they get their money back on that.
Sure, they sold more copies than last year. But let's look at what they could have done with that $45 million instead. Let's say that a topflight animator, fully burdened, costs them $150,000 a year (again, I bet it's not that much, but let's be conservative). For just $10 million, they could have hired an additional 65 animators to work full-time on the game for a year. Think that would have improved the animation?
So they make the game significantly better for $10 million, they sell more copies, and they saved $35 million in the process. Does anyone think that Madden wouldn't have sold more copies if they had just improved the game?
Even better, that's a one-time investment. Once animation is good, it's good. Sure, you add animations each year, but if the core is outstanding, you don't have to make the delta investment again. That one-time investment pays off for years.
This is how adrift the leadership on the Madden project has become. ABC Monday Night Football has little video clips of the starting lineup introducing themselves. It would be entirely consistent for EA to spend hundreds of hours filming little video clips of all the projected starters to make the "broadcast" more "real" for next year's version. I expect them to do that, actually. They'll improve anything except what happens after the ball is snapped.
EA actually asked a site to pull down a four minute gameplay video because they said it wasn't "representative" of the game. Dude, it is the game. I swear, if I still had Gameday from 1996 I could fire it up and I don't think Madden's current animation would be significantly better. More polygons, sure, but I doubt that Madden would look much better in motion.
And if I can find a copy of Gameday somewhere, I'll try that this week.
Now if Madden's been playing possum with placeholder animations and the final version is just fantastic, I'll be thrilled. I appreciate an excellent sports game as much as anyone, and I don't care who makes it. But I don't see any indications that Madden is going to be that game.
EA has franchise disease with most of its titles now--a gross misunderstanding of what isn't working and what needs to be improved. Major problems are totally ignored while new features that are as thin as tissue paper get added. Of course, some of those new features will disappear next year, only to reappear several years later. Feature inconsistency across platforms, feature inconsistency across team sports titles--it's a mess. Selling the game and growing the customer base is more important than playing the game.
Would you like a list of what Madden should have done five years ago and still needs to do today? Here you go.
1. Fix the animation. It's ass.
2. Scrap the playcalling logic and start over. Remember that the two-minute offense needs different criteria for playcalling. Better yet, just open it up and let us adjust it. We would fix it.
3. Stop using speed cheats as difficulty levels. Giving the CPU team a 15% speed bonus is not a difficulty level--it's bad design.
4. Stop ignoring special teams. Guys on the punt return team need to actually block. Field goal kickers need to miss field goals. Just add a slider where "0" means they make nothing and "100" means they make everything. We can figure out where to set it.
5. Where are the in-game cutaways for highlights of other games? Where is the weekly post-game highlight package? How about a freaking first down measurement once in a while?
You know what would really be fun? If you're playing a game and it's a blowout with five or six minutes to go, why not have the option to leave and watch the end of the week's most exciting game? You're ahead by thirty, you're bored to death, and suddenly you get switched to a game that's tied with two minutes left. How much fun would that be? So instead of playing in a cocoon, you'd actually be seeing the rest of the league. It would be so much more convincing. It would be dynamic, which is a word I never even think of in conjunction with Madden.
Believe me, I'm barely scratching the surface. I didn't even mention jetpacking db's and the incredibly sterile franchise mode or any one of a dozen other problems. None of which have anything to do with "quarterback vision" or Superstar mode or any of the crap they added this year.
Grrr.
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