When EA Sports College Football releases in 2023, longtime players of the Madden NFL series will be right at home with how it plays. That’s because the game will utilize a lot of the same core gameplay as Madden when it launches.
The game will have a separate development team to handle College Football-specific features, modes, and elements. However, the gameplay team will utilize the same technology that Madden has. That means the same engine, animation technology, and more.
Should the studio decide to change game engines down the line, the assumption is that both games will change at, or around, the same time.
Not a Surprising Decision
Though many fans are going to undoubtedly groan at the news, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. Back before the original NCAA Football series ended, both Madden and NCAA Football shared many core elements like the aforementioned engine and animations.
That said, it was never the same exact team working on the game. Back in the “old days” of EA Sports, there were still separate Madden and NCAA gameplay teams.
Today, while they are still using the same base engine, the separate teams allow them to focus work on creating all of the things which make the college game different from the NFL. Presentation, rules, hashmark location, and how the gameplay is tuned, for example.
In real life there are specific tactics and strategy in college that isn’t done in Madden or the NFL. Those are the types of things that will be added to the game as well as any other types of “innovations” not in the NFL game yet. As a refresher, elements like RPOs and wildcat formations came from college.
With both games in development by the same studio within EA Sports, keeping things close knit should help with the development of both products. That said, based on the company’s decision to move a large part — rumored to be half of the franchise team, at least — of the Madden team over to College Football, it may be a bit too much of the same for fans’ liking. Rather than use the new game to work on new technology or gameplay from the ground up, EA Sports clearly wants to keep its status quo. For their sake, the hope is that it pays off
EA Sports College Football is currently in development, and expected to be released on new-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 in July 2023.
What do you think of the EA Sports College Football sharing core gameplay elements with Madden? Let us know in the comment section below, and stick with Sports Gamers Online for more.