In the second of our interviews with Madden 22 developers, we got a hold of Head EA Madden Ratings Adjustor and Equipment Guru, Dustin Smith. We reached out to the SGO community for their Madden 22 questions on Twitter and our official Discord. In this interview, we talk everything equipment. Most notably, baggy sleeves, adjustable sweatbands, and custom cleats (?).
Take a look at what Madden 22‘s Equipment Guru had to say below.
Madden 22 Dustin Smith Interview
Are more mouth guards coming?
The Natural: One major thing that we’ve kind of been having these conversations about for years, right, was the mouth guards. You finally checked that off the list, previously. Are you going to build upon that and include things like fanged mouth guards that players are wearing more now or the baby pacifier?
Dustin Smith: Yeah, now that we’re there there’s not really a limit to where we can go with that. It really just depends on what we want to focus on. And personally, I would like to get in a whole bunch more gear before we expand upon it. I’m big on… I want to do the baggy sleeves, I want to do the padded shooter sleeves, I want to do the loose QB sleeve, I want to do the handwarmers on the back, I want to do towels in different places. So, I mean that’s really all it’s going to come down to…
The Natural: You just took out like four questions in a row… [laughs]
Dustin Smith: I’m just saying these are things I want to do. They’re really high on my list. And, I mean…
Will adjustable handwarmers/towels be in Madden 22?
The Natural: Hold on… let’s pick one of those. One of the biggest things now, the “new mouthpiece,” that’s kind of taken its place as the number one thing I’ve seen is the towel and handwarmers to the back. What’s the challenge with that?
Dustin Smith: There’s a rigging challenge. There’s a graphics challenge… apparently. It sounds easy, and I think its not as hard as maybe we’ve made it on ourselves. I’m currently working on seeing if we can maybe make that happen this year. But if not, it’s pretty much a top priority for next year. Same thing with the handwarmer on the back. It’s high. I want to make them happen. They shouldn’t be terribly difficult.
Like I said, the new art director that we brought over is a big fan of these exact same things too. So looking forward, I can’t see why we can’t make these things happen sooner than later. If I’m lucky… hey, maybe it happens this year. But, I won’t promise anything! You know, I remember the last time I talked about mouthpieces, “Potentially, hey you never know, it could happen this year… You never know.” And you never do, right? Because last year it came in via title update.
Multiple/adjustable sweatbands
The Natural: It’s good to see that it’s on one of the higher priority lists. That’s what people are asking for a lot. Especially… what about things that are already in the game and being able to manipulate them in other ways like adding multiple sweatbands? Or being able to adjust the sweatbands up and down the arm? Or kind of place them anywhere you want to?
Dustin Smith: Yeah, that would ask for a whole new system because you have to be able to rewrite… let’s say you have an option that says you can have an elbow band, a wristband, a forearm band, and a bicep band. And you were given sliders to slide it up and down the arm. Then you’ve got to be able to create a system that says, “Once this band is in this area on the arm, now other items can’t be added here so they don’t clip into each other.” Right? You know, you can’t have a potential elbow pad if you’ve got a bicep band right there because they just kind of clip through each other and it looks terrible. So you’ve got to be able to create a system that knows what you want to lock out, based on whatever you have assigned.
I don’t see why it’s not doable. I mean personally, I would kind of just go the direction of adding bicep bands and forearm bands and just doing a single and a double option, and going that route. Then you’re still going that route but its a little bit simpler because you can’t slide them anywhere… But going the route where you can still put tons of bicep bands/elbow bands/forearm bands all over your arm and then you can lock out [bicep bands, forearm bands, etc.].
Madden 22 baggy sleeves and… custom cleats?
The Natural: One of the things people ask for the most are baggy sleeves. Where’s that, kind of, on your tier list there to get to?
Dustin Smith: That one’s super high. I mean, it’s become very popular over the last two years. That one, padded shooter sleeve, definitely super high for me. Like, same thing, we get it a lot with the custom cleat colorway. I also see it as a glove colorway too… It’s something I’m really, really building towards. We got real close to it. I can’t put a date on it, I’m not going to promise anything. But, I think we have a really good shot to get our colorway stuff working to where we want it. We want it to where the user can put whichever the team colors wherever he wants it, based on, you know… wherever the shoe is.
For all this, plus more information about equipment in Madden 22 and beyond, check out the full interview with Dustin Smith above. For more Madden 22 content, watch our interview with Clint Oldenburg as he touches on gameplay in this year’s game. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to make sure you don’t miss news as it breaks.