It is, without a doubt, a tale of two stories. On one hand, EA continues to push a franchise towards “realism.” This strategy pleases most of the Madden community. While they also cater to the non-educated football fan, how can we blame them in trying to appeal to the masses? Gameplay is continually improving with each release and system.
On the other hand, the epic “starting” disappointments during release have let us down annually. In recent times, players creating leagues for their website (which is their world in some cases), have been greeted at the starting gate with a giant “STOP!”
Madden 13 brought us many wonderful treats. First of all, we had the broken “left-side press” for PS3 users. Something as simple as this changes everything about gameplay and what transpires the next 12 months.
Adding on to that nugget would be the broken accelerated clock and injury-bug. The acceleration clock issue (while annoying), did not stop us from starting a franchise …but the injury-bug did. While users played through a franchise, they were surprised to see that injured players would be carted off the field one week, to only be miraculously healed for the next week. Either Jesus himself is the head trainer for all 32 NFL teams, or we had a major problem on our hands.
Commissioners alike were faced with a major problem: either continue the franchise and “manually” control injuries, or re-start once the issue was patched. Of course the latter was the more common, and hell ensued during late August / early September of 2012.
M25 brought us the QB Injury Bug and CFM start game issues. While franchises did not need to be recreated, these were some nasty setbacks.
Fast forward to now, and the same nonsense continues to plague league members. The CFM “Games not Registering” bug is serious. Right now, commissioners are checking their phones every 10 minutes to check for an update on whether their franchise will need to be recreated, or if it can be patched “in-franchise.”
Gameplay is marvelous ….the unfortunate thing is we wouldn’t know because we cannot play for real just yet. Stay tuned.