After a disastrous rollout and #FixMaddenFranchise trending last year, EA Sports vowed to exercise a renewed focus on franchise mode in Madden 22. On Wednesday, the company gave it’s first deep dive into what they’ve improved over the last 365 days. Here’s what we learned from the Madden 22 All Access Deep Dive.
Madden 22 new franchise staff and staff points
According to EA, this year’s franchise mode is more of an RPG-style, narrative-driven experience. Coaching staffs make a return (sort of) with offensive and defensive coordinators, and player personnel in addition to head coaches. The staffs are not fully licensed, like in older Madden’s, but they are customizable. New staff points are earned weekly by setting goals, playing games, and completing objectives and can be used to build a team that fits your playstyle. Additionally, scouting is back with national and regional scouts. More info on this will be released later in the summer. A live service scouting update is queued up for September, says Connor Dougan, Madden 22 Senior Design Director.
New weekly strategy and dynamic gameday integration
Weekly strategy is the core of the franchise experience. In Madden 22, who, where, and when you play is said to play a bigger role than in past games. Halftime adjustments, next-gen stats, opponent’s play calling tendencies, and managing things like fatigue/practice intensity are all a part of the mode.
Madden 22 new season engine
In an attempt to mimic the true to life ups and downs of the NFL season, franchise mode launches with over 35 scenarios, with more updates to come throughout the year. This is essentially an extension of the scenario engine introduced in Madden 20, but with more of a cutscene instead of just text on a screen.
Madden 22 new franchise hub
This year’s Madden also debuts an updated franchise UI. The new hub aims to streamline the most important information for players. Such as the activity list, team goals, roster management, league tab, and reworked news tab.
Seems light but it’s a start?
I’m afraid I have to disagree. The season engine, the in-game and out-of-game weekly strategies coaching trees and abilities, and a new scouting system are not light. It’s really a lot and can provide so much to us franchise players off the field. It is what I have been looking for in a football game. You have lots of sim games out there that have these functions. Nice seeing madden at least trying. That is also if they are able actually to get it to work. But it does look promising.
i mean, yeah its big, but that honestly is a super small part of madden, the gameplay is still trash, constant game breaking bugs, trade system is one of the worst of any sports game, drafts are just terrible (remember when you used to have actual fun storylines you could follow, like a 40 year old who declares for the league?), its awesome they are finally adding coaches, but in the grand scheme of things, its more of a “okay, aaaand?” point rather than the main new feature of the game. and for all we know, it could end up being just like 2k where coaching actually doesn’t matter at all, i appreciate you can upgrade coaches in madden and that offers a little more than 2k, but in the end coaches don’t really change the game. hopefully its like head coach ’09 and not like a 2k game.