EA Sports is bringing Madden NFL into the future.
EA announced during its conference call that the Madden NFL franchise will make the jump from the Ignite engine to the more advanced Frostbite engine starting with Madden NFL 18 later this year.
“Our Madden NFL franchise will transition to the Frostbite engine with Madden NFL 18, unlocking major visual advancements and new gameplay experiences that will excite dedicated Madden players, football fans, and sports fans overall,” EA said in a message to its investors.
The Frostbite engine made its debut in the EA Sports catalog of games with Rory McIlroy PGA Tour and FIFA 17 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The engine will also be coming to the NHL and NBA franchises in the near future as well, though it wasn’t mentioned if that will be this year.
For those that don’t know about it, the Frostbite engine was developed by the team behind the popular Battlefield series, EA Dice. The engine was originally developed for first-person shooters, but was expanded with the third edition of the engine, just known as Frostbite instead of Frostbite 3, to include sports titles.
As far as what the engine means for Madden, the potential right now is near limitless in regards to gaming.  Take the Frostbite’s dynamic weather ability for example. Madden could now feature games that hypothetically go from rain to snow to clear over its course which is something that hasn’t happened in the series before.
In addition to the weather, the in-game physics could drastically be altered. This could ultimately change the way tackling, running, receiving and passing are all done within the game itself.
Finally, frostbite definitely excels at is facial animation and emotion. So expect to see more realistic player reactions on the faces of players in Madden 17. It also allowed EA to recreate backroom areas for fifa 17s story mode, The Journey. So could we finally see a fully fleshed out player story mode in madden 18? I guess we will have to wait and see. Needless to say Madden fans should be in for a drastic on-field change.
