In addition to new equipment, EA Sports shared news on player likeness and other details pertaining to Madden 22 authenticity.
Madden 22 New Player Ratings, Roster and Ratings Details
EA expressed an understanding in knowing player and coach likeness remains extremely important to players. The process of head-scanning takes time and relies on our team getting face-to-face with athletes. Limitations around in-person opportunities impacted their ability to get the traditional number of head scans this year. EA intends to add more head-scans via Title Updates during the season and hope to hit the road to start scanning even more NFL players soon. Here’s a list of some head-scans added for launch of Madden 22:
- Trevor Lawrence
- Kyle Pitts
- Justin Fields
- Zach Wilson
- Jonathan Taylor
- Rodrigo Blankenship
- Deebo Samuel
- Terry McLaurin
- Darnell Savage
- Byron Murphy
- Juan Thornhill
- Matt Milano
- James Robinson
- Diontae Johnson
- Cam Akers
- Mark Andrews
- Clyde Edwards-Helaire
- Mecole Hardman
- Maxx Crosby
- Antonio Gibson
- Darius Slayton
- Penei Sewell
- Micah Parsons
With those limitations in-mind, EA made a significant effort to upgrade the generic head library. To do so, EA added over 100 new generic heads which will be available for create-a-player. Additionally, they also spent time making visual improvements to existing scans. These will carry forward to the latest console generation.
Rosters
For rosters, some adjustments were made to make Franchise mode more dynamic. Changes made aim to better reflect aging superstars and promising young players. EA started with removing the ‘Star+’ dev-trait on many older veterans who have met or surpassed their full potential through their careers.
You can expect some tweaks to the OVR formula as well. Modified were made to the outside linebacker group getting them closer to middle linebackers. This will improve ratings crossovers when changing a player’s position from one to the other to support specific defensive schemes and playbooks.
This change will prevent significant OVR shifts when changing positions and keeps players within the same range across the LB positions. Along with this, Ball Carrier Vision has been added to the Scrambling QB archetype to better characterize a very important skill for this type of player.
Ratings
During the Madden 21 season, EA started using the average of the top five speeds recorded by each player, via Next Gen Stats, to get a better evaluation for our Speed rating. Using real-life data from the NFL, and accounting for player performance on a weekly and yearly basis, EA plans to deliver a more accurate representation of player speed on the Madden gridiron.
In addition to the speed data, EA finds it important to accommodate recorded 40-yard-dash times and watch game film to see how it translates to game-speed. To summarize, EA is matching up the Next Gen Stats data and combining numbers with actual game footage to improve our creation process of Speed and Acceleration ratings for Madden 22.
As you have seen throughout the game over the last two years, NFL Next Gen Stats plays a big part in terms of player performance. EA hopes to continue finding ways to integrate this data into ratings processes in the future.
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