We’ve got the most detailed CFM interview yet with Madden NFL CFM Creative Director Kolbe Launchbaugh who gives us the scoop on CFM goals, scouting, XP, the combine, draft boards and more in part one of this two part interview.
The Natural: The is the Natural with Sports Gamers Online and we’re here with the one and only Kolbe Launchbaugh here at EA Sports, he is the creative director of CFM, a lot of the great modes that we all love, we’re excited to talk to you, and tell us a little about some new features and stuff from Madden 16.
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Alright, well, you guys have all seen the press release, we’ve got a bunch of new features in CFM, rather than talking about the press release, why don’t you tell me the questions you want to know about it, what type of stuff do you want to know?
The Natural: Sure, we’re really excited about the weekly goals that they have for this year and how you guys have enhanced that and changed that with the weekly goals, and some of the drive, the per drive goals that you have going now, this year, which are really cool.
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Alright, yeah, so we have overhauled the goal system, we did make some big changes to the weekly goals. Last year, all of the weekly goals were kind of fire and forget, one off weeks, this year, the weekly goals, they can tell a little bit of a story. They can chain together, so if you have a young running back, or if you have a young running back on your team, depending on how you’re playing, and you’re starting to have a breakout year, you’ll start to get a series of goals called ‘breakout running back,’ and it starts to help you improve and give you more and more XP as you achieve harder and harder goals throughout your season. Sort of how any breakout running back might have happen to him, he might get more and more carries, more and more opportunities to improve himself, this is trying to kind of mirror and mimic that effect that happens in reality in a game with that mechanic.
The Natural: That’s awesome! So, different teams in the CFM, they might have totally, a whole different set of goals for different players?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Absolutely, yeah, no, dependent on what’s happening to you inside of your CFM, I apologize, I’m losing my voice a little bit. And I’ll tell you a little bit more about the dynamic game goals; those each pertain to the specific drive, and we have this new presentation feature called a ‘drive starter,’ and the drive starter looks at the situation of the game, what’s happening in the past in the game, kind of like the story of this drive, and starts to tell a presentation story and an audio story about what’s going on. Well, the drive goals hook into that feature, and for the most part, they’re going to piggyback on that and tell the same story, so if they’re talking about getting the game started or getting the quarterback hot, you might get a complete three passes in a row to get the quarterback going, so to build his confidence, you can literally gain confidence now while in the game.
The Natural: So, that’s also tied, a little bit, to the commentaries there, a little bit, tied into that?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Well, we don’t actually say ‘get your drive goal and you’ll get confidence,’ because that’d be stupid. But, what we do, we tell it in the fiction of the football game, right? So the fans might be talking about how they really got to get the ball going, I’m sure they’re going to look to throw the ball there to get the game started, they’ll say things like that, that line probably doesn’t exist, but something like that does, to make the game feel like it’s really more contextual and really knows more about what’s going on and adding in those drive goals with it helps you in the game to, kind of, be apart of that world.
The Natural: We’re super excited about that, as soon as we saw that drive goal feature, we thought it was very cool. Another way to build up confidence and get some XP for you player sin the game, which is awesome. So, about, like, one thing I was concerned about with that, though, was do you think those drive goals are kind of shaped how the player plays the game, as in, let’s say if he’s more of a runner and you’re saying ‘you need to pass for 50 yards in this job,’ do you feel you’re kind of shaping the gameplay within the game by doing that?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: If you listen to the drive goals, a little bit. But, the drive goals really are not there to force you to play the way that you want to play, it’s really there to help you augment your team. So, if you’ve got a guy who’s low on confidence and you know ‘oh man, I’ve got to help this guy, he needs a confident boost, so I’m going to go ahead and do the drive goal for my wide receiver, I’m going to throw him these three balls, and get him that plus one confidence and help him get out of the slump he’s in,’ that’s a real thing. It may not be literally communicated to passes to Larry Fitzgerald to get him out of his slump, but if you’re playing (I’m a Cardinal fan, by the way), but if you’re playing with the Cardinals, that may not be happen what happens in reality with Carson Palmer and Larry Fitzgerald, but they will try and get him involved in the game, they will try and get him some isolated catches, some easier catches to get him back started up again. You know, it happens all the time in reality; we’re trying to mimic it and try to represent that a little bit with a game feature.
The Natural: Another big thing you guys got going this year is you’ve kind of re-did the scouting a little bit and how you can take away and see the first three portions of scouting, can you talk a little bit about the scouting features and how you guys improved and re-worked that?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Sure, so, I mean, I’m sure you know, last year the scouting was- you had all of the attributes available to you, you kind of would pick and choose what you wanted to reveal and you spent XP to get his letter grade, you spent time to get the actual number and then you can spend XP on whatever you wanted. Well, the problem that gives you is that as a hardcore guy, you know, I only care about these two traits, and it’s like development trait and speed. Everything else doesn’t matter, I mean, because all I want is that, so it made it pretty easy to go do scouting. The other thing that made it really easy was the idea that you can store up all your scouting points all year long and then right before the draft, right after everything’s happened to you, you know, you’ve lost your game players and agency, guys have retired, you know, you could or couldn’t pick somebody else up in stringency. So, you know, ‘okay, this is exactly what I need, I have the perfect plan with the perfect amount of scouting points to go get the perfect guy.’
The Natural: That’s exactly what I did!
Kolbe Launchbaugh: That’s exactly what everybody in the league does, that’s exactly like you. So, we wanted to make it more like reality, and I know you could argue that this is not like reality, and it’s not, it’s the game iteration, the game interpretation of reality.
The Natural: So, it’s the closest thing?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Yeah. Reality is like you’ve got to hire a bunch of scouts and you’ve got to send them out and learn to trust that scout, that scout’s got to give you great information, it’s going to give you a bunch of written feedback, numbers, charts, graphs, sentences, that’s not realistic.
The Natural: But with all that, even in real life, they still don’t know, and they still get it wrong. Every year, despite the millions of dollars spent on scouting.
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Yeah, and that’s not realistic in the sense of what you could do in the scope of a video game. To expect that millions of people would be able to pursue all of this information and make sense of it and then go ‘I know what to do in the draft,’ it’s not an easy thing. So, excuse me, I’m going to take a quick drink of water. Alright, sorry. So, what we did was simplify the system, simplify the problem and make it a game mechanic. So, now, you can only find out three things about every single player in the draft, and those three things are his top three attributes. If you reveal the third one, you will also get his true draft grade. So, we have a projected draft place, so you might look at the project as a kipper, right, his draft board, the big board.
The Natural: Oh, you said ‘the board,’ that’s a magic word there! Better watch out for that one.
Kolbe Launchbaugh: I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen (inaudible)’s video? Okay, so we’ll get there. But, with the true draft rating, it tells you a lot closer where he really will be drafted, or really should be drafted, not will. So, the advantages by getting that third piece of information, you see this guy, it says he’s got first round talent, you know, first thing he’s got an A in catch in traffic, and you’re like ‘oh cool,’ well, he might have a B and a B in something else and you might think ‘that’s great,’ but the true draft may say he’s like a third round guy. Now, somebody else didn’t reveal all three, they don’t know he’s actually a third round guy, they may get him in the first round, and he’s kind of a bust.
The Natural: Reach!
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Yeah, it’s kind of like a reach. All those little bits of games you can play, forcing you to draft, or to scout every single week, you can’t just save up all of your points until the end and spend them all at once, you have to really think about what you’re going to need and plan ahead. I think like ‘okay, my defensive tackles are getting old,’ I’m a cardinal guy, right? ‘My tackles are getting old, I need to start looking for tacklers in the draft, I’ve got one good end, the other one is okay, and I’m okay there, I need a good middle linebacker,’ so I’m starting to wonder ‘how do I build my draft?’ And then, I might make a totally different move and change it; there might be a great region that I can go pick up, that solves one of those problems, and now with all of the scouting I did, I might still use that, but it falls down in priority.
The Natural: Yeah, it makes it tough. Also, you added the combine, you added the combine, but that’s open to everyone, those combines, that’s a cool thing, I’m definitely happy you guys added that, but what’s stopping guys from maximizing and going for the fastest, you know, biggest guys in the combine, and not looking at a lot of the other stats?
Kolbe Launchbaugh: Well, just because they’re the fastest player doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great fit or a great player on your team. They could be a super fast wide receiver with no catch training, no route running, no awareness, all of those things play into how he plays when you’re not controlling him. So, I would say that yes, it’s nice and yes it adds something, but in the real draft, everybody has combine information. You know how fast that guy is, you know, it’s kind of silly to force you to spend scouting points to find out when you can find out after the combine. So, it’s real, it’s cool, I know it’s something that you guys have asked for, so that’s what we did.
Check back daily for the second part of our Madden 16 Connected Franchise interview with CFM Creative Director Kolbe Launchbaugh.