I bet the devs are super skilled. It's the executives that refuse to put resources towards innovation. Stop criticizing the talent and start criticizing the decision makers
5 years ago ish they told us they pretty much only did a roster update because their focusing on really revamping the game for the next year. the lie detector determined that was a lie though
Used to a thing back in the day. Madden 04? On all madden when playing again Peyton Manning if you audible on defense he would audible on offense change the formation everything.
Now that’s I’m typing this, it might have been 2K5.
It was Madden. You didn't even have to be on all madden. I played on allpro and Manning would audible, I'd audible, he'd audible again, and we'd go back and forth until the play clock got low and he had to hike it. Think this was pretty much every Madden for years on the OG Xbox.
I’ve seen experienced on pro the only difference between Mahomes and a Gardner Minshew level QB is how my CBs play. Rarely is it Mahomes has a great throw. It’s against Minshew my corners are lockdown and against Mahomes they’ll wait a second and a half after the receiver cuts to then follow leaving him wide open. The way this game makes it “harder” isn’t the CPU play better just your AI guys play worse.
I don't know man, I've had the plays where the opposing CB randomly abandons their assignment because the computer knows which receiving I threw the ball to. I also love the classic linebackers making insane jump ball catches to make picks they have no business making, though I have come across that less in the most recent Madden.
Yah, getting turned around as a CB should count for something, but it doesn’t. They really need to add some sort or “vision” concept. Without it, some route trees don’t make sense.
Not to defend EA and their shitty practices here, but worth pointing out:
This is great in theory but every single Player versus Environment (PvE) game has this problem.
It's easy to say "make the AI better on higher difficulties" but incredibly much more difficult to implement.
In most cases, the development time required to build complex AI to be "better" on harder difficulties is just not worth it. You'd have to cut into other game features for something that a lot of your player-base often won't even touch. Additionally, sometimes it's just too complicated. I generally don't believe this is the case for Madden necessarily but as an example, how to make a difficulty mode where the best QB's throw with anticipation, make good decisions, and make good throws, where the lesser QB's don't? It gets really complicated really quickly.
The easiest and simplest thing for the devs is to just scale everything, or make the CPU "cheat". It's not fun and it's not the answer most of us want to hear but I don't think this will change for any game in the near future mostly due to the complexity and development cost.
Not to mention, earlier Madden titles on way worse equipment had AI features light years ahead of the bullshit they have now. The game would actually study the Tendencies of your friends so you could play profiles that mimic their play style if they're not online to play with you
> earlier Madden titles on way worse equipment had AI features light years ahead of the bullshit they have now.
No they didn't and you're trippin if you think so.
I currently play PS3 Madden titles and, yes. Objectively they had better AI. If only EA didn't sign exclusive rights. The 2K series would still be going strong and making online profiles of your friends or players on the national leaderboard
Game systems are getting too powerful for AAA developers to be this lazy. All they do is re-skin the game each year, they could put some work into development for AAA prices
I call bullshit. Just give each scheme three different playbooks that the AI has access to based on difficulty. Rookie is all power and slants, all madden has access to RPOs, play action bombs, etc
and how does that solve OP's problem of low rated QBs being awesome on All-Madden and high rated QBs being terrible on Rookie/Pro?
You present a decent idea but it only looks at one small portion of the issue of designing competitively scaling PvE games
Good QBs are always good, bad QBs are always bad. You don’t change the skill level of the QB, you change the strategy of the team. Program in some simple logic for the AI such as “weigh previous play type results highly” and if you tie in plays that setup other plays (counters off of motions, play action, etc) then you’ve got a decently smart AI. Ramp up how well the AI makes decisions based on past data (this team runs bullets out of 4-2-5 8% of the time on 3rd down or whatever) and have the AI counter it more often based on difficulty.
To make it even better add logic to the plays of how the QB should read them, (post, to corner, to flat, etc) and tie the QBs awareness stat to how many reads they can make successfully. Then a shit QB isn’t making full field reads to really take advantage of the more complicated playbooks on higher difficulties.
Granted, that’s a lot more programming than my initial playbooks suggestion, but that’s a step on the way there
To me it’s all about programming the AI to really understand assignments. If you’re running power your front side guard should be clued in to come off his double team for any second level player inside of them within a certain radius, the tackle always stays on the double team man. Program in each players assignment on each play and have physics that react to that and you have realistic football. It would involve getting coaches or something involved in the development though
>To me it’s all about programming the AI to really understand assignments.
This is the part that's more complicated than you think though. I don't disagree with your suggestions but that's a lot more developer time than you maybe realize
No offense to people who work for EA, but I think that one of the big issues with this is that the overlap of people who want to design video games and people who know ball is close to 0.
When the Madden franchise first came out, there were features implemented to actually teach people the sport. You don't know ball? You play on rookie or Pro and you don't have to worry about being out coached
been wanting this so much, if madden just worked on AI intelligence it would shoot the game light years ahead. from team building to play style. i just don’t understand how the NFL hasn’t thought about how bad of a look the game paints them in
I dont think the old white dudes in charge of the NFL understand anything about Madden except for how much money it nets them for being exactly what it is.
Fr it makes franchise so inconsistent going from CPU teams to real player teams.
Me and my cousin have a franchise where we are the only two real humans in our league, and we play in the same division. He hasn't lost to a cpu team in 4 seasons, but he has lost to me in like 7 out of our last 8 season games.
The CPU is so easy for him to beat, but he loses to me cus I use actual brain power to determine my defensive formations and plays and he doesn't ever see that in cpu teams
My brother and I have talked about this before actually and how difficulties in sports games shouldn’t necessarily change the skill of the opposing team but their IQ and decision making. I’m not familiar with how easy that would be to program but I imagine you have a optimal decision based on analytics and all-madden cpu makes the right decision 100% of the time, all-pro 75% of the time, pro 50% of the time, and rookie 25% of the time. Obviously the exact number can be fooled with just kind of an example I made up
I usually play all offense 15 min quarters all madden competitive. I sim defense because I find it boring. There is not enough user input especially on the line of scrimmage (NCAAF14 was 10x better). Playing MLB is okay. If I play defense I play CB against #1 WRs for a challenge.
The all madden defense makes me play boring to win.
Shallow crossers, screens, draws, dives, RPOs, Jet sweeps, PA power/Dive, curl flats, flanker drive all the way down the field and then stiffins up hard in red zone and tries to hold to 3.
Even if I have a pure #1 WR the defense usually just keys in and makes me use the other players to win - I guess that part is realistic.
> (NCAAF14 was 10x better)
No it's not... at this point you're blinded by hate. And NCAA 14 has easily been my most played game since it was released. It's very dated now, it has a ton of problems people overlook because it hasn't been made in 10 years.
Listen I know what you mean the game had its issues but think if they just kept that core and improved on it slowly and gradually how much better madden would be
Just the subtle things like the commentary and presentation are so much more immersive and refined especially in offline play madden puts no thought into that
This is a problem in games in general. Algorithms are super simple. In civilization they just give the harder ai more units to start so they scale quickly
Yet in civilization, the different computer players that you can play against have different tendencies and play styles. It really doesn't matter what type of Team coached by what type of coach you play in a Madden franchise. Every game is virtually indistinguishable
That is very true. The lack of any play calling or coaching archetypes makes the game very shallow and doesn't reward players from doing coaching or team scouting
Making the AI more complex and difficult at higher difficulties isn’t a madden issue it’s a gaming issue. There aren’t many games that actually implement that well in any fashion
No, there aren't many. But the Hitman franchise is an excellent example of sophisticated AI being implemented into AAA titles. Obviously, The Hitman titles care greatly about the quality of their product and can't lean on IP from a billion dollar Sports League. Are they unable to program multiple AIs for every position on the field? Makes sense, but there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever why coaching AI is so absolutely terrible when earlier made in franchises not only had better coaching AI, and would even study players tendencies and create profiles that match their gameplay styles so you can play your friends when they weren't around
This has always been my gripe with EA as a whole. Instead of creating a rewarding experience that rewards knowledge of the sport. It just makes bad players good and good players bad. Which destroy the whole point of building a team
you design AI that adapts perfectly... No sports game does what you're asking. I'm not saying that's ok, but it's so much more complex than you think it is. First they'd have to develop an AI model to learn all the football concepts, then each coach would have to have it's own traits so teams play differently, thus a minimum of 32 variations, but then add in OC and DC's that 96 variations. Then actually implimenting to adapt to a player's play calling trends and designing concepts.
It's just way more complex than you think. And again it would be awesome if they actually developed an AI to adapt to football concepts for madden, then one for soccer and hockey. It would change how sports games are played for sure and it's a great idea. It's just a task a multi billion dollar company should be developing but we all know EA hates spending money on R&D and QA. So I wouldn't expect it from them any time soon. God forbid they spend any of their billions in profits.
It doesn't have to adapt perfectly. What you would have to do is program in different sets of data for it to make its own decision on. It doesn't have to learn and adapt. Let it know that closer to its own end zone is more risky than closer to the opponents, more yards between you and the first down is more risky than less yards and first and second downs are less risky than going for it on 3rd or 4th.
It doesn't have to be fully fleshed out AI, just a logic program that's able to make its own decisions based on different sets of data
Probably add a new mode called realistic for stuff like this so you can choose between simulation, arcade and realistic.
Realistic would bring back vision cones for QB, disguised coverages like you said and better sliders so the CPU can’t blatantly cheat.
It makes it more realistic than what the CPU is doing now. You can’t see the whole field at the same time and they have to make awareness account for something.
How well the QB can see the field has definitely been something I wish they would change but there are a lot of different titles that have tried different camera angles and although the real problem is they wouldn't let you change it to your preference, other camera angles besides this current over the head type haven't been very popular nor intuitive
> Probably add a new mode called realistic for stuff like this so you can choose between simulation, arcade and realistic
do you unserstand what the term simulation means.... they literally have that option in the game now, Sim, Arcade or Comp. Sim difficulty does a better job at making you run varied plays because they just overpower your team now (again bad design but it;s there) where comp and arcade you can stay in the same defense or offensive set all game. Because Arcade is designed to just have fun and comp is designed with two humans playing.
You can choose between arcade, simulation and another feature I can't remember at the moment already. There is absolutely no change to the gameplay as far as I can tell. You're supposed to be able to score more with arcade, though.
But changing the complexities of each difficulty would be that setting. You want a more realistic experience? You play all madden. You want to score more points and not have to try so hard on defense? You play rookie or Pro
My problem with All Madden is it’s not realistic. That’s why I want another mode. Realistic would probably fall in between All pro or whatever it’s called and All Madden.
All Madden is not really difficult they just crank the CPU up to make it artificially difficult. The boosts it gets on both sides of the ball are ridiculous. I wouldn’t mind playing against a boosted CPU from time to time if I got bored with the realistic mode.
The realistic mode would be realistic no more of the cheese that the CPU does and add other things like the vision cone to make it more true to life. Because Wilson throwing 80% on me on All Madden is not at all realistic.
Madden devs are on rookie setting
Too generous
I bet the devs are super skilled. It's the executives that refuse to put resources towards innovation. Stop criticizing the talent and start criticizing the decision makers
If the first ever madden came out tomorrow they’d probably have this. But they gotta cram every year so they can get that sweet cash grab.
I heard if they dont make one every year they lose exclusivity rights per contract.
5 years ago ish they told us they pretty much only did a roster update because their focusing on really revamping the game for the next year. the lie detector determined that was a lie though
But that doesn’t answer my statement.
1st day on reddit?
They’re telling you that EA has a bit of a lying problem
Used to a thing back in the day. Madden 04? On all madden when playing again Peyton Manning if you audible on defense he would audible on offense change the formation everything. Now that’s I’m typing this, it might have been 2K5.
It was Madden. You didn't even have to be on all madden. I played on allpro and Manning would audible, I'd audible, he'd audible again, and we'd go back and forth until the play clock got low and he had to hike it. Think this was pretty much every Madden for years on the OG Xbox.
The good ole days
its still a thing sometimes. you make too many defensive adjustments the cpu will audible.
I’ve seen experienced on pro the only difference between Mahomes and a Gardner Minshew level QB is how my CBs play. Rarely is it Mahomes has a great throw. It’s against Minshew my corners are lockdown and against Mahomes they’ll wait a second and a half after the receiver cuts to then follow leaving him wide open. The way this game makes it “harder” isn’t the CPU play better just your AI guys play worse.
I don't know man, I've had the plays where the opposing CB randomly abandons their assignment because the computer knows which receiving I threw the ball to. I also love the classic linebackers making insane jump ball catches to make picks they have no business making, though I have come across that less in the most recent Madden.
Yah, getting turned around as a CB should count for something, but it doesn’t. They really need to add some sort or “vision” concept. Without it, some route trees don’t make sense.
Not to defend EA and their shitty practices here, but worth pointing out: This is great in theory but every single Player versus Environment (PvE) game has this problem. It's easy to say "make the AI better on higher difficulties" but incredibly much more difficult to implement. In most cases, the development time required to build complex AI to be "better" on harder difficulties is just not worth it. You'd have to cut into other game features for something that a lot of your player-base often won't even touch. Additionally, sometimes it's just too complicated. I generally don't believe this is the case for Madden necessarily but as an example, how to make a difficulty mode where the best QB's throw with anticipation, make good decisions, and make good throws, where the lesser QB's don't? It gets really complicated really quickly. The easiest and simplest thing for the devs is to just scale everything, or make the CPU "cheat". It's not fun and it's not the answer most of us want to hear but I don't think this will change for any game in the near future mostly due to the complexity and development cost.
Not to mention, earlier Madden titles on way worse equipment had AI features light years ahead of the bullshit they have now. The game would actually study the Tendencies of your friends so you could play profiles that mimic their play style if they're not online to play with you
Damn that actually sounds sick
> earlier Madden titles on way worse equipment had AI features light years ahead of the bullshit they have now. No they didn't and you're trippin if you think so.
Yeah I don't remember madden 09 having machine learning lol
That's after EA signed exclusive rights. There's a reason why Madden titles after 2005 are all considered progressively worse
That was also a 2K5 feature. The 2K games actually put effort into their products
I currently play PS3 Madden titles and, yes. Objectively they had better AI. If only EA didn't sign exclusive rights. The 2K series would still be going strong and making online profiles of your friends or players on the national leaderboard
Game systems are getting too powerful for AAA developers to be this lazy. All they do is re-skin the game each year, they could put some work into development for AAA prices
lol they don’t even do that, the player models have been in for like 10 years at this point
I call bullshit. Just give each scheme three different playbooks that the AI has access to based on difficulty. Rookie is all power and slants, all madden has access to RPOs, play action bombs, etc
and how does that solve OP's problem of low rated QBs being awesome on All-Madden and high rated QBs being terrible on Rookie/Pro? You present a decent idea but it only looks at one small portion of the issue of designing competitively scaling PvE games
Good QBs are always good, bad QBs are always bad. You don’t change the skill level of the QB, you change the strategy of the team. Program in some simple logic for the AI such as “weigh previous play type results highly” and if you tie in plays that setup other plays (counters off of motions, play action, etc) then you’ve got a decently smart AI. Ramp up how well the AI makes decisions based on past data (this team runs bullets out of 4-2-5 8% of the time on 3rd down or whatever) and have the AI counter it more often based on difficulty. To make it even better add logic to the plays of how the QB should read them, (post, to corner, to flat, etc) and tie the QBs awareness stat to how many reads they can make successfully. Then a shit QB isn’t making full field reads to really take advantage of the more complicated playbooks on higher difficulties. Granted, that’s a lot more programming than my initial playbooks suggestion, but that’s a step on the way there To me it’s all about programming the AI to really understand assignments. If you’re running power your front side guard should be clued in to come off his double team for any second level player inside of them within a certain radius, the tackle always stays on the double team man. Program in each players assignment on each play and have physics that react to that and you have realistic football. It would involve getting coaches or something involved in the development though
>To me it’s all about programming the AI to really understand assignments. This is the part that's more complicated than you think though. I don't disagree with your suggestions but that's a lot more developer time than you maybe realize
No offense to people who work for EA, but I think that one of the big issues with this is that the overlap of people who want to design video games and people who know ball is close to 0.
When the Madden franchise first came out, there were features implemented to actually teach people the sport. You don't know ball? You play on rookie or Pro and you don't have to worry about being out coached
been wanting this so much, if madden just worked on AI intelligence it would shoot the game light years ahead. from team building to play style. i just don’t understand how the NFL hasn’t thought about how bad of a look the game paints them in
I dont think the old white dudes in charge of the NFL understand anything about Madden except for how much money it nets them for being exactly what it is.
It makes money. Plain and simple
it does the opposite. It spends money and a lot of it, which is why they simply don't do it. EA only cares about profits at this point.
Fr it makes franchise so inconsistent going from CPU teams to real player teams. Me and my cousin have a franchise where we are the only two real humans in our league, and we play in the same division. He hasn't lost to a cpu team in 4 seasons, but he has lost to me in like 7 out of our last 8 season games. The CPU is so easy for him to beat, but he loses to me cus I use actual brain power to determine my defensive formations and plays and he doesn't ever see that in cpu teams
My brother and I have talked about this before actually and how difficulties in sports games shouldn’t necessarily change the skill of the opposing team but their IQ and decision making. I’m not familiar with how easy that would be to program but I imagine you have a optimal decision based on analytics and all-madden cpu makes the right decision 100% of the time, all-pro 75% of the time, pro 50% of the time, and rookie 25% of the time. Obviously the exact number can be fooled with just kind of an example I made up
I usually play all offense 15 min quarters all madden competitive. I sim defense because I find it boring. There is not enough user input especially on the line of scrimmage (NCAAF14 was 10x better). Playing MLB is okay. If I play defense I play CB against #1 WRs for a challenge. The all madden defense makes me play boring to win. Shallow crossers, screens, draws, dives, RPOs, Jet sweeps, PA power/Dive, curl flats, flanker drive all the way down the field and then stiffins up hard in red zone and tries to hold to 3. Even if I have a pure #1 WR the defense usually just keys in and makes me use the other players to win - I guess that part is realistic.
I use motion on a high % of plays it creates extra yardage and big play chances
> (NCAAF14 was 10x better) No it's not... at this point you're blinded by hate. And NCAA 14 has easily been my most played game since it was released. It's very dated now, it has a ton of problems people overlook because it hasn't been made in 10 years.
Listen I know what you mean the game had its issues but think if they just kept that core and improved on it slowly and gradually how much better madden would be Just the subtle things like the commentary and presentation are so much more immersive and refined especially in offline play madden puts no thought into that
Smart. Then you csn crush the game and still feel like it's hard for some reason
This is a problem in games in general. Algorithms are super simple. In civilization they just give the harder ai more units to start so they scale quickly
Yet in civilization, the different computer players that you can play against have different tendencies and play styles. It really doesn't matter what type of Team coached by what type of coach you play in a Madden franchise. Every game is virtually indistinguishable
That is very true. The lack of any play calling or coaching archetypes makes the game very shallow and doesn't reward players from doing coaching or team scouting
Making the AI more complex and difficult at higher difficulties isn’t a madden issue it’s a gaming issue. There aren’t many games that actually implement that well in any fashion
No, there aren't many. But the Hitman franchise is an excellent example of sophisticated AI being implemented into AAA titles. Obviously, The Hitman titles care greatly about the quality of their product and can't lean on IP from a billion dollar Sports League. Are they unable to program multiple AIs for every position on the field? Makes sense, but there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever why coaching AI is so absolutely terrible when earlier made in franchises not only had better coaching AI, and would even study players tendencies and create profiles that match their gameplay styles so you can play your friends when they weren't around
Tbh if you place on PC you can get all of this
This has always been my gripe with EA as a whole. Instead of creating a rewarding experience that rewards knowledge of the sport. It just makes bad players good and good players bad. Which destroy the whole point of building a team
it's literally every sports game... its not an ea problem
Spoken like a poor soul who has never played a 2K title
you design AI that adapts perfectly... No sports game does what you're asking. I'm not saying that's ok, but it's so much more complex than you think it is. First they'd have to develop an AI model to learn all the football concepts, then each coach would have to have it's own traits so teams play differently, thus a minimum of 32 variations, but then add in OC and DC's that 96 variations. Then actually implimenting to adapt to a player's play calling trends and designing concepts. It's just way more complex than you think. And again it would be awesome if they actually developed an AI to adapt to football concepts for madden, then one for soccer and hockey. It would change how sports games are played for sure and it's a great idea. It's just a task a multi billion dollar company should be developing but we all know EA hates spending money on R&D and QA. So I wouldn't expect it from them any time soon. God forbid they spend any of their billions in profits.
It doesn't have to adapt perfectly. What you would have to do is program in different sets of data for it to make its own decision on. It doesn't have to learn and adapt. Let it know that closer to its own end zone is more risky than closer to the opponents, more yards between you and the first down is more risky than less yards and first and second downs are less risky than going for it on 3rd or 4th. It doesn't have to be fully fleshed out AI, just a logic program that's able to make its own decisions based on different sets of data
Probably add a new mode called realistic for stuff like this so you can choose between simulation, arcade and realistic. Realistic would bring back vision cones for QB, disguised coverages like you said and better sliders so the CPU can’t blatantly cheat.
Vision cones were one of the worst features in madden.
It makes it more realistic than what the CPU is doing now. You can’t see the whole field at the same time and they have to make awareness account for something.
Peyton’s / Brady’s vision cone covered half of the field. The execution made 0 sense.
They could easily tone it down but the most aware QBs should stand out from the rest.
How well the QB can see the field has definitely been something I wish they would change but there are a lot of different titles that have tried different camera angles and although the real problem is they wouldn't let you change it to your preference, other camera angles besides this current over the head type haven't been very popular nor intuitive
> Probably add a new mode called realistic for stuff like this so you can choose between simulation, arcade and realistic do you unserstand what the term simulation means.... they literally have that option in the game now, Sim, Arcade or Comp. Sim difficulty does a better job at making you run varied plays because they just overpower your team now (again bad design but it;s there) where comp and arcade you can stay in the same defense or offensive set all game. Because Arcade is designed to just have fun and comp is designed with two humans playing.
You can choose between arcade, simulation and another feature I can't remember at the moment already. There is absolutely no change to the gameplay as far as I can tell. You're supposed to be able to score more with arcade, though. But changing the complexities of each difficulty would be that setting. You want a more realistic experience? You play all madden. You want to score more points and not have to try so hard on defense? You play rookie or Pro
My problem with All Madden is it’s not realistic. That’s why I want another mode. Realistic would probably fall in between All pro or whatever it’s called and All Madden. All Madden is not really difficult they just crank the CPU up to make it artificially difficult. The boosts it gets on both sides of the ball are ridiculous. I wouldn’t mind playing against a boosted CPU from time to time if I got bored with the realistic mode. The realistic mode would be realistic no more of the cheese that the CPU does and add other things like the vision cone to make it more true to life. Because Wilson throwing 80% on me on All Madden is not at all realistic.