One of the biggest ways the NFL has been able to get younger viewers into football has been through the massive success of their “Madden NFL” franchise. However, the current iteration is an incredibly disappointing game that leaves NFL fans wanting more. Today, Madden has gone away from the “simulation” style game and gone more “arcade” based. Too often we see animations that just look weird and choppy. The graphics are incredible and look like a real football game until you actually start playing. Once you start playing and see the weird animations, it quickly becomes very obvious that this is not real football. EA used to use physics instead of animation. That made for a much better game because it looked way more realistic.
In the early 2000s, Madden was a significantly better product than we have today. Think about what I just said for a second. A video game that is remade every single year had its best and most realistic versions in the early 2000s! We lived in a world without the original iPhone when EA gave us their most detailed and most engaging game. It’s not like they don’t have the technology! I created a list of twenty features that used to be in older Maddens that have been taken out of franchise mode alone over the years. By the way, almost every single feature I included on this list is in other sports games like NBA2K and MLB The Show. There is a great video by SOFTDRINKTV on YouTube of a list of 89 features that have been removed that I highly recommend.
- Create-A-Team
- The ability to design your own stadium
- The ability to relocate your team wherever you want instead of the set cities that haven’t changed since 2013
- An actually realistic and detailed career mode
- Historic teams to play with
- The ability to create your own plays to use in-game
- Offseason workouts
- Trade logic that isn’t completely broken
- The Senior Bowl
- Way more detailed look into free agency and contract negotiations
- A playable Pro Bowl
- Restricted Free Agency
- Players holding out
- Position battles in Training Camp
- Players coming out of retirement
- The ability to create a situation in practice that you want your team to work on
- Player stories
- Mentors to help your younger players develop
- Rivalries
- A radio show that talked about what had happened during that week during the season
To be fair to EA, they have come out and said they are making a real effort to bring Madden (franchise mode in particular) back to what it used to be, and after over a decade of fan complaints they are finally starting to bring back older features like coaching trees and a much better and revamped scouting and draft process. They also added cool new features like the Dynamic Gameday. This creates a home-field advantage and actually has a real impact on the game. So they are absolutely taking steps in the right direction and I will give them that. But it is insane to me that most of the features that fans want in current Madden are features that they have already had and took out! Franchise Mode is getting better, but we are far from satisfied with what we have.
MOOSE PRINTS 
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