Super Mega Madden: Third Down

Madden is misunderstood because people think it's a "sports game".

It's not.

5 More things Madden Needs to Figure out in its 20s

If you missed Part 1, here it is.

Part 2: Controls

There's not a lot wrong with the controls in Madden. In the thirteen years of the DualShock era of controllers, Electronic Arts has been fairly conservative with their button configurations. The most radical, and welcomed change was when EA decided to map sprint to R2 (RT on Xbox) instead of X (A on Xbox). This freed up the user's thumb for stiff arms and spin moves. Madden 2005 introduced the greatest conceivable feature in a sports game: the Hit Stick.

Madden 25 touts a “Run Free” feature that is designed to give the user more control as the ball carrier. It makes running with the ball more like controlling a player in FIFA, which is always a good thing. There are other areas where Madden can improve its controls so let's hit the list.

5 Things Madden Needs to Figure out in its 20s

For those late to the party: The 25 means its Madden's 25th release.

Rabble Rabble Football! 

It's August.
Madden turns 25 this year.
The human brain is not fully developed until age 25.
Madden is not fully developed at age 25.


PART 1: Infinity Engine 2.0

Backbreaker 2010

Last year Madden added the Infinity Engine which introduced "real-time physics" to the gridiron. That's EA's line, not mine. What actually happened was EA finally took a baby step towards what Natural Motion had already accomplished attempted with Euphoria Engine in Backbreaker (2010).  The Euphoria Engine made Natural Motion's football game an impressive tech demo, but the game was hardly playable.  A radical camera angle kept most window shoppers at bay. The unpredictable passing game kept everyone else out.  On the other hand, every kickoff was accompanied by the first seven seconds of P.O.D's "Boom".  Every kickoff. Every time. A rough outing indeed for the first football game to feature a physics based collision system.

Before Madden 13
Before physics were introduced to Madden, the ball-carrier and defender would meet, and Madden would takeover to decide the outcome of their encounter with an animation. Based on the animation Madden selected for you, your player may or may not get to where you needed him to be. The animations were generally okay, but they removed control from the player.  An animation based tackling system turns every collision into a cut-scene.

Madden 13                      
Swapping animations for physics gives players more control over the collisions that happen on every play. The Infinity Engine 1.0 replaced most tackle animations with physics, but there are many other collisions where it is poorly used, or not used at all.

1. Getting tackled by your teammates.

This doesn't happen on Sunday...

The Infinity Engine needs to do a better job discriminating between gentle contact and knockdown force. Far too frequently, my ball-carrier made contact with a friendly lineman, stumbled, and then crumpled to the ground before any defender made contact with him. This problem plagues all but the very best running backs which makes running between the tackles nearly impossible for some teams. This is bad for balance.  What's worse is that a great deal of plays end in an uncontrollable stumble among your own lineman. 

2. Hurdles!

This looks like Sunday.

This is beautiful.  This is Backbreaker (2010)

This is Madden.

This is ugly. This is Madden 13 (2012)

3. Stumble Control

In Madden 13 there are times where your player breaks a tackle and will begin stumbling.  Sometimes he regains his balance, sometimes he falls.  The issue is that when the character begins his stumble, control is removed from the user.  The user should be granted some control over a stumbling character in much the same way the user is granted some control of a sliding car in a racing game. Stumbling in its current state, just brings the user along for the Madden ride, which is what the Infinity Engine sought to remove in the first place.    

4. Magnetic-Static Blocking 

A player gets blocked in Madden in two steps.

Step 1: Defensive player is drawn in by the offensive player's magnetic blocking field.

Step 2:  The pair engages in a static "blocking embrace".

In Madden, control is wrenched away from the player as soon as they get too close a blocker.  This is the reason it's not fun to play as a defensive lineman. The Infinity Engine 2.0 should make blocking more dynamic and user-controlled....also...pancakes.  

                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                       
5. Why does everybody run hard?

If Andy Dalton, an average sized quarterback, were to ever scramble out of the pocket and allow a linebacker to hit him, he would go straight to the dirt.  Neither occurs in Madden 13. Quarterbacks consistently behave like their much bigger teammates at the moment of impact. In reality, quarterbacks do not fight for extra yards at the moment of impact, they look to get down on the ground as safely as possible.

See: Tom Brady

In Madden 13, every quarterback fights for extra yards, and more often than not will try to bulldoze defenders. There are a few slippery quarterbacks in the league, but most of these guys are elusive, not powerful. Also, when these guys slip away, it's usually in the backfield, not fifteen yards downfield.

Stay Tuned for Part 2:Controls

What modern sports games tell us about competition in the market

There's been hubbub lately about Sony's upcoming baseball simulator MLB 13: The Show being, for the first time, the only baseball video game on the market. Sports video games, once a genre full of games made by competing companies in each sport, are nearly now down to a single game per sport. Want some NFL? Better play Madden. Want hockey? Better play NHL 13. Many people worry that this lack of competition in the annual sports game market will lead to studios getting lazy and publishing the same product year after year, since consumers have no other choice if they want to enjoy their preferred sport in virtual form.

Let's take a closer look at the last ten years of critical reception to sports video games. Any farther back and the market gets veritably flooded with other competing sports game franchises, many of which lasted only a year or two; the last decade has seen a relatively consistent market. I normally don't look at aggregate review scores to judge the quality of games, but annual sports games are a unique genre--objective improvement is slightly more conceivable here than in other types of games. All my statistics in this article are taken from the review aggregator site GameRankings.com.

American football

We want to believe competition breeds innovation, right? Nobody likes monopolies. It's simple economics. The posterchild for this is the biggest sports game franchise in the United States, EA Sports' colossal Madden NFL series. While the series has gone downhill since 2004 when EA bought the exclusive rights to NFL video games, this may be the exception, not the rule, when it comes to the results of competition (or lack thereof) in sports games:

We talk about competition in football videogames like it was yesterday, but Madden has had nearly a decade on its own now. It's been a bumpy road that's never quite reached the glory days of a bygone gaming era. Much of players' anger directed at EA stems from the fact that rival 2K Sports ended its football career on a high note--the final game in the series, ESPN NFL 2K5, is considered by many fans to be the pinnacle of virtual gridiron.

Baseball

2K Sports' pigskin franchise was a life cut tragically short by EA's multimillion dollar deal. So what did 2K do? They fired back, of course, by buying the exclusive rights to the next-biggest American sports league: Major League Baseball. But unlike EA's NFL deal, 2K didn't take into account that they only got exclusive third-party rights to MLB. The major console manufacturers are still allowed to internally develop their own pro baseball games, and that's exactly what Sony has done. Let's take a look:

Approaching Camera Angles in Sports Games

I'm a big hockey fan. This year, EA Sports announced a big new addition to its hockey sim stalwart NHL 13: a new "true broadcast camera" angle! As realistic as the NHL series has become, the most glaring difference between real hockey on TV and virtual hockey is the camera orientation. While most hockey video games usually use a vertical angle to replicate the players' perspective, TV broadcasts use a horizontal view to create more of a balance between teams' camera space.

So does it work in NHL 13? Not really. The horizontal perspective makes local multiplayer easier since neither human-controlled team has to be going downwards, but for standard single-player and online gameplay, most players will stick to the vertical angle. NHL's analog stick controls were built around the vertical view, and the developers knew this: despite touting the true broadcast camera in marketing, the default settings for the game are still set to the classic vertical view.

It hasn't always been that way. Konami's 1987 Blades of Steel and Nintendo's Ice Hockey the following year (pictured here) were two of the most influential 8-bit sports video games, and they both featured the horizontal perspective.

But as soon as EA Sports got into the game with NHL Hockey in 1991, they introduced the vertical camera to hockey gamers. It's been the standard angle for hockey in video game form ever since.

What about other sports? On a basic level, soccer (football) has many similarities to hockey: two teams trying to score on each other's net, guarded by a goalie. But strangely enough, after going through a few changes (including an isometric view in 1993's FIFA International Soccer), the industry standard today for soccer video games is the horizontal perspective. Basketball games have settled on this angle as well.

Hockey isn't an anomaly, though. One of the best-selling game franchises in the United States, Madden NFL, uses the vertical angle. While the angle in NHL remains the same throughout the duration of play, the camera in Madden actually makes a 180º flip whenever the ball changes hands. This is easier to accomplish in (American) football because possession doesn't change nearly as frequently as it does in hockey.

Baseball is a league of its own, due to the sport's asymmetrical gameplay. While the standard camera angle for batting is behind the batter (instead of behind the pitcher, as it is in TV broadcasts), it matches television angles when the ball is in play and the game switches to a wider angle of the action.

So will hockey video games ever change full-time to the "true broadcast camera"? Even if you're not a sports fan, we can all learn something from studying sports games' approach to the camera. Capturing a game within a game--adapting an existing real-world game to video game form--presents a huge array of philosophical questions for game design. It boils down to balancing what's best for gameplay with how to best simulate the real world events players are already familiar with.