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I'm surprised no one's mentioned Front Page Sports Football. In 1992 not only did they have a franchise mode (without any licenses, but if you picked different sized leagues they would be based on real leagues with generic names, like the CFL and World League) but even back then managed to have an online multiplayer franchise mode. I played it for hours on end as a kid and would print out pages upon pages of draftees to compare them. It's not surprising that Madden has always treated franchise mode like a red headed step child. I don't believe any of the EA games added a franchise mode until the 99 versions. They wanted you to pay for next years version of the game, not playing franchise mode till 2050. The 99 versions Franchise mode was so bad, that AI teams could not figure out the cap after a few seasons. They would cut first round picks because they were expensive and weren't as good as current players without considering the players long term potential. So I would have teams full of first rounders.
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May 6, 2021 04:15
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Player development, drafting, and free agency moves in Madden has always been tricky, and at various times were insane depending on how player development was in the particular game. For a while in the 360 era, players had development grade that gave them a hard cap on what their overall could max out at in franchise mode. Players with an A grade could hit 99, B would max at 89, and so on. For drafting, you might find a rookie come in at 82 OVR with B potential, but another guy at the same position would be 74 OVR with A potential. Unlike the way Madden has been most of the last console generation where the player develops and their rating can potentially improve every week, in those years you didn’t have direct control over how the player developed, and it only happened in the offseason, so you’d be stuck with that 74 OVR guy and hope that he’d played enough to get boosts in the categories you wanted after the season. This was also the era with inflated ratings, so anybody with an OVR below the mid-80s was backup level, so even for human players, there were years where developing players in the game was pretty stupid. Draft and salary cap logic by the CPU I think has always been dumb, but back before the rookie salary cap took effect they didn’t make those two things work together at all. Even as a human player, that poo poo got annoying to deal with. Fortunately, in Madden that was also the era of pre-generated or pre-determined draft classes, so it was painfully easy to either get an online guide or figure out scouting stuff to find all the studs in the mid-late rounds and sign them to 6 or 7 year rookie contracts at league minimum.
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May 6, 2021 04:48
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I can't be the only person who preferred Madden back when you had no control over how players developed right? The portion of every offseason where stats changed was basically why I played the game. It's worth noting that I haven't played on Madden since they switched from individual stats to grouped stats.
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May 6, 2021 14:16
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Eifert Posting posted:I can't be the only person who preferred Madden back when you had no control over how players developed right? The portion of every offseason where stats changed was basically why I played the game. It's worth noting that I haven't played on Madden since they switched from individual stats to grouped stats. Both that system and the newer ones, which they’ve tweaked a bunch, had their pros and cons. After work today, I’ll throw up an effort post on some of those ups and downs and some of the related draft changes.
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May 6, 2021 15:51
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Bring back the freaking camp minigames. Actually just give me a standalone camp minigames release and I'll pay 20-30 bucks for that and never buy the main game again.
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May 6, 2021 15:53
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Madden: Player Development, The Draft, and Related Nonsense Before I dive into that subject, let me make a few comments on where I'm coming from. The period I most heavily played Madden was from the Xbox 360 and Xbox One eras. I had every game from Madden NFL 07 to Madden NFL 17, with the games on the 360 (Specifically, 08 to the misleadingly named Madden NFL 25, which should have been NFL 14) being the ones I probably sunk the most time into. I later skipped 18 and 19, but got 20 and it was okay. In some cases, I'll go in broad strokes, in other cases very detailed, as this is all going off the top of my head. Another thing to note is this: the AI is stupid. A team that drafts a QB with the #1 overall pick will then draft another QB at the top of the 2nd. Madden's AI draft logic, as well as their free agency moves, contracts, and everything else is always just a bit weird. This also applies to how it views developmental players at times. Like so much else, it sometimes can work, sometimes it doesn't. When Madden introduces franchise mode in the late 90s, it was a pretty big thing. Previous games usually only let you play the single season they were representing. Even games like Tecmo III that let you play multiple seasons with rosters and moves carrying over did so with only the players in the game, it didn't add new rookies and older players didn't retire or stuff like that. Madden adding that was a big deal. Originally, franchise mode allowed you to go like 10 or 15 years into the future, and by the mid-2000s it was up to 30 seasons. I have no idea how far it goes now, but for a while in the early-to-mid 2000s, franchise was basically the signature single player mode for the game until Ultimate Team became and thing an EA found more money to grab after when their previous attempts at Madden microtransactions didn't work. So as mentioned before, the development system in the early 2000s worked like this: new players would come in with both the usual overall rating on a 0-99 scale, and a development grade on an A-F scale. That system had some issues with it that proved to be unpopular. Players could only progress in the offseason after the season ended. The development grades put a hard cap on the max rating a player could reach, so if you drafted a guy who was 85 OVR but B potential, he was never going to get past 89 no matter what you did. The offseason improvements were also done at random, so you no real say in how a player developed. For example, an offensive lineman might randomly get improvements in pass blocking, but not run blocking, regardless of whether or not your team was pass or run heavy or how they were used. I seem to recall that the development wasn't obviously connected to playing time either. This was also an period where player ratings were heavily inflated, where there might be 12-15 quarterbacks rated in the 90s, while by comparison, Madden NFL 21 launched with only 5 rated so highly, so having the A potential was a huge thing. The system had some flaws, and got replaced around Madden 13 or 25. The new development system essentially gave players one of four ratings: Slow, Normal, Star, and Superstar, although I think those names have been tweaked over the years. Most new rookies in the draft would be Normal, but you'd find some of the others as well. The main thing was those development levels could change. If a player was hugely successful, or you built up enough XP, they could upgrade to a higher level. Conversely, if a player sucked repeatedly (Talking multiple seasons) or as they got much older, their development would go down. Players were also given the option to manually control how development went, as the XP could then be spent on specific ratings. From around Madden NFL 25 (The last game whose primary release was on the Xbox 360/PS3) to at least Madden 16 or 17, this was the system, after which it was replaced by more grouped ratings. I'll use wide receivers as an example here. For those earlier games, a player would get XP, and then you'd have to specifically spend them to improve stuff like Awareness, Catch in Traffic, Spectacular Catch, Route Running, etc. By Madden 20, the grouped system would give you like 4 options based on player role type (Something like Possession, Deep Threat, Slot, Red Zone Threat, West Coast, or whatever), and those would devote the XP to a small range of categories which it'd specify. Selecting the "Possession" option would give improvements to route running and release, while "Slot" would have catch in traffic and awareness, all that sorta stuff. The problems with this system since it was introduced was the ways to gain XP and actually develop the players in a meaningful way. The game had introduced practices during each week which would help, and after a certain point could just be simulated, and up to three total players on your team could be focused on for an additional bit, which allowed backups to actually be developed a bit, however the highest totals were awarded for in game statistical markers. These would be for both individual games (Get 100+ receiving yards), over the course of a season (Catch 75 passes), and career totals (50 touchdowns), and the bonuses for these achievements were how you'd get the most XP. Annoyingly, they were all or nothing, not on a scale, so if your marker was get 1,500 yards and your guy only get 1,498, he's out of luck. I don't like this system since it tended to encourage running up the score to get more yards/points/whatever, and the single game achievements were often quite random, while players could also take slight penalties for not hitting these markers. A quick pause to address one thing: Eifert Posting posted:I can't be the only person who preferred Madden back when you had no control over how players developed right? The portion of every offseason where stats changed was basically why I played the game. It's worth noting that I haven't played on Madden since they switched from individual stats to grouped stats. If you don't want players to develop weekly, or have control over that, it's among the franchise options. I think you can set the development to be weekly, monthly, every 8 weeks, or only in the offseason, there's a few options, and there is an option to let the AI handle it even for your own team, which is functionally how it was in the old days. So, now that we've talked about how players developed, let's talk about Madden's draft where these players come into the game! During the mid-00s, Madden's draft classes were all pre-generated and appeared in a specific order. Basically, when you started franchise mode, Madden would choose a number between 1 and 30, and it'd go from there. If it selected Draft Class #17, that'd be the first one you'd have, then 18, 19, and so on. This gave rise to the infamous online guides that would break down every player, since their ratings were always the same and they'd appear in the same order. This obviously removes most of the randomness of a real draft, since if you looked them up you'd know who the gems were, who'd bust, and so on, but I actually liked it to an extent. In real life, we generally have at least a little feel for upcoming classes, and know that next years draft had lovely corners but the year after was loaded at that spot made for an interesting dynamic to team building for me. One hallmark of that era were the infamous 'clones' in each draft. Many drafts had players that were clearly based on famous players from the past, in some cases from upcoming classes, or just stuff they found funny. Madden NFL 09 had Boar Jackson, a phenomenally gifted running back whose only flaw was being somewhat injury prone. Madden 10 in particular was loaded with them. I'm pretty sure one single draft had "Jelani Okoye" (Obviously Christian Okoye), "LeMarcus Taylor" (LaDainian Tomlinson), and a 6'9" former basketball player turned tight end named Terrance Trunk (LeBron James). Another draft had a scrambling left-handed QB from Florida named 'Tim Tribow' with poor accuracy. There was a Peyton Manning clone named 'Cooper Reno' who was paired with a Ryan Leaf-esq poor QB whose last name was ironically Luck (I think this was before Andrew Luck was even at Stanford), one class recreated the infamous 1983 quarterback group with not-Marino, Kelly, and Elway in it, and another with a running back named Sweetwater that was obviously Walter Payton. One of my favorites was Madden 25 choosing to include Leon Sandcastle from the NFL Network commercials and Rich Eisen running his 40 at the combine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kGKVvGzTLU Around the time of the console generation switch (Madden 25 was the last one developed for the 360/PS3, while Madden 15 was the first for the Xbone/PS4), some changes were made. One was the predetermined draft classes would now appear in random order as you went through franchise, so you couldn't know from season 1 exactly which draft you'd get in season 29. However, the players in each class were still pre-determined for a while. They started tweaking this by adding some focus players with stories that would show up in the franchise news section and in game fake twitter. These players would actually have branching story lines. For example, say QB Bob Smith was reported as being the best QB in college at the start of the season, and in the scouting menu is the top overall player. You'd get a few updates about him lighting up opponents and his team doing well, and he retains at the top of all the prospect lists. Then, at mid-season, Smith suffers a knee injury, and the players' fate would depend on whether he tries to play through it or not. If he does keep playing, his determination helps win him the Heisman and his team win the national title. At the combine it's revealed his injury has caused long term damage and Bob chooses not to perform any of the drills, so his skills and ratings pre-draft remain unknown, but he remains graded as a mid-to-late 1st round prospect. When drafted, he'll have a low 70s OVR, poor mobility, a very low injury rating, and Slow development. He's clearly hurt and it will take several years of work to make him into a starter, and while he's not strictly a bust, he's likely a disappointment. However, if Bob Smith chose to have surgery and miss the rest of his season after his injury, things go differently. His grade still slips to mid-late 1st, but the combine shows he's healthy and he does well in the drills. This version of Smith enters the league with an 82 OVR, good ratings across the board and Star development. He can start from day 1, and will easily increase his OVR by 3-5 points as a rookie and/or increase his development to Superstar to get better even faster in subsequent years. Madden still does this, but around Madden 15 or 16, they switched to 100% randomized draft classes. Each year, everything is created at random, and while there are still some storyline players that come and go, they generally don't correlate to being notably good or bad or anything. It's more just about "hey, the game randomly decided that Denny Cheeseboro played hockey before going to UAB, I might as well draft him for the fun story and name". General Dog posted:Bring back the freaking camp minigames. Actually just give me a standalone camp minigames release and I'll pay 20-30 bucks for that and never buy the main game again. This is something a lot of people have asked for. As an aside, Madden goes through cycles every few years where they can't decide whether they want the game to be hyper detailed or easily accessible. For example, when it was first introduced around 05 or 06, Super Star mode where you played as a single player required you to do all the combine drills, take a short version of the wonderlic test, pick an agent, and then had what was essentially a text RPG element where you'd do press conferences, even appear in movies and poo poo like that. There was a lot going on there. Over the years, all that got stripped away, and when the mode got folded into 'Connected Franchise' as the player option, it's basically just the games with nothing else... only for the "Be a Pro" mode or whatever it is to add back in some of those same elements. Franchise in the mid-00s had you as basically the owner, GM, and team president all in one, hiring coaches, coordinators, signing players and handling everything from concession prices to potential relocation and stadium naming rights (Personal favorites of mine there included Vandelay Industries and Scarn Paper Co being options). Those were also gradually stripped away. Madden NFL 11, with Drew Brees on the cover, was heavily marketed as being simpler and faster to play, with options that allowed full games to be played in like 10 minutes, at the expense of so many features from the previous 4-5 years being trimmed away... only for many of them to start returning over the next 4-5 years. A bunch of other features were taken out for the ill-fated NFL Head Coach franchise in the mid-00's, and it took forever to bring back poo poo like custom playbooks, while create-a-play still hasn't returned. Madden has been heavily criticized really over the last decade when it's been the only game in town, but most of that was by the die-hard fan community who were still buying the game anyway. In recent years, it's gained more traction among casual players, with last year's Madden NFL 21 getting mixed critical reviews and being widely panned by fans... but it still sold stupidly well, as the game always does.  Anyway, I've covered some poo poo I wanted to cover.
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May 7, 2021 00:32
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Figuring out dev traits and landing several star -> superstars is a rush that rivals cocaine
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May 7, 2021 01:08
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Retro Bowl became old once I realized having a QB with a maxed out arm and just throwing post routes to your star WR / seam route to your TE / dump off to your RB over and over made it very easy to score 50+ a game
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May 7, 2021 01:12
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5 star oline in retrobowl for the full 
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May 7, 2021 01:17
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Tecmo Bowl sucked you hit two buttons then ran up and down The only good football game was madden 2020 and maybe the last iteration of NCAA yes blitz and nfl street sucks too
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May 7, 2021 19:04
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Doltos posted:Tecmo Bowl sucked you hit two buttons then ran up and down I haven't thought about NFL Street in years.
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May 7, 2021 19:22
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NCAA was not at its best at the end there
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May 7, 2021 19:29
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The only good football game was Backbreaker but video game industry shills and the AAA autocracy killed it out of fear
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May 7, 2021 19:53
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Is Blood Bowl any fun? I see it advertised every now and then on Xbox for 5 bucks, but it seems to have a strong love/hate relationship with some reviewers.
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May 7, 2021 19:57
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Silly Burrito posted:Is Blood Bowl any fun? I see it advertised every now and then on Xbox for 5 bucks, but it seems to have a strong love/hate relationship with some reviewers. I played the first one and liked it. It's not quite football but a sort of football/rugby/grid-based strategy mash-up. The announcers are great but have an extremely limited repertoire so they get old kinda fast. One issue with the league/franchise mode is that, barring death, your players tend to retire at about the same rate. Meaning you suddenly lose all of your most experienced players within a few games of each other and are back to square one.
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May 7, 2021 20:05
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Silly Burrito posted:Is Blood Bowl any fun? I see it advertised every now and then on Xbox for 5 bucks, but it seems to have a strong love/hate relationship with some reviewers. It's most likely not what you're looking for. It's a turn based thing that's halfway to a board game version of fantasy football that's not really what most people are looking for.
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May 7, 2021 20:09
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Silly Burrito posted:Is Blood Bowl any fun? I see it advertised every now and then on Xbox for 5 bucks, but it seems to have a strong love/hate relationship with some reviewers. I'm a big fan but unless you're playing against people it can be really frustrating It's jokey and it's a lot harder to have a good time when your rolls go to complete poo poo Also you can't laugh at the computer as much beating them with a gimmick team like the halflings
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May 7, 2021 20:15
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Blood bowl is Go with extra steps and a football veneer, it would benefit from not being that
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May 7, 2021 21:18
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Blood Bowl is fine but it's a board game with RPG elements with some vague football.
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May 7, 2021 21:24
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I can do more of an effort post on blood bowl later tonight. Long story short it's definitely its own thing and is only tangentially related to football. It is really fun though particularly if you subscribe to the sort of dwarf fortressy "losing is fun" ideal
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May 7, 2021 21:46
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GNU Order posted:The only good football game was Backbreaker but video game industry shills and the AAA autocracy killed it out of fear Backbreaker was a game about a dynamic physics system allowing amazing tackling and big hits that didn't have an injury system.
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May 7, 2021 23:11
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What if they made a version of Blaseball that’s football
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May 7, 2021 23:27
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Is there a good alternative for the Football Mogul games? They're pretty decent but have some crippling flaws (economic sim is absolute trash, it's drat near impossible to develop someone on the bench, etc.) so I'd love any suggestions for a better GM sim type of game.
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May 23, 2021 11:46
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The first football game I played was the handheld jobber where everyone was a dot. The first computer game was TV Sports Football for the Amiga. The graphics weren't bad for the time although the offensive and defensive line were just there and didn't do much but grunt. The game was limited to four sprites on both sides but had an interesting dynamic for passing the ball. You would pull back on the joystick and run to where you wanted to throw the ball from. After pausing a moment aiming the joystick would aim the ball and the distance it went was determined by how long you held the button. It was a very instinctive way to play QB. The game also featured parody commercials and a pre and post game sportscast. It had 28 teams and you could fully edit the roster names. Cinemaware died so there was never a sequal.
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May 23, 2021 23:29
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Q_res posted:Is there a good alternative for the Football Mogul games? They're pretty decent but have some crippling flaws (economic sim is absolute trash, it's drat near impossible to develop someone on the bench, etc.) so I'd love any suggestions for a better GM sim type of game. The Out of the Park developer brought in someone to make one (Beyond the Sideline IIRC), but I think their lead guy died a couple years ago? and it's just kind of fallen off the map Goal Line Blitz had a bit of a following as a browser-based sim but that became P2W real quick & the playerbase was toxic as gently caress
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May 24, 2021 18:54
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I just want to play offline franchise in Madden and have my great defensive players make the pro bowl 
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Jun 4, 2021 21:54
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I love this thread. I've been playing "footballgm" (android) and its been scratching my gm itch. I was having fun till I figured out how to cheat the system. Any recommendations like that?
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Jun 6, 2021 22:35
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I wish I did. I've been stuck in a rut with Madden '05 after being disappointed with the subsequent games. How's Football GM?
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Jun 6, 2021 22:41
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grill youre saelf posted:I love this thread. I've been playing "footballgm" (android) and its been scratching my gm itch. I was having fun till I figured out how to cheat the system. Any recommendations like that? If we're talking mobile. There's also a college version along with pro and college basketball https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.achijones.footballcoach2
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Jun 6, 2021 22:42
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poly and open-minded posted:I just want to play offline franchise in Madden and have my great defensive players make the pro bowl This is actually why I stopped playing Madden! It's ludicrous how bad the run vs pass AI is offline.
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Jun 7, 2021 19:38
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I would pay $100 for an NFL licensed version of Football Manager. I don't want to control dudes running on the field, I want to manage the team and set strategy, MAYBE call plays from time to time.
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Jun 8, 2021 04:16
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poly and open-minded posted:I just want to play offline franchise in Madden and have my great defensive players make the pro bowl This made me remember how for a few years, the game had some bug or glitch where the left DE in a 4-3 or LOLB in a 3-4, your typical blindside pass rushing guys, couldn’t get any sacks, but the RDE or ROLB would basically get 20+ without breaking a sweat. I think it was based on how CPU teams overvalued left tackles/undervalued right tackles, but it basically made constructing defenses a joke at times. Fate Accomplice posted:I don't want to control dudes running on the field, I want to manage the team and set strategy, MAYBE call plays from time to time. Madden has (Or had?) the option to just do that stuff and either sim the games or just not control the players if you wanted to call the plays. In typical Madden fashion, it kinda worked, the setting to actually do it was buried in some menus, and was often regularly bugged the gently caress out. One year, Madden 09 or 10, it made simulated games insanely run heavy, so you’d look at the league stats at the end of a season and see 3-4 running backs finishing the year with 2,500+ rushing yards, sometimes even over 3,000. Also how much it actually ran a desired game plan or used desired plays varied as well, as I know the ability to rate plays from frequently used to rarely used they’ve had for about a decade now has never really worked all that well. fartknocker fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Jun 8, 2021 |
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Jun 8, 2021 13:51
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Fate Accomplice posted:I would pay $100 for an NFL licensed version of Football Manager. Same. Shame Front Office Football, but with a GUI is never coming out.
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Jun 9, 2021 19:37
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MrLogan posted:Same. Shame Front Office Football, but with a GUI is never coming out. How dare you insult football spreadsheet the game
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Jun 9, 2021 19:46
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https://twitter.com/FieldYates/status/1405526047290925058?s=20
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Jun 17, 2021 15:15
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Wildly cursed
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Jun 17, 2021 15:25
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I like those choices.
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Jun 17, 2021 15:45
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General Dog posted:Wildly cursed Mahomes lost the AFCCG and the Super Bowl to Brady, how much more cursed can he be? 
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Jun 17, 2021 16:56
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It's real
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Jun 17, 2021 17:24
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Kalli posted:It's real i remember when NCAAF had that feature in like fuckin 2007
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Jun 17, 2021 17:47
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