Madden NFL 17 - SIMMS GONE GOTY 10/10, Gameplay questionable for the season

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Sports Argument Stadium > The Armchair Quarterback > Madden NFL 17 - SIMMS GONE GOTY 10/10, Gameplay questionable for the season

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

I'm going to put my replies on each byline since it'll be easier that way. Also this is my last year working on Madden, I've taken a job with Splash Damage and am moving to England in August so I know what's going on for 17, and some of the patches but from next year on I really don't know a lot of how things will work.

Dubious posted:

Improved Zone Coverage - EA is touting an overhaul of Zone Coverage this year. There is apparently 8 new types of zone coverage being introduced, with the ability to set defenders to better match up in the zones receivers will be running their routes in. Hopefully, this means the nearly uncoverable slants and drags will see some opposition this year, as a West Coast offense was incredibly to hard to stop and get turnovers on.

Dunno why we haven't mentioned it, or maybe it has but none of you sperglord powerusers care about it, but we've added the ability to do a defensive playcall that counters a specific area of field you've been getting burned on. So if you see a guy always running short inside passes you can choose that playcall mode after they've chosen their play and it will give you some better counters.

Dubious posted:

Special Teams - New kick meter coming this year, which is reminiscent of older kick meters! An Ice the Kicker mechanic is coming on (likely similar to NCAA 14's ITK mechanic, which effectiveness is questonable, as in real life). EA is promising a new mechanic to block kicks, and is saying we'll see a greater variety of trick plays. Hopefully this year running kicks back isn't as impossible as it was in the last two generations on PS4 - Xbox One.

I worked a lot on this feature and it's....interesting. The kick meter is your basic 3-click meter from older Maddens or almost any version of Tiger. Dunno why they went back to it, but :iiam:

Dubious posted:

Ball Carrier Controls - We are supposedly seeing an improved run game this year. The last couple years, most running backs all felt very similar in performance whether they were a power back or a speed back. The intention this year is that power backs will feel much more like Power Backs, as will Speed backs be more elusive and nimble. Todd Gurley should be more of a trucking machine than LeSean McCoy is, and the last few years not much difference was felt (anecdote - I run the ball a poo poo ton, and was putting up 2700 yard seasons with Bishop loving Sankey in goon leagues). EA is promising better prompts to make cuts, as well as guidance on running lanes during trainings (not sure if this applies to games.) For the lesser skilled folks on lower difficult, just handing off lets the CPU do the work for you.

The running lanes prompt does show up ingame depending on your difficulty level. Ditto with the button prompts for skill moves to get around defenders. It's auto on rookie, gives prompts on Pro and up and on All-Madden I believe they're not shown at all.
Now, to what a lot of us care about here JOIN SASFL

Dubious posted:

Game Prep A benefit of executing the drills that can contribute to gameplanning your opponent, is that you may get a small boost to execution of certain plays you practiced that counter opponent tendencies. I am worried this may be kind of broken, but it's unclear what kind of boost is available at this time. If they pull it off though, it's definitely a welcome addition.

It's not too bad, you basically get some performance boosts to your players if you call a play during the game that specifically counters something you trained for. Your guys don't become all pro HOFers for a play.

Dubious posted:

Play the Moments - This feature is one I am actually very excited for. In the past, simming through CPU games often felt like the worst, but predetermined RNG ever. Multiple 15 yard penalties, 80+ yard runs, constant 3 and outs - it was truly awful. This year, Key Moments helps to alleviate some of this, and make the slog of CPU games during online seasons, or solo play, much more enjoyable! The game will sim to Key Moments of the game that can have a huge impact either way (stop your opponent on a goal line. Convert a key 3rd and long. Go for it on 4th while down by a FG. Play a crucial half down by 2 scores. It can probably go on and on.) The game will stop the sim, and give you the option to play the Moment, or just the sim keep going. Once you complete (or fail, you scrub) the scenario, the sim will pick right back up.

I fuckin love this feature even if I don't use it a ton at work. It looks neat and the fact that you can just turn up the sim speed to instant you can basically blaze through a game in a minute or two even if you do actually play some plays.

Dubious posted:

Injuries - While injuries will remain random as ever this year, and I haven't heard anything if offensive lineman will stop being invincible,(Scud? can you confirm/deny?) but a new feature this year is the ability to bring a player back before the full duration of their recovery time. Need your star QB 2 weeks before he's ready? You can make the decision to start him ahead of recovery, at the risk of further injury. The game will show you the performance with and without an injured player to help make that decision.

I'm pretty sure I've seen linemen get injured through normal play, hell for a long while the injuries were tuned wrong and you'd get an injury almost every other play. It was hilarious and hosed up, thankfully it's been tweaked quite a bit but there are still a lot more injuries than in previous years.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2016 01:24

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 14:34

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Saw there were a bunch of posts and figured people weren't that excited over the post marketing did about new equipment in the game...

BiggerBoat posted:

This game has been broken for over a decade, but why fix anything if people pre-order it like lemmings every year anyhow? A fresh coat of paint on an old jalopy every...mother...loving...year. Can't wait to stand in line. EA doesn't even care and why should they?

Yep, that's why I put in 60hr weeks every year, to poo poo out the same thing with just a roster update.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 04:23

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Volkerball posted:

We'll see if your tune changes when you start your new job.

It won't because I know a lot of the guys are already busting their balls getting all sorts of things squared away for patches and also laying out the guideline for what's going to happen next year.

Like a good friend of mine is putting the finishing touches on something people have been yelling about for years. Hell, I was the one who was supposed to do it but because I'm leaving tomorrow it got passed to him. It's come along nicely and I'm pretty sure everyone is going to be over the goddamned moon about it. :ninja:

# ¿ Jul 8, 2016 03:53

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Eifert Posting posted:

Was this ever announced?

Don't think so because as far as I know it's coming in a Day 0 patch. So it'll get probably get announced when they put up the notes for it.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 03:52

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Fork of Unknown Origins posted:

Games have to go gold so that they can be physically printed and shipped out to stores ahead of the release date. Between the game going gold and the release date they usually get a patch together cleaning up some bugs and tweaking some things.

This, basically to get the thing certified by 1st party, Sony/MS, you have to have the game in a finished state on a certain date so they can take a look at it, find any issues and you have time to fix those Cert issues.

However that's still like a whole month and a half before release day, so while things are out for Cert you'll start another patch branch of development and start putting in things that might've been wishlisted in the list of fixes you're making for that patch.

Day 0 stuff is usually things we may know about but fixing them is too risky to get done by the deadline to get things off to 1st party, but with a month of development and QA time they can be done without many knock-ons

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 17:54

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Bonham posted:

Please tell me the menu lag is gone. I can't understand how that can be allowed to happen in a yearly release mega AAA title. Also the unskippable 20 second game breaks and turnover reviews for fucks sake why can't every sports franchise be MLB the Show

You can skip all gamebreaks and things like that, believe the only thing you can't skip which I'm not sure why is the intro for MUT games, but thankfully it's not very long.

Menu lag is gone as much as we can, but the problem is the powers that be really love to put in poo poo that doesn't really add anything but looks pretty. So it loves to cause the game to hitch while it's loading up all the stuff.

Bonham posted:

Speaking of can we get a non totally jank career mode... I'm a CB why am I calling the plays that is your job coach. Career mode really shouldn't be integrated into CFM it's kind of an integral part of any sports game and shouldn't be basically disabling some menu options and locking the camera and calling a day.

That's because people would pitch a fuckin fit if they couldn't pick plays and were instead forced with whatever the CPU picked.

Bonham posted:

And where are we on the formation subs that were present in 2008 but apparently are too much to ask for

# ¿ Jul 19, 2016 18:48

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Havoc904 posted:

Ah hell no, I have been the Cowboys going back to the 360 days. I had to suffer through like 5 years of being in the same division as Menamino and constantly getting my rear end kicked at least 2 games every season. I paid my dues for the Cowboys dammmnnn it.

Things are sometimes better on paper than they are in reality :viggo:

# ¿ Jul 27, 2016 05:09

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

I appreciate scud breaking the NDA for us

I didn't break any NDA I was under just hinted at things, but yeah that's what I was supposed to do before I put in my notice. It got put together by my buddy and should work great.

Also yeah the xp gains are done instantly in the middle of the game and you can easily tell what was boosted and what they did. It's a neat little thing.

real_scud fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Aug 9, 2016

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 12:07

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

You were pretty specific imo, which I do truly appreciate

I will now be enforcing your covenant not to compete

Yeah I knew people would be happy about it and do kind of enjoy telling people more specific details on things. Sometimes wish they wouldn't really care and would let us freely talk but employees have been burned before. Thankfully while you all are loving mental with your MUT playing, everyone has been chill over the years.

davecrazy posted:

It's going to suck not having an inside man anymore.

If they would've given me the promotion I deserved then I'd still be there, it was just time to move on since I got this opportunity in England and had to jump on it.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2016 14:20

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

davecrazy posted:

lol, just loving lol

https://www.reddit.com/r/Madden/comments/4y9kee/looks_like_you_can_tell_if_your_opponent_is/

I didn't do it! But it's honestly not a terrible thing to fix, so it'll probably happen in an emergency patch or something.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2016 17:13

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Santheb posted:

Man the Madden team must hate the Redskins. Josh Norman getting stiffarmed by Zeke on the back of the cover, defense getting owned in the first loading screen, kicker misses a kick and then gets it blocked in the demo while you wait game.

Dicks

They don't actually, in fact one of the main gameplay designs is an Ex-Skin and there are a lot of Skins fans on the team at some pretty high levels.

Dubious posted:

trip report - game fuckin owns

I pulled tom brady

# ¿ Aug 23, 2016 11:21

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

Outside the gameplay: the GUI is still trash. Everything besides the handful of franchise changes (which aren't that big of a deal for non autists and should have been in older maddens) is still the same old poo poo. Acting like it's MAJOR IMPACT WOWEE ZOWEE is bs marketed to the LCD.

It's not the same old poo poo, while it may kind of seem it to you believe me when I say even on the backend with the logic everything relating to Franchise stuff has been changed/revamped. Not only was the flow updated so you don't have to go in and out of so many loving menus, but the logic behind them were tweaked as well.

Oberst posted:

Please stop changing the kick meter every year, just loving settle on something.

I worked on the kick meter and it was a loving bitch, mostly because the design was in two words, not good, and I had to figure a lot of things out in the initial one and then it got reworked a few times because it was bad. It's decent in the end but I laughed when I realized it's the same 3-click meter that was there a few years ago. They wanted to make it more challenging but I don't think it really is, except for when they had the values wack and basically it went insanely fast even on Pro and anything higher was impossible.

Malloreon posted:

the Gronk intro is so much better than the OBJ from last year

The best intro, which sadly none of you guys saw, was what we effectively called "The Jib-Jab" intro. It was for Sherman 2 years ago and they did a thing that was supposed to use 2d images but made it look like he was animated as he caught a pass or something.

In the end it was loving awful looking but looked EXACTLY like one of those jib-jab videos. It got changed almost immediately but a lot of us on the UI team kept an old shelf of it around so we could boot it up every so often and laugh. Kind of wish I had a video of it now though because of how hilarious it looked.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2016 10:27

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

davecrazy posted:

Then againI use the pitching meter in MLB The Show which is the exact same mechanic, so I may be biased.

The pitching meter in The Show was the direct influence on switching our kick meter.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2016 11:51

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

AfterFather posted:

I'm guessing we're not getting web based cfm this year.

I don't think that'll ever happen tbh

# ¿ Sep 2, 2016 09:13

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

FYI the Pass/Run and fumble patch is live now.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2016 14:26

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Samu posted:

Is there any way to turn the commentary off and maybe play music or something? Hearing about how Demarius Thomas only ran hooks and go routes in college for the 15th time is getting pretty old and I've had this game for a day.

Of course there is. Go to Customize > Settings > Settings (I know, the 1st settings is a hub really, but whatever) > Volume Control and then change all the poo poo you don't want to hear.

# ¿ Sep 8, 2016 23:34

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Last bit of Madden code I worked on just got released. It's the stuff for the Color Rush jerseys as well as a fix for PS4 Play-A-Friend.

Basically this has been done for a while since it has stuff I worked on before I left EA but we knew it wouldn't come out in the 1st patch since the Color Rush stuff wasn't officially announced + there's always one emergency patch for crazy issues found right after launch.

edit: Oh yeah and I forgot I also added a feature for CFM where you can edit the uniform of the CPU to whatever you want, so you can make every game a Color Rush game if you're that insane.

real_scud fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Sep 14, 2016

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 14:56

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

AfterFather posted:

Is there a momentum mechanic in CFM?

Have no clue since I'm not a gameplay engineer, I only worked on the UI side of things.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2016 21:18

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

davecrazy posted:

No differnt then pitching in The Show.

Don't have to go full power for chip shots. Middle of the meter is far enough for XPs. Aim the comeback swing at the front of the sweet spot not the middle.

What he said, I worked on the kick meter so I'll tell you if you end up going for full power the meter will swing faster on the down motion than it did on the up since you overpowered the kick.

Also do what you can to make sure you're aiming to get the mark in the middle of the zone on the downswing. If you get it to far to the edge you could still miss it because I believe some randomness is put into the final calculation. That or my math was a bit crap and it renders inside the zone but in reality is out. Either way, aim for the middle.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2016 09:04

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

foolish_fool posted:

Kicking seems hard enough offline that ever even considering kicking while online seems crazy to me. Like was the whole point of the system to discourage people from taking field goals or extra points? That is what it feels like.

It was done to try to make it a bit more difficult since in the past it was an automatic gimme that a good player would make every kick, even from 50+ yards which in reality is a thing that almost never happens.

You should've seen one of the earliest tunings of the speed, it was goddamned insane even on Pro. We used to laugh at how comically fast it went.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2016 09:11

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Epi Lepi posted:

I'm in an Online CFM League with some friends on Xbox One. Two of us are playing each other soon, is there a way for anyone else in the league to spectate that game?

Sure, you use Twitch to stream your gameplay.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2016 22:20

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

I like madden dev team ironically and unironically

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 22:15

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Alfalfa posted:

Madden Mobile dev team gets an E for effort.

I don't get why it's so hard to provide an update like above for MM or actually tell people what events and sets actually produce instead of just leaving everyone guessing.

It's cause their team is much smaller and I believe splitting time between putting out updates for MM and also the NBA mobile game.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 22:52

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

Actually unironically answer why a basic feature like card batching took 5 years?

I wasn't involved in that portion of the game but I think a lot of it had to do with it being originally written by a bunch of outsourcers who wrote terrible fuckin code and it's taken about this long to piece-by-piece completely rewrite all of that code that was functional but nothing more than that.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 23:46

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

zimbomonkey posted:

I have noticed something really weird happening lately in my franchise mode. I mostly play offense and sim defense on slow (so I can watch them play and relax). Lately I've noticed that whenever I score a TD the extra point is being kicked from a random spot on the field. It's never been on the wrong side of the field or anything, but I did have one recently where I had to kick it from the 43 and missed (it was well out of my kicker's range. This has happened like 6 or 7 times over the last few weeks and I haven't really played all that much. Is it a widespread issue?

That's pretty loving weird and definitely shouldn't be happening.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2016 23:54

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Wiccan Wasteland posted:

real_scud still around?

I am but I don't work for EA anymore so any information I could give would potentially be outdated by now.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 14:34

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Wiccan Wasteland posted:

Ah crap, forgot about that. Just wanted to know how the Devs went about replicating the issues/bugs that people are able to produce. If there was a better way to report this stuff outside of youtube/twitter then the Devs could be more proactive in looking into these issues.

That's honestly the best way to show a dev what's going on. Ideally you know of steps to reproduce it and not just "This weird thing happened". We need to know what you were doing before it happened, who it happened against and as many details as possible. All of that info helps try to recreate the issue and in reality no details is too small if you can remember it.

Before when people would post crazy bugs here I'd ask them to send me videos of it and the steps to reproduce it and then I'd try to replicate it at work on my devkit. If a dev can get it to happen there easily they can hopefully fix it. The problem is that some of the time a bug occurs only in real world MP games where the users are far apart and the ping to each other isn't 1ms, like they are in our dev environment. Those bugs are a bitch and take forever to figure out wtf is going on.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 21:18

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Wiccan Wasteland posted:

Makes sense. I always wondered why you guys didnt give the game changers copies of the game that could send bug reports but I guess that's too much of a risk.

https://twitter.com/EAMaddenNFL/status/817431040960495616

Gamechangers do get green discs I believe, which means they get a retail copy before the public does, but that's still only like a week or two before street date.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 21:28

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Kind of glad I'm not on Madden anymore so I don't have to stare at Brady's smug loving face day in and day out.

That said the last word I heard from ex-coworkers is that the transition to Frostbite hasn't been smooth even if it's been planned/worked on for 2 years. So it was all hands on deck trying to get it out the door and as bug free as possible.

# ¿ May 13, 2017 00:09

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Fork of Unknown Origins posted:

Awesome can't wait to scroll past this so glad they took development resources away from Franchise to get this in there.

They didn't. This has been worked on for about 2-3 years by a small team, most of them were brought in specifically for this. So quit your lovely bitching.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2017 07:13

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Fork of Unknown Origins posted:

Clint literally said that they had to fight extra hard to get features in to CFM (in reference to off ball injuries) due to the new engine and new story mode. It absolutely took resources away.

They might've had to fight extra hard because of the engine, not the story mode stuff. The switch to Frostbite is/was a pain in the rear end and they ended up having to bring all hands on deck to get it done. The story mode stuff was basically done by a small group for a long time who were pretty independent of the rest of Madden dev.

They also probably had to fight extra hard to get it in because of how hardwired a lot of Madden is, so since it was something that the game didn't do easily it probably took more effort than one would think to get off the ball injuries in.

Oberst posted:

Do you always have to defend the lovely company you don't even work for anymore?

No but as a developer and someone who really knows what happens in games I have to defend other developers when lovely manbabies bitch and whine about things they have no real idea about.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 06:25

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 14:34

real_scud: Sep 5, 2002; One of these days these elbows are gonna walk all over you

Oberst posted:

Btw consumers can whine all they want about whatever they want hth

No poo poo, but people love to whine even moreso about poo poo they've no clue about simply because it's EA.

Fork of Unknown Origins posted:

Clint literally said that they had to fight due to story mode and the new engine. He could've easily said it was just the new engine but he chose to say that story mode was part of it also. I don't think it could be more clear.

It could be more clear because people who talk to any kind of media are only allowed to talk about certain things, and in this case he said it was because of Story mode and the new engine since those have already been announced. I know for a fact that CFM took a backpage this year because the people who worked on it last year ended up getting split between building CFM shareable features between NBA and Madden since they're both made in the same studio and they want to be able to more easily share resources between them. Rex talked about this briefly in the 2nd video linked above but that's really why CFM didn't get much done.

We had about 20 or so people between Austin and Orlando working on all the CFM features last year, but since it was a big part of the focus last year it's not going to be a focus this year. So they split the people to work on the NBA/Madden CFM which really meant implementing Madden's CFM in NBA.

But yes by all means please try to tell me I know nothing about a game I worked on.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 23:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Sports Argument Stadium > The Armchair Quarterback > Madden NFL 17 - SIMMS GONE GOTY 10/10, Gameplay questionable for the season