Stemming from the reactions to the EA Sports College Football 25 trailer, the OS community has been amassing questions they hope get answered before the July release of EA’s college football game. I think there’s a lot of good ones so far and wanted to highlight some that have been asked multiple times.
First and foremost, the majority of the questions revolve around dynasty mode but specifically recruiting. It was something I mentioned before the EA reveals, and it remains as present as ever that recruiting needs to be great. But a lot has also changed in the recruiting world in the last 10 years and so EA’s game has to reflect those changes while also creating something that’s fun.
With that in mind, it’s a lot of questions that revolve around the fusing of the new realities of the recruiting world with the old systems of NCAA Football 14. Will we have a points system and the coaching carousel again? Will there be de-commits, an early signing period, what will go on with the transfer portal, and so on. A lot has changed in college sports in the last 10 years, especially with recruiting, and it’s trickier to gauge things because this is also where EA had a lot of game mechanics already in place.
How many of those game mechanics could even be salvaged in presumably a new franchise mode/dynasty mode system is a question all on its own, so EA is really going to need to go in-depth here (and I think they will). On top of the recruiting, progression was very basic in ’14. It wasn’t necessarily “bad” but it was very predictable and linear. So we’ve had a bunch of people discussing if it will be more based on playing time and results rather than just getting older.
One question I was surprised to see mentioned so many times dealt with the weather. Maybe it’s nostalgia to some extent, but there’s multiple folks asking if we will have The Weather Channel integrated into the game again. Beyond that, people just want to know if weather is going to have a big impact on certain games, and whether we’ll be able to tweak the weather if we want during dynasty mode. I do get this question because weather has mostly been neutralized in Madden, so this would be another way to make the game feel unique, but I just didn’t expect as many questions about it from the community.
Customization is also a big one. There’s plenty of questions surrounding customizing conferences, customizing the College Football Playoff, customizing playbooks, and of course customizing players. I feel like EA called out an ability to customize conferences even before the reveals, but the other stuff are open questions.
Playbooks have been a sore spot in Madden for years, and it goes beyond just our own playcalls and playbooks, so I’d almost prefer EA just get better at this component of the game rather than trying to let us fix it with custom playbooks, especially when I assume we’d never be allowed to use that stuff in an online dynasty. We know the College Football Playoff is in the game, but we don’t know how the at-large teams will be determined as of now.
And how and when we can edit/customize players is maybe the biggest mystery of them all because we really need to know not only what we can and cannot edit, but what we can and cannot share. We know Team Builder is contained to offline areas, so does this mean the same for editing players?
On the gameplay side of things, there are fewer questions because we just haven’t really seen any “true” gameplay as of yet. Everything from the trailer was from the in-game engine, but this is not the view we play from. We know about homefield advantage and wide open gameplay being buzzwords, but there’s also talk of “new in-game passing mechanics” and this tidbit:
Pre-Snap Recognition makes the decision behind every snap matter more. Do you trust in your high-skill seniors, or take a risk with your untested freshman? Read the game then read your players to make the right decision when it matters most.
That’s exciting to read, but it’s only exciting if you infer certain things like this meaning we’ll have a new hot route system or choice routes/sight adjusts that you’ll have to trust your receivers on during a play — with the implication even being that you have to guess the way your receiver will break at times.
Lastly, going back to the rosters, I’ve seen some people being curious about how roster updates will work. We have all these real players, so how much will ratings change? Will injuries be accounted for during the season?
It remains to be seen how many of these questions EA will get to in the weeks ahead, but so far EA has been relatively transparent, and I would expect that trend to continue since this title has so much hype behind it — on top of it being a “new” franchise in a lot of ways. We’ll be here to share any news that comes out, and of course head to the forums if you just want to chat with other college football fiends in the meantime.
