Well Madden (and NFL) fans, as promised, we’re bringing you a sneak peek at Madden NFL 10 by releasing a feature that you’ll see in this year’s game! Remember, it’s only a mere 6½ months away!

We have a big goal as a team this year - to relay out as much information as possible. Hopefully in the process we can make the development of this game extremely transparent so you all, the fans, can get an inside look at how the game gets made. In doing so, we’ll often be discussing new features with you as they are finalized and polished, meaning that each and every one of you out there can give suggestions directly to us to try and shape the game towards your preferred direction. Madden NFL as a Franchise has one overarching goal it has to reach every year, and that is to be the best sports game in history. I’m going to leave the discussion to you all on whether we’ve reached that goal in year’s past, but I do know that now we all get to be a part of making it happen this year. You are no longer posting to forums in vain!

So as we sat down as a team and tried to decide what information we wanted to release first, it really made the most sense to focus more on the technical details for the first part of the year. This is for a couple of reasons – one, the majority of the people looking into Madden info right now are most likely going to be the more hardcore fans (who appreciate the details), and two, we obviously want to save more of the big name feature stuff for later in the year closer to launch time. You should see this theme continue throughout the first few months of our updates. Another reason we really like this approach is that some updates (this post included) are purely about new technology that actually hasn’t been fully fleshed out in the game yet. So the hope is that we can take feedback from the community in regards to maybe new ideas they’d like to see us implement with the new technology. This is one of the most exciting aspects for us as a team in regards to our interaction with the community throughout the development cycle for Madden NFL 10.

Enough talk – on to the new stuff!

Let me tell you a story of playing Madden NFL. It’s 3^rd and 10, and I’m down 14-7 against my buddy over Xbox LIVE. He’s a pretty conservative player, so I know he’ll sit his safeties back a bit and stay with man coverage on my outside receivers. I’m going to try and send my slot WR on a deep fly to clear the safety out, and hit my #1 WR on a Deep In. I saw Kurt Warner and the Rams with their greatest show on turf make this look easy week after week in the late 90’s! So I take the snap and analyze the situation quickly – no blitz, and the safeties are dropping out…money. I wish I was better at going through progressions, but I’m not - I’m pretty much watching my #1 WR all the way. He’s just coming out of his break on the deep in, and he’s got at least 2 steps on the defender trailing him in man coverage. I fire it in there, a perfect bullet pass where I think only he can catch it. Right before the ball gets to him the DB turns around and in one quick motion steps in front, picks it off, and is headed back the other way. HUH? THE DB NEVER EVEN SAW THE BALL!

Ever happened to you? Did your controller survive to tell the tale?

It is my pleasure to introduce Madden’s newest piece of technology, one that is also shared within many of the EA SPORTS games, called Procedural Awareness. What is it? We’ll you’ve likely heard of “head tracking” with IK. If you haven’t, it’s a way to turn the players head around to face a target dynamically, without the need for canned animations. Well, think of Procedural Awareness (PA for short) as the “next-gen” version of head tracking. Since it is so early in the year, unfortunately I can’t show you any videos of it running in the game, but I can show some “tech demos” of sorts:

This is definitely pretty cool stuff…we can tune how fast the player switches between different targets, and then also how he behaves when he locks on and follows a target. You can already envision this being used by DB’s and WR’s when the ball is thrown, QB’s as they go through progressions, safeties as they drop in zone, and obviously many more cases. In terms of visual fidelity, PA is also a major step up from any other normal IK head tracking solution. We’re in the middle of some changes so I would rather not show you our player model’s face in the tool (his jaw is missing…it isn’t pretty ), but I can show a video of PA running in the tool with an NBA Live player model – Dwayne Wade. This shows off how the eyes track along with the head, the ability to dynamically “blink”, some really smooth blending between different targets, and even how the spine and shoulders can be “pulled” to follow the eyes/head as well:

There’s one last cool feature within PA, and that is a concept of “procedural attitudes”. An attitude is basically a collection of a bunch of different variables that alter the way a player “looks” while he is head tracking. So for the above videos, you basically saw just one attitude – “alert”. But PA allows you to not only just tweak how quickly he reacts and the amount of time it takes him to switch targets and such, but you can also toy with a big collection of variables for players to actually express emotion with their head and eye movement. A big problem in many sports games is making characters feel “alive” – and it applies to Madden often times as soon as the play is over. You don’t want to see a bunch of zombies walking around, but you also don’t want to spend months writing code and adding animations to make players act a little more lifelike (especially when there are so many features we need to attack to more realistically emulate football gameplay). Here’s where PA helps tremendously…it allows artists to create subtle emotional attitudes for players without the need of an engineer. Again there is ZERO canned animation at work here…it’s all totally dynamic and can be created by an animator adjusting a few sliders in the tool. Below is an example video of a few attitudes:

Alright, so what’s Procedural Awareness in a nutshell? “The ability to procedurally manipulate the spine, neck, head, and eyes on a player in the game; and also add layers of emotion/attitudes on top of those manipulations”.

So the videos really just showcase the technology…not how we implement that technology in our game to actually change the way the game is played. My story above about getting picked off by a DB that can’t see the ball? Well now we can make a DB track the ball realistically and we’ll make sure that he has a true line of sight before he can make a play on the ball. And if/when he gets burned, he can dynamically look down and shake his head with zero new animations or engineering support.

A very exciting thing for our team while posting this is that we are not using PA’s full functionality in the game right now. We have the standard “alert” attitude hooked up for 1) DB’s and WR’s to track the ball, 2) defenders to track the ballcarrier, and 3) the ballcarrier to track threats. Post away…where else would you like to see PA active? Also, we have created a few other attitudes – confident, nervous, intense, etc, but they aren’t being used in the game yet. Are there any new attitudes would you like to see? Do you have any suggestions on the best area you think we should actually use the attitudes that we’ve created?

We will follow up in a few months (once we’re actually showing videos of the game) and show what all we changed/added thanks to community feedback. I personally can’t wait!

Enjoy the rest of the Super Bowl!

-Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10

I'm back again folks, bringing you some more additions and improvements that you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10. This week, I'm going to focus primarily on the QB position and show some of the improvements we've made for this year. First off, I'm going to talk about a new animation technology that we can call "layered blending".

Layered Blending
"Layered blending? I thought you were going to talk about quarterbacks?" You'll see shortly how this works for QB's. First, a quick lesson on what blending is. Anytime a player transitions from one animation to another, he will use a 'blend' of his previous animation into the next animation. When you don't have a nice smooth blend, you'll get poppy / hitching animations. If you make blends that are too long, you can easily not have the correct amount of control over your player (he can feel very 'sluggish' or unresponsive). The most common types of blends are linear, ease in, and ease out. Those just refer to how many frames of either the previous or current animation you use while blending. For Madden NFL 10 though, we've added something new - the ability to actually separate the blends out between different parts of the body. We call this layered blending because it allows us to create different layered animation by blending one part of the body out quicker or slower based on the needs of the game. So how does it relate to QB's? Well, how often has this happened to you?

(Note these are Madden NFL 09 screenshots)

                  
                         Press the button to pass                                          Sack animation starts, he tucks the ball away

I sure can't count on one hand how many times this has happened to me, and it's extremely frustrating, for hardcore and casual gamers alike. You hit the pass button, and you want to throw it! To try and alleviate this problem over the years, we've tried speeding up the release on pass animations, we've trimmed sack animations to be much tighter, as well as all sorts of other ways to make this problem go away. But this never quite solved it perfectly, and it inadvertently made our game a bit less realistic in the process. It's a tough problem though...when two animations start blending together, there was never really any other way around it.

I'm happy to report however that layered blending is the answer! When the sack animation starts, we can blend out the arm and shoulder of the QB at a MUCH slower rate to ensure that he gets the ball off. Here is a sample video of the tech in our ANT tool:

Obviously we had to do this on an animation-by-animation basis...you don't want the QB throwing the ball when a player has him wrapped up on his throwing arm. Immediately as soon as the tech went in, we realized what a great "sim" element we could turn this into by creating a real risk-reward of trying to get the ball off vs. taking the sack. We totally alter the physics of the ball on release based on how hard the QB is hit while throwing, and how far into the throw animation he was when he was sacked. If you were one frame from releasing the ball when you're hit, then the ball may just come out with some slight wobble. If you are hit right after you started the wind-up, you can expect some wounded duck floaters going up in to the air for the defense to go swarm to. These make for some very dramatic moments, which is a must when you're trying to re-create the 'essence' of NFL football. The great part too is that now we can return all our passes to normal speeds and make the passing game feeling more realistic since we don't have to worry about the 'suction sack'. :)
(For the inquiring minds, we were able to put this technology into NCAA Football 10 as well!)

New QB Ratings
Our next big change for the QB position was the addition of some new ratings. For countless years we've basically had Throw Power, Throw Accuracy, and Awareness as the only ratings for the QB position, so it's very hard to differentiate the players correctly and have them perform more like their real-life counterparts with just those few. For example, a superstar like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning would previously have a very high Throw Accuracy rating like a 98, well that had to be the case for a 5 yard screen or a 65 yard heave! Here are our new ratings:

1. Deep Ball Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on deep passes (streaks, deep posts, etc)
2. Medium Passing Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on medium passes (outs, corners, etc)
3. Short Passing Accuracy: Determines the accuracy on short passes (quick smash, flats, etc)
4. Throw on the Run: Creates a modifier to accuracy when the QB is throwing on the run. Every QB will take some sort of accuracy hit when throwing on the run, but a QB that has a high rating here will take a smaller hit.
5. Play Action: Determines the 'effectiveness' of Play Action for a QB, i.e. how often they can fake out or freeze the defense (which is obviously weighted against the defenders Play Recognition ratings)

 With Donny's new philosophy on ratings, the addition of these ratings immediately made the game play VERY differently than in years past. Chucking up the deep ball with a QB with high throw power but bad accuracy is definitely a recipe for disaster! We have recently been doing tuning to scale down these effects on the lower skill levels because QB's are way more inaccurate than you're used to seeing, and we felt this would be a little too hard to play for a casual player. Rest assured though, on All Pro and All Madden, we will have a much more realistic representation of accuracy for the QB's. I know I've read many times that in the past it seems that the only incomplete passes in Madden are either swatted, dropped, or intercepted...that is definitely no longer the case.

 The other change that was made once we got in all these accuracy changes was to change our accuracy 'algorithm'. Previously there was a big circle that got drawn around the player and we picked a random point in that circle based on the rating check. However, you could get pretty unpredictable results in this system. I'll show you why in the case of an out route headed towards the sideline:

Even if we determined that it should be an inaccurate pass behind him, it could end up hitting the WR right in the numbers since he could slow down as the ball was released. So we changed this up to match more of a realistic system based on what an NFL QB would do. Here is the NEW system:

We implemented across the board based on the 'err on the side of caution' aspect. Good QB's will put the ball where only their receiver can get it, and bad QB's, well, they'll at least try to do that.

We also used this concept for precision passing. It always felt strange to be holding 'down' on a precision pass on a curl route, only to have the ball sail over the player's head. The new algorithm will err on the direction that you are holding...so if you are trying to throw it to low to a player on a quick smash, you would put it in the dirt (assuming that your QB's short accuracy rating determined the pass would be inaccurate). Eagles fans probably know this phenomenon all too well.

Well that's it for this week. We definitely feel these changes will really help make our game much more realistic and authentic, and also improve control, responsiveness, and even accessibility along with it. There are quite a few more improvements coming to the passing game and QB's in general, but it will be a little while until we release that information (as we aren't quite sure how far we're going to get yet).

We'd like to hear from you guys though! Some topics for discussion:

• What do you think we should rate your favorite QB in the new ratings above? Donny would love to hear it.
• Have any ideas of other places we could possibly use layered blending that we may not have thought of? 

Hey Madden fans, it's that time again...time for another weekly blog update! I’m Josh Looman, senior designer on Madden NFL 10. First some background on me…my most recent role was as the lead designer on NFL Head Coach ’09. Prior to that, I was the ‘Franchise Designer’ on Madden 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 for PS2 and Xbox. When the opportunity was presented to me to re-join Phil Frazier, Ian Cummings, and Donny Moore on the Madden team, I dropped everything and came aboard.

This week I wanted to give you an update on what we’re addressing in franchise mode this year. We’re probably going to have a few blogs about franchise mode from now until August, so I’m just going to touch on a couple of things we’ve been working on since I joined the team.

One thing we learned on NFL Head Coach ’09 was that in order to have a great franchise mode, you need a solid base. You wouldn’t put a 2nd or 3rd addition on your house if the foundation is crumbling, right?

Since our ‘foundation’ is the logic behind every decision made in franchise mode, we knew we really wanted to address that foundation before anything else major was applied. I know some folks may be expecting the entire NFL Head Coach ’09 game to be dropped into Madden this year, but that’s not going to happen. We have a lot of work to do and it’s going to take us some time to start with the core of franchise mode and take it where we all want it to be.

I’ll break down some of the problems we’ve encountered so far and talk about how we’re addressing them below.

Offseason Player Signing Logic

When we sat down and started taking a look at the logic, the #1 area that stood out to us was how teams handled player decisions in the offseason. After a simulated season, many teams were cutting players left and right in free agency to upgrade much lesser needs (like punter and full back). In fact, that first year we saw the Colts cut Peyton Manning to sign a punter.

We dug through some of the logic and found out that CPU teams were just being too rigid when it came to upgrading positions on their team. They all felt like their #1 priority was to field the best team possible, but when it came to clearing cap room they could possibly just cut the player who would save them the most. Thankfully, this has been addressed. Teams are much more mindful of the amount of cap room they have in free agency now…if they have no room, they’ll pass on that new punter.

Another thing we addressed was contract amounts. We’ve scaled player ratings differently this year, so we needed to make sure a starter in the league was paid like a starter. It’ll be tougher to cherry pick in free agency now, as an 80 overall defensive end is going to ask for the money he’d be paid in real life. We also increased signing bonuses and salaries for elite players. We found that the max a player could get paid was about 60 million over 7 years in previous versions of the game. We fixed that so you’ll see elite players like Asomugha and Haynesworth sign those $100 million dollar deals.

We’re also focusing on the re-sign player stage, making sure that teams intelligently decide whether to keep or release their upcoming free agents. If a team cannot afford to re-sign a player, he’ll become a free agent. It’s that simple.

The Draft

The other big thing we’ve looked at so far is everything surrounding the Draft. After joining the team, I ran through a season and started doing some in-season scouting. Three issues presented themselves immediately:

•   When I scouted a player, it was a pretty cumbersome experience. I had to click on a player, enter a sub-screen and then click on him again just to start the first level of scouting.

•   After I scouted a player for a few weeks, the comments never seemed to change. Beyond that, they were pretty vague and really told me very little about the player.

•   The screen for in-season scouting was actually quite buried as well. Placing it within the “owner mode” sub-menu meant that very few people would necessarily know to go use it.

To fix these issues, we first made the interface a lot easier to use (which we’ll show screenshots of quite soon). Second, we re-vamped the scouting system so that you unlock more comments as you scout the player longer. The comments can go from being broad (We think his awareness is no higher than 80) to telling you exactly what his key ratings are if you scout him the entire time. It won’t tell you his overall rating, but it will give you his potential, which is what you should make your decision off of.

One nice addition that we were able to take from Head Coach was how we handle the rookies in the Draft. We now create every rookie by hand, just like you saw in NFL Head Coach ’09. You might even see a few famous rookies make a re-appearance from those drafts.

In addition, we also have the ability to determine where a player SHOULD be drafted and what his potential is. So we can create busts and sleepers just using those systems. Drafting a player in the top 10 will no longer guarantee that he is a great player in Madden NFL 10. Unless you do some scouting (like the real teams do), you might just pick up this year’s Vernon Gholston. On the flip side, you might also find the next Tom Brady or Marques Colston in later rounds. One piece of advice…don’t be enamored with workout warriors. Running a 4.2 forty or benching a small concrete block does not automatically make you a good football player.

The big thing we’re working on as we speak is the Draft logic. I promise you…you will not see the Colts take a QB in the first round and then in the 3rd, 5th, etc. These type of logic tweaks are happening across the board and the draft is no different.

NCAA Import Draft Class tuning

We have been doing quite a bit of tuning on the NCAA Import Draft classes, as we saw a lot of feedback on the forums regarding this area in general. Here are a few of the changes:

•   Added the 5 new QB ratings (Throw on Run, Play Action, Short Accuracy, Mid Accuracy, Deep Accuracy).   Since NCAA Football does not have the new ratings in their game to use as a base, we will be using Throw Accuracy for the 3 Madden Accuracy ratings.  For Throw on Run, we take a combo of their Speed + Throw Power.   For Play Action, we use a combo of Awareness + Throw Accuracy.

•   Tuned the import draft class feature to be more superstar based.  The community feedback matched our own in the feeling that were too many superstars coming in from NCAA. There was not much of a difference from the 1st Round Picks to the 5th round picks.  Nearly all the players were 75+ OVR rated and we felt like that was too high for your average draft picks.  We have tuned this quite a bit to ensure that the elite guys will still be elite, but you should expect the middle and lower round guys to be rated much lower in Madden 10 (with a few gems buried in there as well).

Progression

Finally we get to progression, easily one of the most often-discussed areas of Franchise mode in the community for Madden NFL 09. Donny Moore did a lot of good work with progression prior to my joining the team and I’ve been able to keep tweaking it since. Here are the major changes we’ve made so far:

•   Older players will digress much faster. In fact, when a running back hits 30, he’s going downhill at warp speed.

•   Younger players will progress quickly if they play well. We’re talking up 10 points in overall if he has a great year.

•   Veteran players will still progress, but not substantially. They can also digress if they play poorly.

•   We added more stat categories to determine a player’s success/failure for a season.  For example, if you lead the league in rush TD’s but don’t do all that well in total rushing yards, you’ll still be able to progress accordingly. And it’s not just yards, and TD’s, it’s other stats like rushing attempts and rush yards per carry.  This was done across the board for all positions.

•   Removed age from ranking players.  Some people may not know this but our previous progression systems would ranked each player statistically against players around the same age.  Meaning that older players would only be ranked against other older players when determining how well they performed.  This often created the situation where those older players never dropped even with sub-par years because other players in their ‘age group’ weren’t performing well either.  Now, all players are ranked against all other players at that position, regardless of career phase.

The “potential” rating is another sort of ‘hidden’ addition that we are changing up this year to impact progression (and Franchise mode overall). Every player in the game has a potential rating that he cannot exceed (a la NFL Head Coach 09). This year, we’re actually exposing that rating so you’ll have an idea why your player is not progressing - typically a situation where his potential is maxed out. Exposing this rating also help quite a bit in making personnel decisions when contracts are up. One key detail here is that you’ll only see potential for players on your own team. CPU player potentials will be hidden.

Ok, guys…I’ve probably gone on long enough. Next time I’ll talk about trade logic, hall of fame logic, regular season free agency, salary cap tuning, coach boosts and tons of other franchise stuff.

- Josh Looman
Senior Designer, Madden NFL 10

Hello Madden, EA, and NFL faithful - welcome back to another weekly update provided by yours truly, Ian Cummings, lead designer for Madden NFL 10. Can you believe that this is already our 6th official post? If you haven't had a chance to read all of the other posts yet, I'd strongly suggest you do so...they should give some key insight and hopefully show you (slowly but surely) the goals and direction for this year's game.

You can check them out here: 

1.       Team introduction / Mission Statement [link]
2.       Procedural Awareness [link]
3.       New Ratings Philosophy [link]
4.       Half Sacks / Tackle Assists [link]
5.       Improvements to the QB position & layered blending technology [link]

After that quick look at what's been discussed so far, now comes this week's installment: a focus on improvements made to the DB and WR positions.  

As most folks already know, as a design team we've been very active on the forums recently (starting about a month or so before the Madden NFL 09 release). Within minutes of talking with the community it's easy to tell that one of the most common areas requested for improvement is DB/WR play. Obviously, we're listening to you, and here are just some of the other improvements and changes that you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10 come August.

Defensive Assignments / Matchups

This screen has some pretty broken stuff all over it, but what the heck, you guys can look at early software objectively right? :)

For any that aren't totally familiar with this feature, in a nutshell it allows you to assign a defender to ALWAYS shadow a specific receiver around the field. So if someone is moving Randy Moss all over the place and you can't keep track of him, then you can assign your best defender to always keep him covered. I am not really going to dwell on this feature too much as it did exist in the PS2/Xbox days, but I did want to mention that we finally have it back (and it sure feels good to have back). Also of note - this is a Madden only feature.

Route Running and Man Coverage
We've really spent quite a bit of time on the 'game within the game' of WR/DB interaction. There are two improvements that I'd like to expand on first (as I feel they are the most important), and both are animation related.

First, we replaced nearly every single receiver route animation in the game, with the goal of more accurately recreating real life acceleration and momentum. We are also utilizing the route running rating much more now when selecting these animations. We totally re-tuned which cut moves play (and how 'open' the WR gets) based on an elite/agile/non-agile separation in regards to that rating. Check out the video below - it should really show you what kind of difference this makes from 09 to 10:

We did basically the exact same thing for defensive reactions while in man coverage. This has allowed us to really re-work our man coverage AI to use animations as the true determination of how open the receiver gets. Before, there would typically be a time delay placed on the defender's reaction time based on his (and the receiver's) ratings. Now, we can specifically pick different animations to determine how fast he reacts, or whether he gets faked out or not. This creates a much more believable and realistic simuation of momentum. Here are two example cut moves for a defender backpedaling with the receiver in front of him:

Second, we took a page from the FIFA team and added in the concept of 'jostling'. Personally I am extremely stoked to have this in the game because I've written a design for it for 5+ years in a row...unfortunately we just never had the technology to accomplish it. The 'jostling' concept is a set of looping 2-man animations that can play for the WR and DB as they run downfield. The main reason that I am so big on these animations is that it really helps alleviate a balance problem that has existed in Madden for years. I'm talking about the fact that traditionally you can send a player with a 99 speed rating (regardless of his other ratings like route running, catching, etc) on a streak and easily get behind a defender in man coverage. In real life, regardless of the difference in speed, a good defensive back can use his body to keep the receiver in check... a fly route is rarely an untouched foot-race sprint to the endzone. So here's a video example of just one of the many jostling animations you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10:  

Adding these animations also allowed us the ability to call more realistic pass interference penalties. We've added a lot of variety that ranges from minor hand-fighting to severe push-offs and holds, so now we can make sure that pass interference gets called in a much more accurate manner. We're using the man coverage rating of the defender to determine how well he keeps the WR in check and how often he gets penalized.

Here are some other changes that have been made so far for route running:

• Added support for slip & fall receiver cut moves in bad weather (chances of slipping come from route running ratings) 
• Re-factored all double moves to work correctly, including defensive cut moves that are companions to the WR cuts (chances of defender biting come from man coverage rating, play recognition rating, as well as boosts for correctly timed pump fakes)
• Added all new start play WR animations with more realistic acceleration (should be visible in the videos above)
• Added "pop" animations where say a LB will hit a WR as he comes across the middle through his zone

Press / Release
Another area that we thought needed definite improvements was in the battle between receivers and DB's at the line. Below is a list of all the fixes we've made so far:

• Deleted all previous chuck animations, re-added all newly captured ones from scratch
• Extended animation time drastically on chucks. Longer times not only mean smoother looking animations, but also more realistic reactions from WR's (i.e. they can't catch the ball while they are being chucked so you can't fire the ball over to them immediately and expect them to catch it as they aren't looking for the ball)
• Removed all animation compression on chucks to increase visual fidelity.
• Found and fixed an issue where the players wouldn't align properly during the chuck animation which used to cause some weird clipping through each other
• Fixed "suction" bug where press animations could start from like 5 yards away.
• Fixed a bug with zone / man chuck animations...in 09 the chucks for DB's in zone coverage looked just like chucks in man coverage.
• Re-factored the logic for win/loss on chucks based on the route the receiver wants to run. For example, if the WR wants to run inside (i.e. a post), and he "wins" the press, then he won't just pick an animation that beats the press, he'll pick one of many press beating animations that actually break inside. Likewise for defensive players...they'll push the player inside if they "win" the press in like a Cover 2 situation.
• Made it so chucks can now start from stand

Lastly, we've started to use Procedural Awareness (so far just as a purely visual thing). We recently got head tracking in pre-play for WR's so they now look in towards the ball at the snap. This has been long overdue. We also enabled Procedural Awareness head tracking for DB's. In man coverage they will directly 'track' the eyes of the WR, and in zone coverage they will track the QB's eyes, with the ability to also randomly swap targets based on proximity of guys entering their zone.

That's it for this week! We hope these updates and improvements are starting to really show everyone our vision for Madden NFL 10 - one of a true football simulation. For those that would like to know, the NCAA team took all of these improvements (except for the Defensive Matchups - that's Madden only) for NCAA Football 10.

As always, we want your feedback! Definitely let us know any other improvements you'd like to see in this area. We actually have some more improvements still planned to this area but we always want to hear your feedback and any ideas you may have.

Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10

...(and the challenges in making it fun for the masses)

From the very beginning of the year, we've tried to make clear our vision for Madden - one of authenticity, realism, & simulation (aka 'sim'). There is no doubt that we all want to turn this game into the most realistic version of Madden in history. This week I wanted to touch on some of the changes we've made (and struggles we've had) while trying to achieve this goal for Madden NFL 10. There are quite a few categories...

-- Inconsistent Animation Speeds --
Over the course of the years, Madden has increased the speed of specific animations (and sets of animations) here and there across many areas. Typically, these are put in place to fix small bugs like times where maybe a handoff won't match up, or a situation where maybe the user doesn't have enough control. However, these small little changes can actually manifest upon themselves and end up causing pretty big issues in the game. VERY early in the cycle (like August) we committed to remove all these arbitrary speed alterations for Madden NFL 10, and truly fix the root issues that they were put in place to handle. As an example of a speed alteration gone wrong, below is a video showcasing exactly WHY the fullback dive is so effective...see below:

You'll notice that because the FB doesn't have a proper initial move animation, in order for the handoff to work correctly the QB has to turn around at warp speed. This in turn makes it so the FB is nearly at the line of scrimmage before many players on the defensive side have even gotten out of their stances. The Madden 10 version shows how a simple fix (like a new initial move for the FB) can make this play into much less of an exploit and into a more realistic representation of the play. I can hear the tournament players everywhere cursing my name.

Another great example of how a relatively small speed alteration can blow up into a bigger issue is the speed of the QB dropback. The QB drop was initially sped up because he was getting 'sucked' into sacks too easily if he took a normal dropback speed. This has been discussed often on the forums...though only the QB drop is altered to play faster, with the QB being set up too quickly the timing of the routes cease to have as much importance, the blockers can't correctly form a pocket around you (since the DL are barely out of their stances while the QB is already set), and the passing game now has turned into a very unrealistic representation of the real sport. Well thanks to our new blending technology (more details here, here), and all the time spent tuning the tolerances/distances for sack animations to trigger, we no longer have to worry about speeding the QB up to successfully get a play off. Here's a good comparison video of old vs. new:

P.S. hopefully you'll also notice the changes one of our animators made to the animation after feedback gathered in this thread [link]

It was an easy enough design decision within our team that all of those arbitrary speed alterations had to go. The good thing with us all getting on the team early and being so far out in front of this...we were able to set everything back to zero and then fix any issues that arose with all the time we had in the cycle. In summary...
How Consistent Animation Speeds Affect Gameplay: Visual +15, Exploits -22, Realism +10

After removing all of these and finding some success in the way the game played, we figured we would go a bit bigger than just a few animation changes...so next we looked at pass speed and overall game speed.  

-- Pass Speed --
Pass speed was something that was actually quite a bit over the top in previous years...did you know a typical bullet pass exceeded 77 mph in our game?! In Madden NFL 09, not only did every QB throw a similar bullet pass in mph regardless of their rating, but also every QB also threw "mini-punts" instead of touch passes (even on short and intermediate routes) due to the high speed of the ball upon release. Realistically, we can all agree that Brett Favre in his prime probably had the most zip on his passes, and he's been clocked around 65-70 mph (from what I saw on ESPN). So we brought the max mph down to 70 mph (for a 99 Throw Power guy in perfect weather), and also brought the minimum speed down as well so we could scale down the 'curve' of how the ratings affect the pass. Now for Madden NFL 10 you will see much more obvious disparity between throw power ratings, and also you will see much more "touch" on passes on shorter routes instead of record-setting hang time on lobs (see below).

How It Affects Gameplay: Disparity between QB's +10, Touch Passes + 22, Realism +10

-- Overall Game Speed --
After all of above changes were made, we all really were enjoying the way the game started to feel. It was much more realistic...and gave off a much less 'frantic' feel (if that makes sense). We had one more big area to tackle though - and that was GLOBAL game speed. While playing Madden NFL 09, often times you may have felt like the result of the play was "scripted"...everything happened so fast that it was often very difficult to have an influence on the outcome of the play.  On running plays, holes closed up immediately.  On passing plays, defensive backs came out of nowhere to deflect a pass. For Madden NFL 10 we knew that we all preferred a slower game - one that felt more 'sim' and more realistic.  But this is often a hotly contested topic. This poll proves that people never can seem to agree on game speed. So what did we do? Well first we decided to decrease the game speed by 5% overall. As subtle as that change to game speed may sound, it has drastically improved the overall control of the game.  It is definitely easier to identify the hole created by the offensive line. Scanning the field as routes develop make it easier to keep passes out of harm's way. But we know that not everyone wants that style, so we also included a GAME SPEED SLIDER. Finally right? :)
How Game Speed Changes (+ a Slider) Affects Gameplay: Control +7, Realism +10, Customization +7

-- Ratings Changes --
After Donny re-rated every player in the speed rating, and we had tuned our speed curves to truly make our game showcase the differences between the players, we were feeling pretty damn good. Being that speed was our biggest concern though, we wanted to check our sanity and tested some different player ratings and how fast each player (in a specific rating range) ran 40 yards in our game. These results will probably surprise you...they sure did us:


D'oh! Looks like we went a little too far! I think we can all agree that we won't be seeing too many folks running a 7.8 second 40 yard dash (video game developers might have those times, but not NFL athletes). This immediately brings to light the very real clash that can exist between fun and realism in sports games. We thought we were dead on - we thought the game felt great, was fun to play, and was really showcasing the differences between players. But when you look at the numbers, it is obvious that doing something that you feel makes the game more fun to play can differ quite greatly from a full realistic simulation. So what do we do? Well, first, we can't break our mantra...again, we're all for realism and authenticity in Madden NFL 10. But also we realize that we're making a game for millions of people, most of which are focused on a fun yet competitive experience, and many of them could probably care less about realistic 40 times. So what's our solution? Read on...

Within minutes of seeing these results, we knew right away that we needed to be able to tune the "speed difference" independently, and tune it per skill level. So our engineers built a nice system for us where we can compress this range however much we see fit, and also set the defaults for each skill level as well. You will see below that a good way to make Pro and Rookie difficulties a little easier is to spreads the ranges of speeds out, while on All-Pro / All-Madden we want to emulate real life as much as possible. We want you to boot up and say hello to Sundays in the NFL.

These numbers are very subject to change, but here's an example of the speed ranges based on the skill level:

NOTE: To be ultra clear, this is NOT the scale we use to determine the speed rating of a player! This showcases how fast a player runs 40 yards currently in our game based on the rating that he is given. Donny determines the actual speed ratings of the players based on many different factors...not just the 40 time of a player.

We also realized that you, the loyal Madden gamer, may not agree with these numbers. Many may believe that speeds should always be a constant, and difficulty should be handled in other ways (I sort of straddle that line myself). But to address everyone's concerns, we just went ahead and exposed our tuning values into a "speed differential" slider into gameplay settings. If you want to play on Pro mode but want all of the players to have more realistic speeds, you can do so. If you want to play on All-Madden but want the really fast players to truly feel faster than everyone else, you can do that as well. That way hopefully everyone can be happy. :)
How Realistic Player Speeds Affect Gameplay: Overall Gameplay + 10

So, that's it for this week! Whew.

In summary:

• Removal of arbitrary animation speed alterations; solve bugs the 'right' way
• All new QB drop animations
• Lowered pass speeds globally, fixed "moon ball" trajectory
• Lowered global game speed + added game speed slider
• New slider for "speed difference" to squish or expand the range of speeds among all players; used the ratings ranges for player speeds

Next week we will continue this topic a little deeper and talk about a topic that is very important to our team - player locomotion, momentum, direction changes, and turn rates. These aspects are CORE to making a realistic football game, and they also can easily make your game feel way too sluggish or way too twitchy if implemented incorrectly. I'm hoping to also talk about 'suction' in interactions and 'warping' on catches in that blog as well, but those areas are still very much in progress in development so I may wait a while.

 In the meantime, we'd love to hear your feedback. Feel free to post in the comments and let us know what you think.

- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10