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

Hey guys, we thought it would be a perfect time to share something that I am personally very excited about for Madden NFL 10.   We took each and every rating in the game (over 50+ player ratings) and scaled them up/down in a way that is now using much more of the scale.  I like to describe it around the office like this…”We basically stretched out the ratings.”  We want to use more of the numbers so we get a bigger, more noticeable affect in the game.

Let me give you guys an example….in Madden NFL 09 all of the WR’s Route Running ratings ranged from 62-99.  In the current Madden NFL 10 build, WR’s now check in from 35-99.  To counter this on the defensive side, all CB’s in Madden NFL 09 had a Man Coverage rating which ranged from 64-99.  Now in Madden NFL 10, CB’s Man Coverage range is currently 40-99. 

Every position and every rating has been re-scaled to expand the range of numbers we are dealing with.  The Overall Rating for your average NFL player has dropped.   Your Joe Average linebacker who was 80 OVR is now dropped down to 70.  The players who were before right on the cusp of 90 in a rating category are now down around 85-88…Meaning, there are fewer superstar players out there.  Before, where you could maybe get by throwing to your slot WR who had 93 SPD, with 74 ROUTES, and 77 Catching…now in Madden NFL 10, that guy is going to have like 91 SPD, 60-65 ROUTES and anywhere from 65-70 Catching.  Let me tell you, these rating drops make a big difference when that slot rookie WR with 90+ speed now drops every 3rd pass or so, or just simply cannot get open.

The superstars have not been affected however, this is intentional.  Peyton is still 99 OVR, Patrick Willis a 99, Larry Fitz is 99, etc.  The elite players at rating categories have not been affected either (JaMarcus Russell still has a 98 Throw Power and Chris Johnson still rated 99 Speed).   [Side note: One of my personal goals is to have the actual NFL players in Madden NFL 10 look like their real-life counterparts and play to their strengths and weaknesses like never before in a football video game.]

Speaking of the Speed, which is always a hot topic, we made some major changes with the infamous SPD rating as well.  To give you a great example, I will again go back to WR and CB.  In Madden NFL 09, the WR SPD range was 85-100…CB was 87-99.

In Madden NFL 10, WR SPD range is currently 70-100…CB is currently 75-99.  So as you may or may not tell, the SPD range has been pushed down, in our opinions, to better reflect the “sim-gameplay” style that Ian and Phil have been telling you about all winter long.  This SPD change has been updated for each position, so it makes a huge game play affect.

Ian and I had a game the other day where Earnest Graham broke one up the middle for a 55 yard touchdown run… and he could not be caught!…E-Grahams’ Madden NFL 10 current SPD rating….80 SPD.  That should give you a good sense of what is possible with the new ratings.  It’s not all about having the 90+ SPD anymore.  On this particular run, Ian’s CB’s got hung up against some blockers and all I had to do was beat one safety and Graham was gone!  He had Brandon Jacobs and his 85 SPD breaking some long runs as well.   On the flip side of bigger/slower backs, Chris Johnson is absolutely lethal right now.  You can actually get him outside with sweeps now and he is a beast to stop.  But again, we are constantly tuning the gameplay, we have an entire team dedicated to that and they are some of the best people we have in the building. 

So there you have it, player ratings are in for a major overhaul this year and I am really excited already with the impact they are having on the early builds of the game.  And rest assured, we are well aware of the outside impacts this will have….Rookies will now come into the league based on the new ranges, NCAA Import guys are being tuned as well…Progression has been accounted for as well to better reflect breakout stars and burned-out former stars.  Meaning, we want to have bigger jumps in OVR this year, both positive and negative.  That’s all for now, probably gave away too much already!

Would love to hear any feedback about this big new change in the way we do player ratings.  I’d be happy to answer any questions regarding the new rating ranges….please no individual ratings questions, not answering those!   Stay tuned for more Madden player rating related blogs in the future!


- Donny Moore – Madden NFL 10 Designer

Hey Madden fans, we’re back again with another (quick) update for Madden NFL 10. After talking about technology and philosophy for the past few weeks, we thought it was a good idea to actually show you a new feature this week. Now being that it’s so early in the year, we obviously can’t show big grandiose new features, so we wanted to show something that is in the game that came directly from community feedback and wishlists. It’s been a long time coming for this one...I’m stoked that we were finally able to get this in.

Our screens are in a very rough phase right now but we figured it’s no big deal to show you this screenshot to give away the new feature. I’m sure you’ll notice it right away.

-Ian

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

...(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