Welcome back Madden faithful, it’s Monday and that means it’s time for another blog! This week we wanted to go into some depth about a new feature you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10: our revamped injury system. Hopefully this new addition is just one (of many) that continues to prove that we are focused on delivering an authentic NFL experience to our fans – and that while we are still ensuring to innovate in every single iteration, that innovation has to come inside of what’s core to NFL simulation football. As we said in our [mission statement] way back in January, we aren’t about gimmicks, we are here to create an authentic representation of the sport. “Everything You See On Sunday, See It In Madden NFL”…injuries are a major part of that.
Along with the obvious concern for the well-being of the athlete, there are also typically very major ramifications to the team when a player gets hurt. How serious is the injury? Can the player continue to play hurt even with the risk of re-injury? How well can his backup fill in if he is out? How will the team adjust to continue without him? Will their opponent exploit the loss of the starter? We wanted to emulate all of this strategy, suspense, and emotion behind injuries in Madden NFL 10.
A Look Back
As a design team, we had many different priorities to juggle this year, and countless features and additions that we wanted to add to the game. Overhauling our injury system however rose to the top of our list quite quickly because it was an area that was 100% core to what you see on Sundays, yet it hadn’t accurately been represented in Madden’s history (especially on 360/PS3).
At the start of next-gen, the injury system was changed to be more of a futuristic approach…a system that could immediately diagnose injuries in real-time including a stylized X-ray of the injury. There was a lot of flash and presentation value to this in the very first concept video, and that was also carried over into the product from Madden NFL 06-09. Below is a shot from the concept video:
And here is a shot from Madden NFL 09:
As we looked to overhaul the system, we all agreed this was the very first thing that we had to change. Though the x-ray concept was cool, the suspense on finding out how badly a player is hurt or not, and if he can return to play, is key to conveying some emotion in our game. So when designing the new system, we chose to notify the gamer via banners, player animations, and commentary. Trainers are brand new to Madden NFL 10, so you can see them run out to take care of a guy if he needs assistance in getting off the field. We also made sure to delay the real result for a couple of plays while the player is evaluated:
Doing that was easy enough, but we weren’t quite satisfied. We wanted to really put some real NFL-level pressure on you the gamer by emulating the tough decision a coach has to make after a player is injured. Do you keep him in or replace him with the backup? Now, after an injury has been diagnosed, you are presented with a tough decision on who to keep in the game. To help you make the decision, we put the risk of re-injury on the screen as well as the ‘effective overall rating’ of the injured player based on him playing hurt so you can compare that to the backup that would replace him.
Yep, there is a known bug on this screen with the dual tickers...it's being fixed. :)
For every single injury type and severity in our game (of which there are nearly 100), we dynamically adjust the ratings after the injury occurs. So a shoulder injury can affect things like Throwing Power, Throwing Accuracy, or Stiff Arm ratings, an ankle injury can make it so a player’s juke animations are different and less effective, and a hamstring injury can even affect Speed and Acceleration. Each injury modifies these independently, so more severe injuries obviously negatively impact the ratings at a much larger rate – meaning a bruised shoulder won’t do as much damage to your player’s ratings as a separated shoulder. We also set the re-injury risk independently on each injury – meaning knee injuries have a much higher risk of more severe progression, moreso than something like a finger or rib…typically with those areas once you’re hurt, you’re hurt…it won’t get all that much worse.
Depending on all these factors, you have to make the tough call. Sometimes the decisions are easy – say Tomlinson tweaks an ankle or a knee or something, you can feel pretty confident putting Sproles in without having too much of a drop off. However if Manning takes a bad shot and ends up with an injured throwing shoulder, you might need him to get you the win because the disparity between him and Sorgi is so big. With our new stretched out ratings, this makes this decision that much more important, and also makes managing the depth of your team during Franchise mode a real strategic element that can’t be ignored.
So we have had the ability for players to play hurt in the past, but it was really a low risk proposition – there was just a minor chance of him getting re-injured. And if a re-injury occurred, it was still a pretty random selection to the next more severe injury. You could have a bruised knee and keep playing, and then get a broken rib as the re-injury that puts you out of the game. We wanted to build a more progressive system so players were re-injured in an intelligent manner. Injuries now will be progressive, something like: Bruised Knee -> Sprained Knee -> Partially Torn PCL -> Fully Torn PCL -> Fully Torn PCL and ACL. We also wanted to make sure that something would have to actually ‘trigger’ the re-injury. In the old systems, you could have your running back chip a lineman and look fine and then all of a sudden his ACL was blown out.
We really wanted to make sure that we did implement a true risk-reward system. If you are putting your guy out there on a bum knee, we want you to feel nervous in doing so. So we made sure that real-life actions that could cause an injury, were the true catalysts for a re-injury. For example, if you have kept your running back in the game with a sprained knee, you don’t want to be doing crazy jukes and spins all over the place because he could just plant wrong and get severely injured. You want to take care and use him sparingly - get the best out of him but not risk losing him for the long term. I wanted to show this in full, but it was just taking me a long time to trigger in game (due to the rarity). To show it off I just included the motion capture video of our actors doing their best "I just blew my knee out" impression that we can play if a guy ends up cutting too hard and re-injuring himself (we picked the guy on the right obviously):
Some other details we added:
- Injuries occur more often on special teams plays
- Injury slider was added so anyone can tune to their liking
- Re-injury risk is increased for online and play now (since people won’t have to worry about long term injuries, we still wanted to add a risk to playing with someone that’s hurt)
- Recreated nearly every single injury type, replacing unrealistic legacy injuries like “bursitis” and “dehydration” with new ones.
- There’s finally an injury cart!
Well that’s it for our new injury system. In summary:
1. Injury status / severity is delayed instead of immediate for more suspense and realism
2. All new animations with trainers and injury carts are shown
3. You are automatically prompted to let injured players play hurt (when applicable) or sub in the backup
4. Players playing hurt have their ratings negatively affected (based on the severity of the injury)
5. Players playing hurt have a (logical) risk of re-injury
6. Players show that they are hurt with in-game injury animations like limping
7. Re-injuries happen realistically instead of randomly.
We are really happy with this feature because it has added a whole new strategic element to Madden that hasn’t been there before. It also really helps convey the emotion and suspense of the NFL better in our game. If you have any feedback, please post away in the comments section or [here] in the forums.
- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10