Hey Madden fans! It's been a little while since we dropped a post here on the blog, but we wanted to use this opportunity to answer a bunch of the most asked questions that have been showing up on forums, twitter, etc.

We thought we'd try something new though and do the FAQ in video form. It just made it more personal. :)

Some key points before you watch:

- The first title update was completed before the game shipped (in case you are wondering why certain issues didn't make it in)
- We're hard at work on the second title update, focusing primarily on various aspects of gameplay
- We're going to continue to make more of these FAQ videos.

Enjoy! If you have any questions of your own, please drop them here: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/forums/show/3724.page

UPDATE: Here's a transcription, thanks to bgdave39 on OperationSports:

1) What is the first title update?

• Added Super Bowl and Playoff Field conditions for Online Franchise
• Fixed False Start Grieving issues with Online games
• Fixed video player issue where video would hang on latent connections
• Improved uploaded highlight quality
• Switched ranked online games to 7 min Q's
• Fixed random stability issues
• Added Broadcast Cam!

Gameplay Specific fixes:

• Tuned slider effectiveness (Run blocking and broken tackles esp.)
• Changes run blocking slider to not effect special teams
• Made fatigue effect ratings more
• Fixed WR release to where receivers release to both sides
• Fixed incorrect spotting on punts out of bounds
• Reduced/removed holding on kicking plays
• Improved toe drag catch logic
• Improved pursuit angles for outside running plays
• Fixed defenders in pursuit running away from O-Line
• Better play recognition in man coverage
• Fixed double pass online exploit

2) When is the title update coming out?
It is up for approval from MS and Sony, expecting approval this week, and release next week but it's in the hands of third party at this point.

3) What is being done to stop the effectiveness of passes to the flats?
Hoping to adress this in second title update

4) What being done to improve blocking?
We are looking at this issue and hope to find some fixes for title update #2

5) What's being done to fix the replay cutoffs on highlights?
Will be fixed in title update #2.

6) What's being done to improve the accuracy of simulkated franchise stats?
Working to decrease QB yardage and increase RB TD's. Hoping to get this into title update #2.

7) Are there any plans to fix the effectiveness of the PA Qb draw?
We plan to release a video showing ways to contain this play. We don't feel like it's a money play and releasing a counter via video will go a long way towards containing it.

8) Any plans to change pursuit for cpu defenders?
Looking to address in 2nd title update

9) Pursuit for offensive players?
Next roster update will have increased pursuit angles for offensive players that should cut back on defensive TD's.

10) Any plans to get stadium specific sounds working correctly?
We are currently looking at this and hope to get the fix into the 2nd title update as well.

11) Are you working to adding more features to online franchise such as salary cap, contracts, etc?
Absolutely but it won't be soon due to the complexity of the matter.

12) Are their plans to add sliders for online games and online franchise?
Not for Madden 10, will be looking at adding it for Madden 11 though.

13) Any plans to add more auto replays?
Currently working on and trying to get in for 2nd title update

14) Why isn't the ability to choose what you want to challenge?
Priority for this is low since real NFL refs would look to correct more than just what was specifically challenged by the coach.

15) Why so many restriction on Wildcat formation?
We tried to limit exploits by limiting some of the things you are able to do in normal plays. No plans to unlock the formation fully for offline.

16) Why is it so hard to get sacks against the CPU?
Lame duck throws have drastically released sacks since the QB can throw out. We are looking at ways to increase sacks.

- Ian Cummings
Creative Director, Madden NFL 10

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

Hello Madden faithful - it's Monday, and it’s time for another blog! This week we'll be following up a little bit on the last PRO-TAK blog [link]. We covered gang tackling in detail last time, so for this blog we thought we’d dig a little deeper on our pass blocking, and also mention how PRO-TAK’s dynamic steering technology will help take our blocking a little bit farther into that next level that we know we need to hit of realism. At the top of nearly every community wish list for the past 3+ years has been OL/DL interaction…so this year we’re proud to say we’ve spent a really good amount of time improving this area, and we’ve also built a strong foundation that we can continue to add on to in the future.

A look back
Before we dig too far into the details of our blocking improvements, let’s take a look at previous blocking systems within football games. For this purpose, we’ll look at both the Madden NFL and the 2K series.

Madden NFL
Madden’s blocking system has typically always been based around quick looping animations to enhance user control. A quick looping/hand-fighting animation plays quickly (sometimes less than a second), and during that time the game checks to see if a special move should be tried, or if either player should move forward or backward, or if either player should disengage for any reason, or possibly if the animation should just continue to loop. The bonus of a system like this is that it can be typically very responsive. If you hit a button, it responds rather quickly and a new animation can start. If a ball carrier bounces his run outside after a block animation has started, the defender can break off of his blocker quickly and not get stuck in an animation for too long. Example video from Madden NFL 09:

The main drawback though is that you get very little movement in the animations. You can’t consistently form a pocket when players are playing a multitude of animations back-to-back-to-back. So, when a win/loss decision (that contains randomness) is being made 50 times per play, your level of predictability and consistency in the system is very sub-par. In real life, we all know that even an average defensive lineman has a chance to get past an all-pro offensive lineman (albeit small), but if we put that kind of percentage into our logic, the animation selection can end up being inconsistent since it’s checking to see who’s winning so often.

2K
We all definitely agree that the 2K series did a good job focusing on blocking in their iterations. They had true pocket forming, good motion capture, and good AI. 2K was actually a great visual target we were looking to reach when designing our system for this year. For typical blocking situations, they implemented much longer animations (instead of short looping ones), and this helped their visual quality quite a bit. I don't have a full video of their good stuff...but believe me we think they did a really good job.

Their system also had a drawback though, (which is typically always the negative with using long animation clips) since the user and CPU, in essence, lost control during animation playback. When an animation started playing, the AI really couldn’t update or change it, so you’d see situations where defenders engaged with blockers play really long animations the end up taking themselves well out of the play because they can’t recognize that someone ran past him:

After looking at the best aspects of both games extensively, we set out designing some of the things we wanted out of our new system. We scrapped a lot of our logic (and nearly all of our animations for players getting engaged) for both run blocking and pass blocking. For run blocking, we wanted players flowing the play much better, especially on outside runs, and for pass plays, we wanted the real pocket forming. But we knew that we needed to combine the best of both worlds, taking the positives of each system and limiting the ‘negatives’. We wanted you the gamer to still feel like you were in control, but also wanted much better visual quality and realism. We knew that implementing much longer animations was key, but we also knew that the players in those animations had to be ‘informed’ to what was going on around them. We came up with two new solutions to solve these issues:

1.    Branch Windows
A quick explanation of a branch window: a specific duration of time during the playback of an animation when another animation can be triggered. In Madden NFL 09, we added branch windows to all of our tackles - as something that has been referred to the “Breakout Engine” (by our marketing partners) to our tackling. These branch windows allowed you to dynamically break out of tackle animations after they had already started. IMO this has been one of those subtle forever-game-changing features, mainly because I find myself trying it when I play other games, and I miss it if it’s not there. To me that’s usually the signal of a gameplay mechanic being a real success...something like the hit stick is also in that same category…you don’t know how you lived without it once you play with it. Anyways, we brought this same technology over to our blocking animations for Madden NFL 10...so now for every single engaged blocking animation, you can use the right stick to pick a direction to try and break off of the block while it’s in progress. With us adding long animations for visual quality while still retaining the goal of keeping the animations ‘informed’, we had to make sure that they could be interrupted, whether it’s to put your hands up to knock down a pass or to spin inside off of a lineman after you’ve driven him outside.

Something different about blocks though that tackles don't have is that there are actually two branch windows. There is one branch window at the beginning before you get engaged…this was key to make sure that you could keep your hands out and get away from a guy before getting ‘engaged’. This is typically where the elite defensive linemen can cause havoc and put immediate pressure on the quarterback or running back by getting in really quickly. The second branch window is much longer (it lasts the duration of the main section of the block animation) and this is where you can perform your standard special moves. Using special moves in this branch window creates those moments you see every Sunday - examples like a defensive end looping around to form the pocket and then dynamically "branching" off of his block to get to the quarterback (so you don't have those situations where the defender doesn't seem aware of his surroundings). Here are some perfect examples of the branch windows in action - showcasing a defensive lineman being able to break out of his animation early to make a play:

2.    PRO-TAK Steering and Manipulation
The next piece in our puzzle was a big one, and that was applying the PRO-TAK technology to the blocking animations. Again looking back at those 2K examples, we didn’t want the case where defenders would go right past the ball without recognizing it. You can’t necessarily capture just a ton more animations for each situation either, because the movement of the QB or running back is totally dynamic, and obviously can change drastically after the blocking animation has already started. So the steering technology used in the PRO-TAK gang tackles was re-purposed for these animations…allowing us to procedurally manipulate these animations and move them to the target based on the ratings of the players involved. In layman’s terms, this means that a strong defender can push a blocker right into the face of the ball carrier, or a blocker can steer a defender wide of his target, and the exact same animation can be used. I showed this video last week but I’ll show it again as it showcases how the exact same animation can be dynamically manipulated based on the circumstances of the game:

We are looking forward to showing more blocking improvements (especially in run blocking) in the coming weeks as it gets more finely tuned. Hopefully this shows a good start and the positive direction that our blocking is moving in. Creating real life blocking AI in a football game is obviously an extremely complex matter, but we think  the system we have implemented is a great foundation for us to build on for the future. Feel free to post in the comments section below, or put your ideas or suggestions in the forums.

- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10

Welcome back to another Monday blog Madden fans! Talk about an eventful couple of weeks in Madden-land…our first Season Preview event on Thursday 4/24, our cover athletes revealed on Friday 4/25 (including a cool guest appearance by Larry Fitzgerald on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), the NFL Draft, and last week we even released  a blog on the Wildcat formation. We’re hard at work trying to finish the game while still balancing our media release schedule, so with this week’s blog, it seemed like a good opportunity to dive deeper into one of our most important gameplay features for the year: PRO-TAK.

What is PRO-TAK?
PRO-TAK (which stands for procedural tackling) is a new animation technology for us, built as a custom animation system to sit above our motion captured animations and procedurally manipulate them as the game runs. “Why?” you may ask? It’s simple really…motion captured animations playing back ‘as is’ can limit the amount of control you as the gamer has while playing the game. In order to truly match the look of the NFL, motion captured animation is still the answer to stay authentic and be realistic. But you can only fit so many animations in the game because of the memory limitations of the hardware. So knowing all that, we knew the way for us to truly build dynamic and fun NFL gameplay was to use a mixture of run-time manipulation and motion capture. This approach can make one animation look totally different every time you see it, while still retaining an authentic look that can be controlled artistically. Why not go 100% procedural you may ask? Moving to a full runtime solution and getting rid of motion capture (like a Havok physics system for example) means handing over full control of your visuals to your code (and away from your artists)…which to us is not an acceptable approach being that we are tasked with creating a true NFL simulation.

At its core, PRO-TAK is actually a collection of a few animation technologies. Though it stands for ‘procedural tackling’, we were able to create some new features sharing the technology (that we are also putting under the can PRO-TAK umbrella):
1.    Dynamic gang tackling: New never-before-seen tackling engine in a video game that allows up to 9 players to be involved in a tackle – including offensive and defensive players pushing the pile forward / backward.
2.    Steerable tackles: Dynamically manipulating tackle animations based on player ratings means the difference between a first down or a punt.
3.    All new OL/DL Interaction system: With steerable and branch-able animation technology, we can now create a true dynamic pocket around the QB as well as a true “flow” to the ball on run plays.
4.    QB avoidance: Branch-able animation technology allows for QB’s to shift around the pocket as well as break out of sack animations after they have already started.
5.    Fight for the fumble: Dynamic fumble pileups allow possession to change hands while at the bottom of the pile.

Throughout the year we will go into more detail on each of these aspects to PRO-TAK, but this week we wanted to dig deeper into the new gang tackling and how it plays out in Madden NFL 10. With our theme this year of “Fight for Every Yard”, we had a few goals for tackling early on in the cycle:
•    In real life, a defense playing against a big bruising player (like Brandon Jacobs) often will need upwards of 2, 3, or 4 defenders to bring him down. These players need to be able to fight for extra yardage at all times - we wanted the bigger stronger players to be relevant in Madden like they are in real life. Speed is not the only factor for success in the NFL; it shouldn’t be in Madden either.
•    A shifty / smaller player (like a Chris Johnson) should not need large numbers of defenders to be brought down
•    Yardage outcome should be dynamically determined by the ratings and weights of the players involved in the gang tackles. This was the key detail for us to make sure things were procedurally driven – the animations need to be manipulated during the animation playback.
•    Defenders with high ‘hit power’ ratings should be able to “hit stick” a tackle – meaning they should be able to dramatically alter a tackle in progress by pushing it in another direction.
•    Offensive players should sometimes have the ability to push a tackle forward for extra yards
•    Good defensive players (and teams) should swarm to the ball - adding on to the ballcarrier dynamically to ensure him not getting extra yards
•    User controlled and CPU players should have the exact same abilities

So with these goals in mind, I wanted to let our animation director, Simon Sherr, talk about the features of this new system and how it all started.

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When I moved here from EA Canada nearly two years ago, right before starting work on Madden NFL 09, Ian Cummings gave me a goal to reach for.  On my first day at Tiburon he asked “do you think you can solve gang tackling?” Ian always says “I want this game to look like football, not a football video game”. Very nice of Ian that the very first thing on the list I was challenged with was trying to solve a problem that no one had solved in a football video game (well, any video game) before. :)  Sure there are many things missing from video game football to 100% recreate the sport accurately, but arguably the most important (and obvious), is that tackling is a team sport.

Well, how do you gang tackle?  It was clear at that point that in order to have a solution for this, we were going to have to take what I like to call a “nuke and pave” approach with our tackling engine, and do something with a foundation built around the idea.   The plan for gang tackling was hatched and prototyped over the next few months, and from there, a design for a totally new tackling engine emerged. 

One of the major challenges of working on a game like Madden NFL (and most sports games for that matter) is that we release them yearly, this means that anything that needs to be done to benefit the game needs to be fit into our year over year cycle.  We don’t have the 2-7 years action games get to do massive innovation, so we need tools that let us build on each other, and that is exactly where EA Sports has gotten. All our games steal technology from each other for the EA Sports engine called “ANT”.  However, when we do something no one has done before (like PRO-TAK) which will take more than a year, what that means for our development team is that work must be broken up into chunks that give YOU (our customers) something every year.  Last year we gave you the breakout system (the ability to break out of tackles) as well as a much more predictable, much smoother, and more refined experience when it comes to tackling, but it was a piece of a much larger picture, which you will see this year in a video game first, a true gang tackling system.  This was spear-headed by some very talented engineers on our team (especially James "Superman" Sweeney) – folks that have been working tirelessly on this system with the goal of revamping the way multi-character interactions can work in Madden (and eventually all EA games).

The first thing that Ian gave us was reference. We knew it was going to be extremely tough to match the visual targets perfectly, but we wanted to do as much as we could in one cycle to lay the foundation for the future. Here is a perfect example video of what we were looking to emulate:

We then built the bread and butter feature to PRO-TAK – which is what we’ve been calling “N-Man Gang tackling” internally. As the name indicates, we can now have a large number of players add on to a tackle once it is already playing. This includes adding on and pushing the tackle in any direction procedurally, and also even if you are powerful enough, immediately knocking everyone over.  There is nothing like having nearly half the players on the field involved in a tackle…it’s something that really does change the game.  One extra request from Ian and the design team was that we also allowed offensive players to push the guys forward if applicable. This again adds to the ‘game-changing’ moments…you may be tied up fighting at the goal line with no chance at scoring and here comes big Jon Runyan to push everyone into the endzone…it’s a really cool feeling.

So I wanted to show you two quick video examples of PRO-TAK gang tackling. Keep in mind this is very much in progress and we have plenty of work to do to finish this out from tuning to blending to animation. Regardless, I think you can see that even in rough form this system is going to help change the way the game is played forever. Here is Brandon Jacobs carrying a few Cowboys for some extra yards (PS we know the numbers on their shoulders are broken), but having his forward progress stopped right at the end and pushed backwards.

And here is the swarming Ravens defense making sure that Lendale White will not “Fight For Every Yard”.

Keeping with the spirit of the breakout system from 09, we extended the ball-carrier’s ability to break out of tackles so that you can even shed these large gang tackles… This means as a ball carrier you can seek the daylight and “fight for every yard” by breaking out of this large mass of defenders. Now don’t panic, it isn’t going to be an easy thing to do (as this happens maybe only a few times per season in the NFL), but we did want to make sure it was possible to shed multiple tacklers with a skilled back, especially if you can find a direction to sneak out of that doesn’t have a defender trying to hang on and bring you to the ground. This was our visual target - a slippery Steve Smith breaking out of the clutches of quite a few defenders:

“Steering” the tackles is another huge aspect to gang tackling and PRO-TAK in general. When a defender and ballcarrier collide, we not only take into account their mass and ratings (like trucking or hit power or what have you), but also their previous velocities and impact angle to manipulate the hit after impact. This allows the ratings and the real momentum of the tackle to have a bigger role in where a player ends up after he is hit. This also means that a defender “knows” to try and keep players out of the endzone or sideline or first down marker - our runtime code can manipulate the playback of the animation accordingly to steer it in the desired direction. Accounting for all players’ momentum leading into the impact, and following those physics calculations through into the tackles (and the falls), means that tackles are no longer out of control pre-canned motion capture…they can be driven and moved all over the place. We wanted you to have to fight for every yard, and we can now more easily ensure that sure you do. This was a huge help for us as we worked on re-vamping blocking this year, as we were able to use this technology to dynamically form our pocket. Here’s an example of the same exact blocking animation in ANT with drastically different results based on dynamic procedural ‘steering’:

One of the most dramatic (and fun) gameplay features for me personally, is being on defense.  What PRO-TAK gang tackling allows is that as a gamer I can now add-on to an existing tackle before the knees hit the ground (and even after that as well…more on that later) to nearly ALWAYS change the result of the play.  An extremely rewarding action is to wrap up a ballcarrier with one tackler (say a cornerback), then switch off to a linebacker, run over, and deliver a crushing hit stick on the ballcarrier to clean up the play.  In general what I love about this feature is hearing from everyone that “it just looks like football”.  But even more important than the visual fidelity, we also deliver an experience that allows YOU to make the play far more often.

Well Madden fans, that’s it for this week’s blog and hopefully some good info on how PRO-TAK has allowed us to never before seen moments in a football game. We look forward to hearing what you think – post away in the comments section below or put your ideas or suggestions in the forums [here].

- Simon Sherr (and Ian Cummings)
Madden NFL 10

Hello Madden fans, welcome back for another Monday Madden NFL 10 blog from the development team. It has been a very busy couple of weeks, including the release of 3 (real) blogs in 2 weeks:

- Adaptive AI in Madden NFL 10 [link]
- A first look at Franchise mode improvements [link]
- Using layered blending, dynamic branching, and animation steering for sideline catches [link]

Since we just released a new (rather large) feature on Friday in Adaptive AI, I figured I’d use today’s blog to go over something that we as a team are all extremely happy about, which is the Madden team’s first ever “Community QA Day”.

On April 10, we flew in 8 of the most hardcore Madden fans for a marathon testing day to get an extremely early look at our Alpha build and provide feedback based on where the game is thus far. You may ask, “What is new about this? Haven’t you had community events in the past?” Yes, we have done these before, but there are some key differences.

1. Previous community days usually took place around a week or two before the game was set to go ‘gold’. This meant we could show a typically much more polished game, but on the downside it meant that there was very little time to make any changes. A quick google search reminded me that last year’s 09 community event took place on May 30, 2008 (http://www.pastapadre.com/2643/live-blog-madden-09), as opposed to this year’s event on April 10 (nearly 7 full weeks earlier!). This gives us so much more time to address feedback on our new features and on existing features. As far as I know, we’ve NEVER had anyone have a hands-on this early in the process…it’s quite a refreshing change.
2. This year Phil Frazier and I actually hand-picked 8 community members off of OperationSports.com based solely on the quality of their posts. None of them had ever been to the Tiburon studio before, and as far as I know, none of them had even really see an early build of Madden (or really any game for that matter). We decided to change this up because we knew the guys we picked were very critical but also typically every single post was well thought out. Many of these guys have been known around the Madden and 2k communities for years and years. Previous community days typically featured more “community leaders” – the guys that ran sites. Not to say that those guys weren’t providing feedback, because they obviously always did get us some amazing stuff, but we wanted to try something new and get the guys that we thought were extremely critical and had in depth knowledge of our former competitor’s products as well.

I think without a doubt the day overall was a huge success. We collected mountains of incredible feedback, from incorrect facemasks to a few money plays to logic issues with blocking. I kept referring to these guys as the ‘dream team of testers’, and they delivered for us big time.
The rough agenda was as follows: 
   10:00 – 11:00 – Introductions, expectations, “creative pitch”
   11:00 – 2:00 – Franchise play (play or sim…whichever you prefer)
   2:00 – 3:00 – “The Lab” (Focus: General Gameplay and AI Feedback in practice mode).
   3:00 – 4:00 – Tour, Roundtable / Q & A
   4:00 – Whenever you want to leave – Multiplayer or games vs. CPU

At the beginning of the day, we had each attendee give a brief intro about themselves as we went around the room, and as they talked I brought up one of their most critical posts that they’d ever made of EA. When it got around to TheWatcher, he even brought out a version of NFL 2k5 and said “if you can’t beat this, I’m going to be playing this at the end of the night” which got a nice laugh from everyone, including us. He never did play 2k5, but unfortunately our dev kits don’t play retail games anyway so I can’t say for sure whether he was converted. :)

Next I actually presented the group a trimmed-down version of our “creative pitch” – the actual presentation Phil and I give to folks like Peter Moore and other executives within EA to get our game concept approved. After giving them the basic rundown, we then let them loose on the game along with an accompanying “feature companion document” that listed nearly every major and minor feature along with an “intent” of each feature. This way they could go through the game how they pleased and provide feedback on whether they felt we were hitting the intent of our design or not. For example, this would be a page in their companion document, and below that is a shot of just a few of the sheets I received back at the end of the day:

Feature: Simulation Gameplay Overhaul
Intent: To make the game play much more realistically through the following features:
- Slower game speed
- Stretched player ratings
- Dramatically changed turn rates
- Direction change animations
- Momentum & prep steps while sprinting
- Different jukes & spins while sprinting
- Lower “tolerance” amount on tackles and blocks (much less suction)
- Much lower ‘warp’ amount on catch animations
- Normalized speed on all animations
- Forced QB dropbacks

Just some of the feedback on the feature companion sheets sitting on my laptop.

After the guys had their hands on the game for about 6 hours, we had a little break and gave a quick tour of the studio. Our final destination of the tour was our main conference room:

The big conference room on the 5th floor of the EA Sports Tiburon building

At this point we all sat down and had a roundtable on the top positives and minuses they were seeing so far. Everyone had the ability to basically list out their “game killers” – the issues that they felt were absolutely most hampering the game. I sat there with our mindmap software and took notes, so here’s a small snippet of that feedback:

You can see we have plenty of feedback to work from and some great stuff here from our hardcore fans. Often times it is very easy to get used to things after you stare at them for so long, so having this kind of in depth feedback from a fresh set of eyes (well, 8 fresh sets) is going to prove immensely helpful in us reaching our goal of the best version of Madden NFL football in history.

On a side note, just so everyone knows, the guys didn’t end up leaving until 4:00 am!

So to sum up – again I think all can agree that it was a very positive experience, and I personally believe this one day community event is one of the most important things we have ever done within the Madden franchise to create a quality product. The sheer amount of feedback on every single detail on our early build is going to be instrumental for us to keep the polish level high. We as a team have always believed that staying in constant communication with your customers is the best approach to making an iterative sports title, and this event proved that theory out on all levels. Many thanks to our attendees: adembroski, BezO, dave374, Joborule, KANE699, LBzRule, rgiles36, and TheWatcher.

And just because it’s Monday, and many might be expecting some actual news on the game, we figured we’d be good bloggers and drop a new screenshot. Forgive our current lighting and skin tone tuning that is still in progress, but I thought you all would dig the new accessories.

Enjoy!