How Much Better Is Good Enough?

So this post is going to be little more than a thought exercise. With the recent release of a massively buggy NCAA Football 09 and the impending release of Madden 09, I'm fully ready to once again not buy a football game, despite being a serious football and video game fan.

Years ago, I bought Madden 04. That fact alone made my room the hub for many nights of college fun. That was the first version of Madden I'd owned in years (since the late 90s), and while it certainly gave me plenty of good times, it also featured a slew of design problems that astonishingly still plague the game five years later: spastic offensive line play, shoddy defensive backs, money plays, and who knows how many others.

None of this will stop EA from selling millions of copies: this is precisely the reason that none of those legacy issues will be fixed any time soon. If there's no financial pressure to improve the product (other than updating rosters and tweaking graphics and gameplay), why bother? With EA having the exclusive rights to the NFL for the next few years, little hope exists.

While no one appears likely to attempt to compete with Madden (or NCAA), I'm curious what it would take to draw a significant percentage of Madden's fanbase away. Obviously, not having the rights to real teams or players is a pretty big obstacle to overcome, so the gameplay would have to be substantially better to lure gamers.

I can think of a few features that would sell me on another football game: superior gameplay, superior dynasty options, superior online play, and totally customizable rosters.

Let's explore these. As mentioned above, Madden's gameplay has basically remained unchanged in at least five years. While some of the most egregious exploits have been hampered (like taking your defensive linemen really wide pre-snap), it's still way too easy to break the game on both sides of the ball. However, my real beef with the Madden series is the horrifically simplified strategy.

Professional football is an incredibly complicated sport, and a world of almost constant innovation. Sadly, Madden always seems to lag behind the curve when it comes to allowing users to harness their creativity. Yes, there are more pre-snap options than ever before, but the play creator is still primitive. Our hypothetical game would allow you to utilize every formation that's ever been attempted in the NFL (and some that haven't), from the Wing T to the A11.

It goes without saying that we'd also get rid of all the flaws I mentioned above: linemen would intelligently react to their surroundings, double-teaming elite defensive linemen (something that you could also control), picking the right player out when lead blocking, and behaving realistically on screens and draws.

Receivers would be rated (among many other things) on their route-running ability, meaning that sloppy route runners would have a harder time getting open. This would also allow possession receivers to achieve their proper level of importance.

Most of all, speed wouldn't be paramount. Madden 04 illustrated this most of all: Michael Vick was so good that we banned the Falcons from play on my game. While speed is obviously important in the NFL, it's not the only thing that matters. You'd be excused for thinking so if you only played Madden however. Fast receivers get deep, fast backs break long runs, and fast quarterbacks unbalance the game almost comically.

Beyond gameplay, however, there are other ways to improve on the Madden experience. While the Dynasty mode has improved over time, it still doesn't accurately reflect what it takes to run a franchise. The game doesn't include all of the things that can happen to your players and teams, like steroid suspensions, arrests, and even deaths. This is largely because the NFL and NFLPA wouldn't allow such things, but as I said before, our game doesn't have those licenses anyhow, so why worry about what those leagues think?

Madden's online play also remains laughably behind the times. While NCAA just introduced online dynasties this year, Madden basically just allows you to play with your friends. While this is better than nothing, it's almost comically limited. Anything you could do in single player, you can do with as many people as there are teams in my game. Speaking of which, you can create leagues of a wide array of sizes: smaller leagues will concentrate talent more, but also limit the funds that are available to the league as a whole...oh yes, that's another feature. You'll have to worry about the overall health of the league, from negotiating media contracts to making decisions about franchise movement or expansion. You can even start a league in the past and grow it over time. If you keep your league too small, a rival league might even start stealing players away.

Finally, because of course people will want to play with real teams and real players, rosters, teams, and logos will be totally customizable. You could even download them off of XBox Live (or whatever), so when someone creates all the real logos and teams, you can help yourself to their work.

Look, unseating Madden is an almost-impossible proposition, and there's little reason for another company to undertake it: the risks greatly outweigh the rewards. Still, as a football and video game fan, you can't blame me for dreaming...