Madden NFL 21

Here we go again

Hey, look at that there's a new NFL game out guys! I wonder if it's the pinnacle of the sports game genre and clearly pushes the genre to it's absolute limits, which would be fitting seeing as how this is the first game of the series that'll be imported over to the new gen. That means all of the fancy processing power of those consoles will be at the disposal of the Madden team to bring the art of American football to life like never before. I bet the team are really gonna bite at that opportunity, really string every ounce of power out of those consoles for the good of the game. I mean, they've got not reason not to, right? They've been making these Madden games for going on thirty years now, they must have gotten somewhat good at it, no? Or maybe, they are single handily doing their darnedest to reinforce EA's reputation amongst gamers as distributors of exploitative low-effort garbage that survives on the merit of being the only American football game on the market. Like a line of spec-op Salarians holding the line and preventing any remote inch of passion or respect for the consumer reach their game, the developers would rather die than deliver theirs fans a decent product. You've got to admire that level of commitment.

I'm being serious. I couldn't imagine having that level of general loathing for the people of the world around you, that's some supervillian levels of hatred that these developers hold in their hearts. They must do. To willingly regurgitate the same toxic dump out of their backdoors into the mouth of their 'fanbase', relying on the widely acknowledged stupidity of sports fans to turn a profit; there can't be a hint of respect around this entire studio. In fact, it has to beyond the fans at this point, they must hate game development, gaming and even the American football game itself to stomach this development process year in and year out. That is literally the only explanation as to why Madden still has a development team, and one that tries to defend the pathetic mess of their product every now and then, no matter how half-heatedly. How do you get to be that much of a misanthrope? Please, teach me your magical ways!

So if you wondered across this blog wondering if the new NFL is any good, and didn't pick up on by 'subtle' hints there, it's not. It's so not. But then, are you surprised? The games haven't been good in over a decade. "But what specifically is wrong with the game?", you ask, "give me flaws!". Well there's the problem with is, it's so hard to tell what the actual game is supposed to be anymore because the entire product is such a revolting, disgusting conglomeration of mediocrity and sloth that it's unrecognisable. But I guess I can try to pick some things out. Let's see, they've added another pointless empty mode with nothing to really do in it, the animations are still canned and regularly glitch into one another, the stands are still full of lifeless barely 3D PNGs, the AI seems completely oblivious to basic football strategies, (like a pile-on) the character customisation is unchanged- but tacked onto this new mode, franchise mode is unchanged, significant celebration animations are identical to ones that have been used for the entire last generation, camera angles for replays are nonsensical and often miss the play entirely, replays aren't even stored for a fixed amount of time but get recent whenever the field is reset, (as though this game is running on DS memory), and last but not least; they forgot to stick their NFL 21 logo over all of the spots with the NFL 20 one. Yep, for the second year running they did it again. What an embarrassment. (At least they didn't do an NBA and screw up the Ico file on the executable)

No, I don't just mean that their fumblings are embarrassing to the studio and the people working on the games, that's a given. I mean that it's embarrassing to the fans, the sport, the very industry that they work in, to be this unapologetically lazy. And sure, in the past I might have given these guys the benefit of the doubt and claim this was the steely grip of EA upon their studio, and that still very much is the case, EA's brass are not in the clear for this repeated trainwreck, but I can't just pretend the developers aren't complicit in this con-job anymore. Especially not after one tried to defend the misplaced NFL 20 logo by claiming this was a problem from the last entry that had been fixed. (It would have been so easy for him to check the asset himself and see the discrepancy. But that would have required a modicum of effort on his part and we know that's a no-no for these developers.) Shouldn't people with any conscious be too ashamed at this product to be a twitter-troll about it? Where's your humanity? Was it ever there?

But this goes back further, the disdain for the fanbase and the art of game creation, that is. I remember hearing a story someone told about one Madden developer's reason for why the Pro Bowl couldn't make it into their latest games and it was so inane that I couldn't believe it was real. The Pro Bowl, for those unaware, is a special game of NFL where the teams are made up of star players across different teams in the league, all sporting the colours and iconography of their home states and teams. It's a fun match where the best of the best square up against each other for a little bit of fun. (Although, in reality it tends to be a little more low-key due to the exhibition nature of the game alongside the fact that no one really wants to potentially cause an injury when every player is worth their literal weight in gold.) Somewhere, and I swear this is true, there is a video of one Dev who was asked straight-up why Pro Bowl couldn't make it into modern games, (because it was there before) and the explanation went something like this: the memory that went into loading the different helmet and jersey textures was too much for the console to handle... Seriously... are these 8k textures? Are you running it on MS DOS? Are you coding with an Etch-A-Sketch? Because one of those things has to be true for the words that just came out of your mouth to be correct. What an insult to the entire industry to claim something so stupid when the real answer is; "This isn't the year that we've scheduled to tout that as the gimmick, train again in twelve months." (He could have just said "Technical difficulties" and left it at that; these people must really hate the community.)

And yes, if you've been here any amount of time you'll likely have realised something odd about my rant on this subject, namely that I'm the one ranting. "Don't you hate and never play Sports games?" Absolutely true, I do and I don't. But the thing is, I know a lot of people of who do buy into these games year after year and just don't know any better. Family members who've been buying into sports titles for years and just don't know how to stop, because they don't know that they deserve better out of their gaming experience. And that's not to mention the fact that EA, and 2K with them, use the malleable sports fans as Petri dishes for the next insidious scheme they want to thrust onto the rest of the market, so if you want a little crystal ball into EA's next monetisation efforts you need merely pay attention to this sordid end of the industry. So in some ways this isn't any bit of my business and I have no reason to complain, but on the otherhand it's everyone's business and we absolutely should get on the forefront of this and push back everytime EA, or any other sports company, spits in it's fans faces.

Though one might argue, as they do, that EA don't have the time and effort to create a worthwhile sports game every year. (I mean, Ubisoft and Activision seem to manage, but for some reason everyone thinks that one of the biggest game companies in the world can't hack it.) So here's a solution; hire a second development team. Hell, hire a third. Do rotations on releases. And before you say, "Well that's asking for a lot out of EA" let me inform you that Madden games are a 4 billion dollar industry, (that's a stat from 2013, by the way; now it's likely higher) and then ask you again to say that EA don't have the resources to fund a healthy development cycle for these games. The only thing in EA's way is EA, because why should they bother putting in the effort when everyone buys their waste anyway? Every year the same cycle of 'put out crap game', 'get blasted for it', 'make money anyway' plays out in an identical dance of perpetuity and unless an obsidian plinth falls down from the sky to evolve sports-games fans to the point of being able to tie their own shoes laces, this is the way the dance will always go.

There is one difference for this year, and it's that the power of cancel culture has been awoken to battle the EA juggernaut. That's right, the hashtag "#NFLDropEA" has been doing the rounds under the assumption that it'll reach some sort of rapport with EA's licencors, but I have to be honest; that isn't going to happen. If people still think that cancel culture is a positive force, they are in for a rude awakening when they release that companies are immune to verbal assassination, they have sandbags stuffed with money, the flood of negativity doesn't even get their soles wet. But at least this has the potential to get to the eyes of the masses who buy NFL year after year and perhaps get them to think really hard about the game they're contributing to. Or maybe they'll just see a squirrel run past and immediately lose object permanency, it can go either way with these people. Okay, I'm getting crotchety, it's time to cool off...