Madden 2007 drives me nuts. From the cheating Artificial Intelligence to the instant replay that doesn’t work, it can be a (no pun intended) maddening affair.
It’s also the only NFL game going, and at times it can be incredibly fun.
During my time with the game I’ve come up with a few things the development team could focus on to make the next iteration of the game more fun and realistic.
1: More Accurate Playbooks Or Better Custom Playbooks
Just like the real NFL, playbooks are a big part of what makes a team unique. Half of the fun of playing Madden is taking your favorite real life team and replicating what they do on Sundays. Or taking your favorite time and ditching the coach you hate and hiring someone you like and running their offense/defense. But these things are hard to do when the playbook in the game doesn’t match the one you see on TV every Sunday.
Take the Seahawks for instance. In Madden 2007 there’s a formation called Singleback Flips Trips. It’s a four-wide receiver set with three wide receivers to one side, but two of those receivers are bunched close to the line of scrimmage. The Seahawks in real life run that formation about a half dozen times a game and it seems to produce some of their best and most effective passing plays. But in Madden 2007 that formation isn’t even a part of the Seahawks playbook.
Another glaring omission is the “stretch” play. Just about everyone in the NFL runs some version of the “stretch” play that the Indianapolis Colts have made so famous. Seattle runs the stretch play out of singleback formations about three or four times a game, but you can’t find one stretch play in the Madden 2007 playbook for Seattle.
In short, the playbooks don’t come close to matching their real NFL counterparts. Part of that is the failing of the developers to devote the necessary time to make the playbooks accurate. But that could be fixed… With a custom playbook.
It turns out the PC version of Madden 2007 has a custom playbook editor, much like the 2006 version. Only there’s a couple of huge problems that make this option worthless.
For starters, the playbooks on offense and defense are limited to a scant 11 formations and a total of 78 plays. The limitation on the number of formations is crippling enough, but limiting the book to a total of 78 plays makes it even worse. There’s barely enough room to get in a decent mix of plays.
The problem with a playbook that small is that during the course of a typical game you may run anywhere from 50-70 offensive plays. Repeating an offensive play is bad. Calling the same play more than once in the same game is a bad idea. The computer defense will account for repeated playcalls; it will counteract you by calling tougher defenses or it will just outright cheat and have it’s defenders beat your offensive players so you don’t gain yards. It’s the computer’s way of keeping you from running the same play over and over. This is a good thing (even if the CPU cheats to make it happen) because the computer shouldn’t allow you to call the same play over and over. But with a 78-play playbook there aren’t enough plays to go around.
Calling plays is about down and distance. And you cannot dictate down and distance during a game. You have no idea if you’re going to be facing 3rd-and-long all day or trying to eat away the clock with a lead, and thus calling a lot of running plays. A good playbook will have a mix of plays in it, and the better the mixture the more likely you’re going to have to repeat some plays during a game. And as I’ve said, repeating plays is a bad thing.
This could all be fixed if the developers of Madden would allow playbooks to have more formations and more total plays. The default playbooks have a LOT more formations and plays. Why not the custom ones?
Still, even with the limited formations and small number of total plays, my preference would be to use a custom playbook, but there’s one glaring bug in the PC version that causes custom playbooks to become totally useless: If you use a custom playbook and score in the final two minutes of the first half and have to kick an extra point or field goal, the game locks up. And not the nice kind of lockup where you can CTRL-ALT-DELETE to kill the game. No, Madden 2007 locks up with the really bad kind of lockup. The kind where you can’t get back to your desktop. Your keyboard and mouse become useless and you’re left with the last resort: turning the power off.
This is all sorts of bad.
The solution to all of this is to simply provide a much better custom playbook editor. CPU’s have a lot more memory now. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t bump the formations up to 15 or 20 and the total plays up to 150 per playbook. Give users the power to make their playbook what they want it to be. And fix the lockup bug.
Barring that….
2: Playbooks For Coordinators
Currently in Madden 2007 hiring your offensive and defensive coordinators is pretty much pointless. The playbooks for a team are defined by the head coach. Yet, in the real NFL, playbooks are often the product of the coordinators.
Take the Washington Redskins of 2006. They hired Al Saunders and his 700-page playbook to run the offense. But in Madden 2007 the playbook for the Redskins is based on Joe Gibbs. Same goes for the Patriots during their Superbowl runs: Charlie Weiss was the architect of that offense. Mike Martz is the guy running the offense in Detroit, yet the head coach is the guy credited with the playbook in Madden 2007.
I’d like to see certain offensive and defensive coordinators have their own playbooks. Sure, some head coaches call plays on one side of the ball, like Mike Holmgren in Seattle or Andy Reid in Philly. But a lot of coordinators bring their own playbooks to the team when they’re hired. If offensive and defensive coordinators came with their own playbooks it would make the offseason hiring phase of a franchise mode a lot more interesting and fun. It would make it more meaningful, which would be a good thing.
3: Fix The Passing Game
The running game got a huge makeover with Madden 2007. The developers added a feature to allow you to control the fullback or an offensive lineman on running plays, thus potentially improving the blocking. But more than that, the developers really worked on the blocking and tackling so that it is easier for runningbacks to find lanes in the middle of the field, making the running game slightly more realistic.
Unfortunately, while the running game has recieved a lot of attention, the passing game has suffered.
Madden 2007 has a couple of really annoying features that negatively affect the passing game, and these have to get fixed in the next iteration.
For starters, defenders covering recievers on a “corner route” have this superhuman jump-swat that they use with amazing regularity to knock down a pass intended for the receiver. For whatever reason it is basically impossible to throw a pass over the receiver’s shoulder to a point where the defender can’t get to it, and the jump-swat is a large reason why. What’s annoying about this is that I have yet to see this superhuman feat performed in a real NFL game. Linebackers who get beat downfield by a TE or WR, especially on a corner route, do not have the recovery speed, nor the vertical leap to make this move. It is a physical impossibility. They also don’t have eyes in the back of their head.
Another incredibly annoying feature, at least played on All-Madden mode, is that some routes are simply impossible to complete passes on because cornerbacks react unrealistically to the ball. You see, there’s this thing in the real world call “momentum“. Physics and the limitations of the human body dictate that a person cannot simply switch direction and accelerate at maximim speed without first slowing down and overcoming the momentum they have already generated. This reality is not reflected in the game, however.
A common and oft-used route in the NFL is the “deep in” route or “dig” route. It’s a simple route: the receiver runs several yards downfield in a fairly straight line, and then cuts “in” toward the center of the field. Against man-to-man coverage the receiver’s job is to convince his defender that he is going to run downfield on a fly or “go” route, forcing the defender to turn his hips and commit to running the length of the field. At that moment the receiver cuts sharply ninety degrees toward the center of the field. The advantage here is that the receiver knows where he is going, but the defender does not. There’s a split-second in there where the reciever is cutting and gaining separation on the defender, while the defender is attempting to stop his momentum and reverse field.
When run properly this route is incredibly effective and very difficult to defend without underneath coverage from the linebacking corps. However, in Madden, this route is utterly useless as the defenders ignore momentum and can not only stop on a dime and turn with the receiver, but can actually outrun the receiver and get in front of the route!
This sort of clarvoyant defensive backfield play makes the passing game in Madden annoying in the extreme.
Another serious flaw with the passing game is how receivers constantly bump into defenders in zone coverage and cannot get around them. This causes the receiver’s legs to churn away as he continues to futily bang into the defender, pushing the defender a foot or two at a time while never completing his route. Meanwhile you, the quarterback, take a sack while waiting patiently for your dumbass receiver to navigate a zone and get open.
What’s incredibly frustrating about this is that some of the logic necessary to fix this problem already exists within the game code. When a defender in man-to-man coverage follows a receiver who has gone in motion before the snap of the ball he could run into any number of linebackers and other defenders as he is running down the line of scrimmage. But the developers have wisely coded the defender following the man in motion to navigate the field correctly, and avoid contact with other defenders (this works 90% of the time, but sometimes the players still get stuck). The code handles this situation, so why not receivers running routes?
Adding to the frustration of this sort of problem is the fact that in the NFL a large part of the passing game is predicated on being able to “thread the needle” and get a ball in between defenders, either by dropping a pass over the shoulder of a receiver who has beat his defender (the jump-swat case) or by throwing the ball to a receiver who is not yet open, but will be once he clears a linebacker (the collision case and in-route case). This is a huge, important part of the NFL passing game and it’s missing from the Madden video game.
4: Add QB Slide As A Button
This is a small fix. And easy fix. Add the ability for the quarterback to “slide” after he’s crossed the line of scrimmage. It should be a simple button press, not some convoluted joystick waggle. Sometimes the defense just covers everyone really well. Mobile quarterbacks can make plays with their legs. But in Madden, unless you can get to the sideline you run a very high percentage chance of either (a) getting your QB really hurt or (B) causing a fumble when he gets hit. The QB slide has to be included in Madden 2008 and it has to be easy to use. Period.
5: Lose The “Tuck Rule” Anti-Sack
In 2002 the New England Patriots hosted the Oakland Raiders in the AFC Championship game in what has since then been dubbed The Snow Bowl. This game is infamous for the emergence of the “Tuck Rule.”
The Patriots were trailing 13-10 with less than two minutes remaining in the game when Charles Woodson sacked Patriot quarterback Tom Brady. Brady fumbled the ball and it was recovered by Oakland, effectively ending the game and sending the Raiders to the Superbowl. But since it was the final two minutes of the game a review of the play was called in from the booth upstairs. Upon further review the play was reversed and called an “incomplete pass”. Brady’s arm was technically “moving forward” at the time he lost control of the ball; he was attempting to “tuck” the ball into his chest to avoid the fumble. But the letter of the law said that the passer’s arm simply had to be “moving forward” for it to be an incomplete pass. The call was overturned, Brady lead the Patriots to victory and the rest is history.
In Madden 2007 the “Tuck Rule” makes its presence felt early and often.
Sacking the quarterback is something that is very difficult to do in Madden. It is made significantly harder by the presence of the “Tuck Rule” mechanics. Most of the time when your defender is sacking the quarterback, the CPU QB will have the ball fall out of his hand and hit the ground at his feet. This should be a fumble but it never is thanks to the “Tuck Rule”.
A better solution would simply be for the CPU QB to hang onto the ball and take the sack. After all, in the real NFL when a quarterback feels a defender starting to sack him, his first instinct is to protect the football - to hold onto it.
Ironically, that’s what happens to your quarterback when you get sacked in Madden 2007.
I don’t know how many hundreds of games I’ve played with Madden 2007, but I know that I can count on one hand the number of times my quarterback was successful at getting rid of the ball the moment I was being sacked, and having it ruled as an incomplete pass. The vast majority of the time my QB hangs onto the ball and I get sacked. That’s how it should be. But the rules don’t apply equally to the CPU.
And that’s probably the single most annoying thing about Madden: the rules don’t apply equally. Whether it’s the way defenders cover pass routes, or quarterbacks take sacks, or offensive linemen block, or quarterbacks slide, when you play the CPU things don’t happen equally.
A Couple Other Things….
Here’s a few final thoughts for features/fixes that would really improve the game:
- Defenders that recover a fumble or intercept a pass have about a 100% chance to fumble the ball if you don’t fall down or go out of bounds immediately. The only recourse is to press the “4″ button and hope your guy can hang on for dear life. This is unrealistic.
- In the real NFL the success rate for coaches challenging plays with replay is less than 50%. In fact, it’s closer to 30%. Yet in Madden 2007 if the CPU challenges a play you can bet the farm he’s going to win. I actually tracked CPU challenges for several games and a few franchise seasons. The success rate for replay challenges when called by the CPU coach was over 90%. This has to be fixed.
- Defensive backs never play “off”. In the real NFL, when a team’s defensive backs are outmatched by the receivers, or if the defensive coordinator is a more conservative guy, they will often command their corners to play 8-10 yards off the line of scrimmage. You hear the color commentators comment about this during games all the time: “Look how much cushion #32 is giving!” This is an ideal situation for throwing short curls, hooks and slant routes. But in Madden 2007 the CPU never has the corners play soft. Your receivers never have any cushion - and if they do, the defenders elilminate that cushion as soon as the ball is snapped. It’s yet another thing that makes the passing game in Madden unrealistic and aggrevating.
- Crossing routes are too closely defended. In the real NFL a crossing route can be a killer (this is why defenses employ zones and combination man/zone coverages while they attempt to fill passing lanes with linebackers). It’s very difficult for a defensive back to cover a speedy wide receiver all the way across the field. It’s impossible for a linebacker. Yet in Madden 2007, defensive backs and linebackers routinly cover wide receivers on crossing routes like they had their torso glued to the receiver’s shirt at the snap of the ball. More aggrevating: As you pass the ball to one of these closely guarded receivers, the linebacker covering them (who should be trailing by a couple yards by now) is able to speed up with Superman powers and swat the ball down. I’m still waiting to see this move in a real NFL game.
- Track play calling stats. In Madden 2007 you can go into something called the Weekly Gameplan and see the top three plays your opponent likes to call for passing and running, and the average yards per play that they gain using those plays. But that’s mostly useless information because the CPU is programmed to call plays in a fairly evenly distributed manner. What would be much better is a breakdown of the plays you have called over the course of a season, how frequently you call them and the AYPP. I’d like to see my whole playbook broken down, so I know if I’m not calling certain plays as often, or which plays absolutely stink because I get no yards from them. That sort of information would be invaluable (and fun).
- Shade plays you’ve already called during a game. In the real NFL coaches keep markers with them. As they call plays on their laminated playcall sheets they annotate things. One feature that would be really cool is if the playbook would shade a play you have already called - make it duller, and provide a counter in the corner of the playbox window so you would know how many times you’ve already called that play during a game. If the entire playbox window for that particular play was shaded slightly then your eyes could flip through your playbook for plays you haven’t called yet in very rapid fashion. All of this would make calling plays a richer game experience.
All right - I’m done. For now. Get to work EA. Your game doesn’t suck, but it’s not great either. You’ve got room for improvement.