#FIXMADDENFRANCHISE
It’s cool to see # 1 trend of #FixMaddenFranchise No. 1 hashtag in the United States. It was even more valuable that Madden executive producer Seann Graddy recognized the movement in a dedicated video.
However, without any specific commitments or detailed short-term or long-term planned improvements, it’s hard for franchise fans to be more than cautiously optimistic about this Graddy recognition.
If these promises sound hollow, it wouldn’t be the first time EA has promised to tackle its franchise mode and, for some reason, switched gears without informing its fans.
A year ago, Madden Creative Director Mike Young told Game Informer’s Matt Bertz, “The franchise has refocused on the game and will continue to be so,” says Young. “We just want to add this depth and this immersion to start thinking of it more as a sports role-playing game.”
Unfortunately, the mode remains unchanged prior to launch on the platform for August, and looking towards next-gen consoles, EA doesn’t appear to have shown serious commitment to its core products.
Let’s be realistic.
It’s the weekend of July 4, it’s probably too late for EA to get anything on the retail disk before launch, and that also means it’s too late to affect digital downloads at launch.
This means that the best franchise fans can realistically expect is a patch on launch day that adds something significant to the beloved mode. There are tons of suggestions out there, including the ability to simply call plays and see every simulated NFL wing coach. There are also requests to regain the ability to view all games on the calendar from the streaming camera.
Other users want better stats tracking for players and teams throughout the life of franchise mode. Here’s a longer list of some of the other features that fans of the franchise mode have been asking EA for in recent years.
- In-depth exploration
- Coaches carousel
- Training ground
- Trade logic and improved CPU signature
- Rookie Minicamp
- Create a team
What’s worse is that all of these features used to be part of the game in the early 2000s. For whatever reason, EA removed them and never explained to fans why much less superior consoles could produce these features, and other developers may have Much better franchise modes, but Madden can’t.
If you want to see perhaps the most well-prepared and detailed franchise model, look no further than this masterpiece created by Deuce Douglas of Operation Sports. He put it together four years ago, and it’s still much better than what EA has delivered with fewer materials.
A former Madden developer told me that there are people still working on the game that could turn the franchise mode into something amazing with minimal resources, they just need to be allowed to do it. So far, that has not happened.
Franchise fans everywhere expect these people to have the opportunity to work in an area of the game that they love.
Franchise fans aren’t likely to budge anytime soon, at least until they start to see some tangible changes to the game that they’ve been reluctantly playing for years.
