Madden NFL 10 First Look

In their non-stop pursuit to make Madden the best sports game ever every year, the Madden team is hard at work. They have decided to start letting out just a peak a what they are doing to continually improve and make each yearly edition of Madden worth checking out.

Since it is early in the Madden cycle, they aren’t unveiling anything big, or so they say. But what they talk about was really big for me, and probably will be to other more hardcore Madden players. Let me throw a little paragraph from the article out there.

“Let me tell you a story of playing Madden NFL. It’s 3^rd and 10, and I’m down 14-7 against my buddy over Xbox LIVE. He’s a pretty conservative player, so I know he’ll sit his safeties back a bit and stay with man coverage on my outside receivers. I’m going to try and send my slot WR on a deep fly to clear the safety out, and hit my #1 WR on a Deep In. I saw Kurt Warner and the Rams with their greatest show on turf make this look easy week after week in the late 90’s! So I take the snap and analyze the situation quickly – no blitz, and the safeties are dropping out…money. I wish I was better at going through progressions, but I’m not – I’m pretty much watching my #1 WR all the way. He’s just coming out of his break on the deep in, and he’s got at least 2 steps on the defender trailing him in man coverage. I fire it in there, a perfect bullet pass where I think only he can catch it. Right before the ball gets to him the DB turns around and in one quick motion steps in front, picks it off, and is headed back the other way. HUH? THE DB NEVER EVEN SAW THE BALL!”

Ever been there? Had an intense game between you and your friend be decided by such a ridiculous event? I have, numerous times, both benefiting and going against me. They go on to introduce and new technology for Madden and other EA Sports games called Procedural Awareness. What is it exactly? A much more advanced system of having the players dynamically track the ball, ballcarrier, etc, without canned animations and more.

So what does that mean? That DB up there will actually be tracking the ball with his head if he is going to make an interception like that, you see it, and make adjustments from such an observation. No more out of nowhere interceptions that give that friend of yours a win they didn’t deserve.

Another piece of the technology is “procedural attitudes”, which is their solution to get rid of the Madden robot syndrome. Madden robot syndrome is the look on the faces of most players in-game with a lack of life and emotion besides the canned sequences. The attitudes is a system that again dynamically changes emotions on the players faces in reaction to blowing, or blowing up a play.

The technology is there, the main question is how they are going to use it’s power, and where. Are they going to use it mostly for tracking and have only a few attitudes, or a balance between both. It will be interesting to see how this all goes, and they have me interested already. Make sure to follow the link to check out the full article with videos, and to let them know what you think.

Madden NFL 10: First Look