Why bother trying to actually put a game out that can compete with the ESPN NFL 2K series when you can just pay the NFL to not let them do it? Sega put out a better game for less, and we just can’t allow that, now can we?
Guess I won’t be buying any new NFL games for a while, since paying $50 for a roster update is ridiculous. Maybe Sega can do a college football game that embarrasses the crap that EA has been calling NCAA Football.
Tagliabue, I hope you’re happy when the income from video games goes down because people choose not to buy Madden NFL 2008 since it’s the same game as Madden NFL 2005.
That’s too bad. EA has done nothing to convince me that it was worth my money upgrading from Madden 2003. Sega, on the other hand, had me intrigued with a measly $20 on the line, and I was most definitely going to try the series out next season. I’m also a bit baffled by this call due to ABC/ESPN being involved with Sega all the while broadcasting NFL games. I can’t imagine they are too happy with it.
Sega still has the legal right to create their already in-progress ESPN game. If they’re smart, they’ll set up servers to allow updatable stats and modes. AFAIK, the exclusivity agreement only demands that EA has the rights to all new games. It wouldn’t be a new game at all, now would it?
Of course, there’s probably some lawyering there I’m not seeing. And also, it would be counting on Sega to do something smart, which is borderline impossible.
For both EA’s and the NFL’s sake, Madden 2006 has to be the ultimate football game. Blow you off your chair, rock your world type of game. Anything less and both parties are going to look awful. Even more than they already do.
And I am “a no-questions-asked fan of Madden” and I agree, with no competition they can’t allow themselves to slip. Hopefully, this won’t be remembered as one of the worst business deals of the decade.
Too late. I’ve given up on Madden for good. I’ve run madden leagues at my website for the last three years, ever since the first online version (2003) was released.
'03 was good, but not great. It was pretty apparent that the game wasn’t tested nearly enough, as players found bugs and exploits immediately. The most glaring one was the lack of any kind of timer on kickoffs. If someone was losing all they’d have to do is get to a point where they’re kicking off the ball and then go get a bagel or something. The game allows them to sit there forever, until either they finally kick it or someone quits the game. This wasn’t hard to find, and I still can’t believe they missed, although I definitely understand how they did it now (more on that in a sec).
Out comes '04. Ok, a lot of the problems with '03 have been resolved, and things are looking pretty good. Overall, this was the best online iteration of Madden football. No major exploits, the network stuff worked well, etc. However, the competition was looking pretty good. They had managed online leagues! Why didn’t Madden? Legions of Madden players told EA that they wanted online league play. Did they listen? Well…
August 2004. Madden 2005 is a few weeks away, and we’ve heard nothing about online leagues, except that we should expect a big announcement soon. Ok, that’s gotta be it, we think. And it is indeed. EA Sports announces its new “Premium Pass” service. A service that will cost $20 per season in the future is free for now if you agree to give your information to Dodge. I had a hard time convincing a few players on my website to go with this, and we lost more than a few who were unwilling/unable to use a credit card to sign up.
But the rest of us sign on up and we’re rarin’ to go. And then we wait. The game is released, and the league stuff still isn’t ready. They offer up new information once in a while, but no actual system. Eventually, everything goes up for about a day, then quickly disappears again, apparently due to some showstopper bug that got past QA. After I saw the final product, I was amused at the thought that there could be bugs WORSE than what I was seeing.
Finally we’re told that the leagues are ready to roll. I immediately set up our league: input the name, the divisions, and other options, and click create. It works! Oh. Em. Gee.
Of course, it didn’t work. No one could join the league if I made it private in any way. There was an option to only let people who were on your buddy list join, and it didn’t work. You could also specify names of people to allow in. That option was set up quite intuitively - you had to type in everyone’s player name in at the time you created the league (I was talking about around 25 names at the time). Hope you don’t forget someone or misspell something, because THERE’S NO FREAKING WAY TO CHANGE THE INVITE LIST AFTER THE DAMN LEAGUE HAS BEEN CREATED.
The only other option is to create a public league and hope no random assdwellers join up. If they do, ask them nicely to leave, because unbelievably there’s no way for the league’s operator to remove them. The functionality of the whole system was so basic that any first year computer science student would be ashamed to turn it in as a first semester project.
We DEMANDED league play after Madden 2004 came out. They knew we wanted it. For whatever reason, they ignored our demands and cranked out a half-assed system that was obviously developed at long hours at the last minute.
And as if the situation wasn’t bad enough - the game itself was easily exploitable once again, and they had to remove some basic functionality during online play to keep people from cheating.
EA blew it big time this year. Between this, and the stories about the grueling hours they put their employees through, EA Sports will not see another dime from me. I don’t care if ESPN has fake names or player numbers or whatever next year. I’ll never touch Madden again.
Let’s see, we’re EA Games, and we’re going to spend an extra $300 million (cite) on our Madden franchise. Should we put it into developing the best football game imaginable? Do we give our customers a price break?
No, of course not, silly! We can just muscle out the competition, then raise the price and cut back on the development budget to recoup our expenses! Problem solved.
Well, this isn’t completely true. In the early days, at least, there were scads of unlicensed sports games, and some were pretty good. The other games publishers can just use the same stats, make up player and team names, and go wild. Hell, you play Madden on franchise for more than a few seasons, and almost the whole league consists of fictional players.
If this were 1994, I’d be right with you. However, it’s 2004, and I don’t think the average sports gamer is willing to accept “QB #18” for the Indianapolis Mustangs. The average sports gamer wants to be Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts.
What scares me is that EA may try to pull this with the other major sports. They’ve already got NASCAR locked up (which killed the superior NASCAR Racing series by Papyrus/Sierra on the PC) and now the NFL. MVP Baseball has been good so far, but that doesn’t mean I want to give up World Series Baseball or even MLB Slugfest.
If Sega really wants to counter, they should sign an exclusive NHL deal, just because EA’s NHL series is nowhere near the NHL 2K series, even if it’s 2007 before there’s a hockey season.
Honestly, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say that. I rented NHL2K4 for my birthday last year and after two games we threw it back in the case, incredibly disappointed. My sister’s friends came over the next day, played one game and turned off the PS2 and looked for something else to do.
That was my only exposure to the Sega hockey series and I’ve been playing EA since 99, so I have alot more exposure to that series, but everyone I knows has been very underwhelmed with the 2K series.
OTOH, basketball clearly belongs to Sega. NBA Live is embarassing.
I bought the NHL 2K5 for Xbox a couple of weeks ago, and while I can say that I enjoy the gameplay , the manual absolutely stinks.
Half the manual discusses the controls for playing the game (good). Then there are four pages on using Xbox live (not interested), four pages of developer credits (WTF??) and three pages of song credits (huh?).
Nothing on how to use the franchise mode, season mode, creating players, trading players, et cetera , or in other words all the elements that give the simulation some depth. I guess the only way to figure out how to make those work is through trial and error - and so far it’s mostly been error.
I heard a citeless assertion that videogames have requirements that the manual be incredibly short. Thus, no game ever comes with a long manual. That’s what the countless tips and tricks books are for; to get more money out of you.
ESPN games work around this by including the excellent ingame help manual that is quite extensive. I assume EA has something online, or at least some message boards, to help with this stuff.
ESPN Football is unplayable. Two buddies and I get together and play our football franchise. We picked up ESPN because it came out (way too) early, but we didn’t mind the ridiculously out-of-date rosters. So I select the Giants, and my buddies select the Jets and Steelers. Good to go, start the franchise. Let’s play the Jets game first. You take your Jets, we’ll take the Bengals. We’ll take the Bengals. Hey, why can’t we take the Bengals? Oh, I see, we can’t take the Bengals because the good folks at ESPN are dumber than EA could ever aspire to be. Good job, ESPN.
Quite frankly, ESPN NFL 2k5 had countless problems. No multiplayer franchises. Laughably unbalanced QB scrambling. No QB Spy capability. But don’t worry, we spent a ton of development time on the barbie dreamhouse aspect of our football game. :rolleyes:
People complain about Madden being the same game, and I honestly can’t fathom what they are talking about. They add major components each year.
2002: We started our offline league play
2003: Added custom playbooks
2004: Added owner mode and playmaker; Added training camp
2005: Added player momentum and hit sticks. Added online play for Xbox. Added option routes. (My suggestion at maddenwishlist.com…go me!)
These are huge advances in a football game. Sure, Dynamix had them all years ago, but it wasn’t a console game. The same game as it always was? There’s friggin’ momentum physics now, which radically alters the gameplay on a fundamental level.
However, the formation shift bug is annoying, the lack of configurable controller settings is infuriating, and the huge amount of work put into the storyline mode was misplaced, IMO.
ESPN player ratings (and rosters in general) are awful, and the turbo is a pathetic throwback to the “Track & Field” days of nintendo-thumb. That just will not do.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the lack of competition affecting EA. When, exactly, did they have any competition for a console NFL game? Look at the marketshares; they’ve been doing all the innovation they have for the fun of it, so I expect more great things to come.
Personally, I thought ESPN NFL 2K5 was great. I haven’t noticed any serious issues with scrambling. QB Spy is possible, at least according to this.
As for multiplayer franchises, I guess I don’t get it. With all the in-depth management that has to be done to run a franchise, how would you coordinate multiple people at once? For that matter, why would you need the ability to have multiple franchises running at once? Is that something people actually do in Madden? I’ve never heard this complaint before from anyone.
You’re close but… actually you’re really far away.
Video game manuals are short because there is no room in a DVD case for a thick manual. Back when games were in cardboard boxes, big manuals. Not anymore.
And as you later pointed out, almost every game has an in game manual that gets a lot more use than any instruction manual. So why print something nobody reads?
I just got out the thickest manual I could find from the Good Ol’ Days (the one for the SNES’s Final Fantasy II, which includes a walkthrough for half the game) and tried putting it in the case for the PS2’s Tony Hawk 3. It makes the case noticably heavier, but it fits fine.
Yeah, I probably have too much time on my hands. And my game manuals are too organized.
Since this is A) my thread and B) EA related, I’ll throw this rant in for free:
How the hell do you screw up the roster of a major college basketball program?
My roommate borrowed March Madness 2005 from a buddy. As we are both UK students and Wildcat fans, we immediately started a game with the 'Cats.
About 15 seconds in, we notice a problem: point guard Patrick Sparks, #22, is black. This is a mistake, as the real Patrick Sparks is whiter than Larry Bird. Honestly, he’s clear.
Not only did they screw that up, they left out sophomore center Shagari Alleyne. As Shagari is having a breakout year, that’s just a bit of a flaw.
EA, how difficult is it to get a roster right? Honestly, it’s not like this is Southwest New Mexico Junior College here. We’re talking about the winningest program in NCAA history, a team that has 7 national titles and is on TV for virtually every game. I guess the employees aren’t working hard enough. Better have them work 100-hour weeks on the 2006 game so they get it right.
To my knowledge, NCAA regulations only prohibit the use of player names and images in a game, which is why college games use position and number rather than name.
Thankfully, they also include an “Edit Player” function, which allows me to put the correct name in for each player.
Exactly, EA has no incentive to get everything exactly right, because NCAA regulations prohibit the most important part: the names. So if something else seems off about a “real” player, they can just say it’s not supposed to be that player.
