One of my favorite every few year traditions is when my brother-in-law will text me and inform me that it's time to play Madden again. He's always right. Our ritual involves cooperatively playing through several years of a franchise, typically lifting some awful team to several consecutive Super Bowls along the way. I'm the quarterback and middle linebacker, while he rotates between a few offensive positions depending on if we're running or passing, and plays one of our cornerbacks. We set ludicrous records, invent fantastical backstories for our team and players, and generally have a blast. As I've stated before, Madden and other sports games are now D&D for sports fans.
In past years, we've just stuck with playing Madden NFL 25 (what a dumb name-what happens when they need to make a Madden game in 2024?) on XBox 360, because that was the newest one we had. This year, however, we had a copy of Madden NFL 17 that my wife had picked up for me in the bargain bin at Walmart on some Black Friday, so we moved our efforts over to this one. By the way, at any given point, there are still between 100 and 200 players still playing this game online :).
Like most Madden games, this one is remarkably similar to the older ones, which I don't much mind. I only get a new one every 3 years or so, and even then I get the last year's game to save on price. I don't play the game online, so I really don't mind if there's no user base left for the game. They've tweaked a few things since I last played-most notably getting rid of a my player mode and incorporating it into franchise mode, in which you can now play as a player, coach, or owner. They also significantly changed the way your players progress by now awarding experience points to your players for achieving in-game goals, and season and career milestones. The experience feels pretty worthless to me, to be honest. Despite having record setting seasons with young players, I haven't been able to see my players develop up more than 2 or 3 overall in 2 seasons, save for the temporary adjustments they get for having high confidence (these gains reset at the start of each season.
The gameplay is definitely significantly better and smoother in the new generation of consoles, as is the visual presentation. Running feels more intuitive, with rewards for timing your moves with the ball carrier. Your players will now slow down significantly when trying to "play the ball" on defense, however, making covering receivers significantly more challenging, particularly with linebackers.
One of the most welcome changes is the addition of new commentators Brandon Gaudin and Charles Davis. These two form a duo that is much more likeable than Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth, and they've done a pretty good job excising a lot of the stupid comments that the previous duo would make over and over. After roughly 30 games, I'm still hearing some new comments from them. Using a less famous duo certainly makes it easier to have them in to spend a few days recording a significant amount of dialogue for the game, while I'm sure that the previous had better things to do.
They also improved the trading system by making it actually possible to work mutually beneficial deals. Previous years made you trade gold to get silver, while this one feels like you'll get multiple offers for skilled players on the trade block.
Is it terribly different from the previous year? No. There are still tons of exploitable tactics you can use that will make losing to the AI nearly impossible. The commentary is still silly at times. Negotiating contracts can be downright nonsensical (I offered Aaron Donald a 5 year contract worth 140 million, and he declined based on length, and ending up signing a 6 year deal for 115. In what world does that make sense?). But the core of Madden is always fun, and playing it with my brother-in-law provides a rich experience that the programmers can never replicate. I'll give it a 9.0/10.
I already teased my next, already completed game, so stay tuned! I'll probably be back Friday.
-TRO
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