So there was a slip on the Madden Online Co-op Video that suggested Online Franchise was in Madden 10. Today at the EA E3 Presser, Peter Moore announced the feature for the whole world officially.


Here are some screenshots for Online Franchise

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NCAA Football 10: TeamBuilder Reveal
Create-a-School is back and better than ever.

by Nate Ahearn

April 23, 2009 – Ever since NCAA Football first made its way onto next-gen consoles, it has been without a hugely popular feature that debuted back in 2000 on the PlayStation. For the last three years (the first iteration of NCAA on Xbox 360) people have been waiting for the re-launch of Create-a-School. Thankfully that wait is now over.

This week in New York City EA Sports revealed TeamBuilder, a reworked Create-a-School feature that incorporates new technology and mechanics to bring your created squad into NCAA Football 10. Cooler still is the fact that fans of the collegiate videogame series will be able to create their dream program well before the game hits store shelves.

This time around Create-a-School (TeamBuilder) is all web-based and operated from your PC. Pigskin fanatics can hop onto TeamBuilder.com,

There are hundreds of pieces to every uniform and many can be tuned to your liking. From the stripes on your pants to whether your logo appears on the helmet or your uniform number (ala Alabama), there’s a lot of depth there. There are more than 70 base styles for your uni and 11 different logo placements aside from the helmet designs that I just mentioned. There’s less customizability to the pants, but it’s a similar mechanic. As fun as it is to fiddle with the look of your uniforms, what really impressed me was the freedom afforded to nailing down a team logo.

(once the site is live) sign in with their EA Sports ID, and then get down to the nitty gritty of designing the look and attributes for their school. EA Sports was kind enough to create IGN University (average GPA 1.1) to give us a look at just how deep the creation goes.

The IGN field EA Sports created for us.

First you’ll need to track down a primary logo which must be a 256×256 PNG file. Next, you’ll need to convert that image (or find another) into a 128×128 PNG. Keep in mind, there really aren’t any restrictions on what that image contains. That means you can take an already-established logo, massacre it in any number of ways in PhotoShop, then upload it to TeamBuilder. EA Sports thankfully used the traditional IGN logo and color scheme for ours. Picking your colors is a simple process that has you place three markers on your logo to ensure that you aren’t using fuchsia when you really just wanted pink (and who doesn’t).

Next you’ll pick from any of the pre-existing college, generic or high school stadiums to act as your battleground. Thankfully the fans in your stadium will be wearing your team’s colors. For IGN University that meant a sea of intimidating red. Be afraid.

After picking out your stadium, it’s time to design the field itself. You can pick from four field types: turf, blue (Boise State style), grass, and multi. Then you can place your logo in the middle of the field and at opposing 20, 25, 30 or 35 yard lines. As if that wasn’t enough, you can then design the text that will appear in both endzones.

From there you’re off to design the attributes and player rosters for your school. This is the one area that worried me about TeamBuilder. Since you can upload your created team to Dynasty or Online Dynasty modes, the fact that there’s nothing stopping gamers from maxing out both their school’s attributes as well as the players’ skills seems like it could create an unfair advantage. All the usual school attributes are tunable. That means you can mess your school’s academic prestige, your fan base, television exposure, even the amount of athletic facilities on-campus. Unsurprisingly, IGN had none.

That’s me handing off to Mike Pereira.

Once it’s time to customize your rosters you’ll first need to select a school’s already established roster and tweak from there. Again, all the usual speed, strength, and awareness attributes can be maxed out if you like.

After you’ve set your created school in virtual stone it’s time to take to the field. You can create and save up to twelve schools that can then be downloaded by your friends over Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. It’s important to note that if you decide to take your team into a dynasty mode (online or off), you’ll need to replace one of the schools from the conference you’re inserting the team into.

It’s about time EA Sports made a Create-a-School mode worthy of this generation of hardware. The online integration and the interaction between your PC and 360 or PS3 should be great if everything goes to plan. It’s also a wise move to offer up TeamBuilder to players before the game ships so you can have your custom squad fully built in time for launch.

Check back on Monday for our preview of Season Showdown, yet another new mode in NCAA Football 10.