In a blog today by Carlos of EA Sports Live crew down at E3, he talks to Josh Looman about the new things in Franchise mode. This has to be one of the most in depth franchise mode ever. Josh Looman, the guy who works on Madden Franchise, says there are things in Franchise mode this year that fans have been asking for in the last 10 years.

Read the full story

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

Read the full story

Welcome back Madden faithful, it’s Monday and that means it’s time for another blog! This week we wanted to go into some depth about a new feature you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10: our revamped injury system. Hopefully this new addition is just one (of many) that continues to prove that we are focused on delivering an authentic NFL experience to our fans – and that while we are still ensuring to innovate in every single iteration, that innovation has to come inside of what’s core to NFL simulation football. As we said in our [mission statement] way back in January, we aren’t about gimmicks, we are here to create an authentic representation of the sport. “Everything You See On Sunday, See It In Madden NFL”…injuries are a major part of that.

Along with the obvious concern for the well-being of the athlete, there are also typically very major ramifications to the team when a player gets hurt. How serious is the injury? Can the player continue to play hurt even with the risk of re-injury? How well can his backup fill in if he is out? How will the team adjust to continue without him? Will their opponent exploit the loss of the starter? We wanted to emulate all of this strategy, suspense, and emotion behind injuries in Madden NFL 10.

A Look Back
As a design team, we had many different priorities to juggle this year, and countless features and additions that we wanted to add to the game. Overhauling our injury system however rose to the top of our list quite quickly because it was an area that was 100% core to what you see on Sundays, yet it hadn’t accurately been represented in Madden’s history (especially on 360/PS3).

At the start of next-gen, the injury system was changed to be more of a futuristic approach…a system that could immediately diagnose injuries in real-time including a stylized X-ray of the injury. There was a lot of flash and presentation value to this in the very first concept video, and that was also carried over into the product from Madden NFL 06-09. Below is a shot from the concept video:

And here is a shot from Madden NFL 09:

As we looked to overhaul the system, we all agreed this was the very first thing that we had to change. Though the x-ray concept was cool, the suspense on finding out how badly a player is hurt or not, and if he can return to play, is key to conveying some emotion in our game. So when designing the new system, we chose to notify the gamer via banners, player animations, and commentary. Trainers are brand new to Madden NFL 10, so you can see them run out to take care of a guy if he needs assistance in getting off the field. We also made sure to delay the real result for a couple of plays while the player is evaluated:

Doing that was easy enough, but we weren’t quite satisfied. We wanted to really put some real NFL-level pressure on you the gamer by emulating the tough decision a coach has to make after a player is injured. Do you keep him in or replace him with the backup? Now, after an injury has been diagnosed, you are presented with a tough decision on who to keep in the game. To help you make the decision, we put the risk of re-injury on the screen as well as the ‘effective overall rating’ of the injured player based on him playing hurt so you can compare that to the backup that would replace him.

Yep, there is a known bug on this screen with the dual tickers…it’s being fixed.

For every single injury type and severity in our game (of which there are nearly 100), we dynamically adjust the ratings after the injury occurs. So a shoulder injury can affect things like Throwing Power, Throwing Accuracy, or Stiff Arm ratings, an ankle injury can make it so a player’s juke animations are different and less effective, and a hamstring injury can even affect Speed and Acceleration. Each injury modifies these independently, so more severe injuries obviously negatively impact the ratings at a much larger rate – meaning a bruised shoulder won’t do as much damage to your player’s ratings as a separated shoulder. We also set the re-injury risk independently on each injury – meaning knee injuries have a much higher risk of more severe progression, moreso than something like a finger or rib…typically with those areas once you’re hurt, you’re hurt…it won’t get all that much worse.

Depending on all these factors, you have to make the tough call. Sometimes the decisions are easy – say Tomlinson tweaks an ankle or a knee or something, you can feel pretty confident putting Sproles in without having too much of a drop off. However if Manning takes a bad shot and ends up with an injured throwing shoulder, you might need him to get you the win because the disparity between him and Sorgi is so big. With our new stretched out ratings, this makes this decision that much more important, and also makes managing the depth of your team during Franchise mode a real strategic element that can’t be ignored.

So we have had the ability for players to play hurt in the past, but it was really a low risk proposition – there was just a minor chance of him getting re-injured. And if a re-injury occurred, it was still a pretty random selection to the next more severe injury. You could have a bruised knee and keep playing, and then get a broken rib as the re-injury that puts you out of the game. We wanted to build a more progressive system so players were re-injured in an intelligent manner. Injuries now will be progressive, something like: Bruised Knee -> Sprained Knee -> Partially Torn PCL -> Fully Torn PCL -> Fully Torn PCL and ACL. We also wanted to make sure that something would have to actually ‘trigger’ the re-injury. In the old systems, you could have your running back chip a lineman and look fine and then all of a sudden his ACL was blown out.

We really wanted to make sure that we did implement a true risk-reward system. If you are putting your guy out there on a bum knee, we want you to feel nervous in doing so. So we made sure that real-life actions that could cause an injury, were the true catalysts for a re-injury. For example, if you have kept your running back in the game with a sprained knee, you don’t want to be doing crazy jukes and spins all over the place because he could just plant wrong and get severely injured. You want to take care and use him sparingly – get the best out of him but not risk losing him for the long term. I wanted to show this in full, but it was just taking me a long time to trigger in game (due to the rarity). To show it off I just included the motion capture video of our actors doing their best “I just blew my knee out” impression that we can play if a guy ends up cutting too hard and re-injuring himself (we picked the guy on the right obviously):

Some other details we added:

- Injuries occur more often on special teams plays

- Injury slider was added so anyone can tune to their liking

- Re-injury risk is increased for online and play now (since people won’t have to worry about long term injuries, we still wanted to add a risk to playing with someone that’s hurt)

- Recreated nearly every single injury type, replacing unrealistic legacy injuries like “bursitis” and “dehydration” with new ones.

- There’s finally an injury cart!

Well that’s it for our new injury system. In summary:

1. Injury status / severity is delayed instead of immediate for more suspense and realism

2. All new animations with trainers and injury carts are shown

3. You are automatically prompted to let injured players play hurt (when applicable) or sub in the backup

4. Players playing hurt have their ratings negatively affected (based on the severity of the injury)

5. Players playing hurt have a (logical) risk of re-injury

6. Players show that they are hurt with in-game injury animations like limping

7. Re-injuries happen realistically instead of randomly.

We are really happy with this feature because it has added a whole new strategic element to Madden that hasn’t been there before. It also really helps convey the emotion and suspense of the NFL better in our game. If you have any feedback, please post away in the comments section or  in the forums.

- Ian Cummings
Lead Designer, Madden NFL 10

Well in case you didn’t know a very important gathering was conducted last week at the Tiburon Studios; where 8 guys from Operation Sports was invited to give early feedback on Madden NFL 10. This is very much unprecedented as EA has never really done this before this early. In the latest blog on EA Sports Ian Cummings describes the event as a big success and goes further on some of the feedback that was given.

In the blog Ian talks about past Community Days as:

Previous community days usually took place around a week or two before the game was set to go ‘gold’. This meant we could show a typically much more polished game, but on the downside it meant that there was very little time to make any changes. A quick google search reminded me that last year’s 09 community event took place on May 30, 2008 (http://www.pastapadre.com/2643/live-blog-madden-09), as opposed to this year’s event on April 10 (nearly 7 full weeks earlier!). This gives us so much more time to address feedback on our new features and on existing features. As far as I know, we’ve NEVER had anyone have a hands-on this early in the process…it’s quite a refreshing change.

This year Phil Frazier and I actually hand-picked 8 community members off of OperationSports.com based solely on the quality of their posts. None of them had ever been to the Tiburon studio before, and as far as I know, none of them had even really see an early build of Madden (or really any game for that matter). We decided to change this up because we knew the guys we picked were very critical but also typically every single post was well thought out. Many of these guys have been known around the Madden and 2k communities for years and years. Previous community days typically featured more “community leaders” – the guys that ran sites. Not to say that those guys weren’t providing feedback, because they obviously always did get us some amazing stuff, but we wanted to try something new and get the guys that we thought were extremely critical and had in depth knowledge of our former competitor’s products as well.

As one of the “Community Leaders” brought in early in years past, I have to say that this is a big deal and the the feedback given I know was tremendous. I have no doubt that the so called “Community Leaders” would have done just as good of a job. My one concern that I have is that there was not variety. I have no doubt that those guys did a great job, because I know some of them. I just think that if you want to get community feedback then why not take people from more of the community. I would think that a top tournament player would be involved in this process. Out of the 8 that went, do any know how to Rocket Catch?  Last year when we went to EA and viewed the game, strafe catching and Rocket Catching were still in the game, but it was too late in the cycle to do anything about it.  In fact there were many things that we suggested that got fixed right then and some that we were told “Next Year”.  Why not bring someone out that can RC, nano blitz, and do things that “break” the game so that it can fixed before it goes gold. OS (Operation Sports) has a huge following and the fact that Madden Developers post on their site is a huge plus for OS as well as EA. Now I will say that the fact that they picked guys that are very critical and were well knowledgeble about the 2K series is very interesting. The big thing that Madden lacks from it’s competitors 2K was presentation. I wonder how much did this event focus on presentation because it seems more gameplay related. I for one did not like the running physics of 2K but loved their presentation and if you ask most people what EA could do to be more like 2K they would say presentation. Will Madden show the presentation that we’ve been longing for?

Now please don’t get me wrong because I love the interaction between EA and the Community with the blogs, but there are other sites that have a very fair amount of wishlist items for Madden 10 also. I just think when you get 8 guys from the same site, they are all thinking the same thing, and represent the same type of person. After the NCAA feedback event there was a big out cry on OS that EA needed to get some OS guys out there and I have to admit I wondered why there was no OS guys there also, but to pick nothing but OS guys seem a little overboard. Does OS really have that much pull? All that aside, the most improtant thing is that there was an incredible amount of feedback from the guys there and Ian is going to be busy for weeks to come. View the full blog here.

Let’s move to some other news. Ian also released a new screenshot:

There are a couple of things you’ll notice right away like the handwarmers, the green glove on Dion Branch and the usage of blending layers that was outlined in a previous blog. The picture looks good and it seems like the game is coming along great. This is looking more like the Madden Montage that was presented at the beginning of Madden 06 for Nex-Gen. Looking forward to next weeks blog.

- Shopmaster

NCAA Football 10 has two new features they are talking about; Player Lock and Defensive Assist. While out at EA Studios a month ago, I was able to use these two new features and test them out. I will say that the Player lock and defensive assist was very easy to use and a lot of fun.  I think everyone will be using these new features this year and will be awarded with lots of fun and a freshness to the game.

Here is what EA’s Russ Kiniry has to say about these two features:

With Player Lock you can select a player on the field and choose to stay him the entire play, this gives you a new perspective depending on the position you choose. In the above example you can see the transition from going from our normal game-play camera to a view behind the middle line backer we locked on too.

You can take any player on defense and any skill position on offense (sorry offensive linemen) to Player Lock onto. I’ve found it the most fun to use on defense, it brings a new way to look at the field and play the game. It is really fun and rewarding to know you were locked on to one player for the whole play and got the pick or the sack.

Here is a random screen shot we got last night of an attempt to block a field goal:

Makes for a nice break for our next feature…

In an effort to help players on defense we’d also like to introduce Defensive Assist. By pressing the A button on Xbox 360 (or the X button on PlayStation 3) your player will move to his correct position at any given time. For example say you are not exactly sure where the corner you are controlling should be playing his zone; all you have to do is press the A button and the player under you control will move to his assignment on the field.

Not only does this apply to zone coverage it applies to all movement on the defensive side of the ball; pursuit angles, man coverage, and ball landing spots. It can also help you swat down a pass, but it will not try and go for an interception or attempt a hit stick tackle (it is an assist after all).

Personally I’ve used the Defensive Assist to be able to focus on reading what play the offense is doing and not have to worry about if I moved that linebacker I was controlling too far out of his zone. It’s also nice to get a player moving in the right direction as soon as the ball is thrown, then I like to take over and go for the tackle or pick myself.

I was fortunate enough to go to EA and test these two features out and here is my opinion and how I think they will be effective in NCAA Football 10.

Player Lock

I always like to play with the Safety at the beggining of games and using the player lock feature made it easier to catch interceptions. I did think that making a tackle was a little harder but I think that’s just because I wasn’t used to playing from that view. It was a lot easier to play as a defensive end while using player lock than it was not playing with it on. I felt I was more in control of my DE and was able to swim move more effectively using the man lock. I think guys who usually play with a defensive player will fall in love with this feature. There were a couple of things I noticed about the player lock that I didn’t like.

1. When I did the player lock as a punt returner or a kick returner the camera pointed to the ground as I caught the ball and it took the view of the on comming defenders out of view and I didn’t yeild to much on the return. I think because they have the camera looking the ball in, the camera follows the ball all the way to your hands. I mentioned this to Russ, so hopefully this gets fixed.

2. The second thing I noticed was the angle you get if the player ran past you. It was a weird transition the way the camera moved. It gave a weird angle that was hard to go after the carrier.

To activate the player lock, all you have to do is cycle to the person you want to lock on to and press the right analog stick down.

One thing to note that once the play starts you can not take the player lock off.

I really like this added feature and will make playing defense a little more exciting. I was really having fun locking in and making plays.

Defensive Assist

Defensive Assist was made to assist a player in movement. Many times when a person takes control of a player they may waver from their zone or their defensive assignment and this helps get the player back on track. When you are on a player and you hold down A on the 360 (X on the PS3) the player is supposed to automatically move to the correct position. It actually works pretty well when it is activated but I had trouble getting it tow work consitently. I really tested it out as the DB and the WR running an in or an out and held the defensive assist down to not loose the WR when they made their cut. I was able to stay in position and pick off the pass a couple of times. So for those who like to play DB this will be a nice feature to use. Like I said I had a difficult time getting it to work all the time. Sometimes my man would just stand there on Man to man and leave the WR wide open.

- Shopmaster

This weeks blog entry from Ian Cummings focuses on a new feature that is in both Madden NFL 10 and NCAA Football 10 – Adaptive AI.  Ian talks about the perils of the Madden game when opponents do things that ‘exploit’ the CPU AI.  You see it all the time online and at tournaments.  I saw one post on the EA forums where a guy asked if this is geared to stop the Rocket Catch.  In my opinion the Rocket Catch is not an exploit as it is a flaw in the programing.  Even if the the Adaptive AI would make the computer jump the WR on curls, they still don’t jump high enough to stop the Rocket Catching.

You can check out the full blog here. I strongly suggest you read the blog entry, some very promising things in there.

Why Adaptive AI?

In nearly every sports game that you’ve ever played, there usually comes a time where someone discovers some sort of gameplay strategy that is extremely successful (in an unbalanced way). Often times these are considered ‘exploits’ because they are either impossible or extremely hard to stop. You may find it on your own, or you may learn it from someone abusing you with it online, or you may even pay to find it on a shady website. Regardless, these exploits can often extremely hamper the replay value of a game because at some point, nearly everyone gets tired of doing the same thing over and over again and beating up the CPU by 100 points…and at this point the game typically comes out of the tray. Whether it’s an exploit or a “money play”, it’s all frustrating…so from the start of the cycle we knew that we wanted to create an Adaptive AI infrastructure in our football games. Two of our most experienced gameplay / AI engineers – Daniel White and Ryan Burnsides – took the reigns with designing and implementing the majority of this system so I hope this blog does it justice.

What does it do?

The adaptive AI framework that we’ve built for Madden NFL 10 is rather simple at its base, but its power is in its ease of use and integration to the game. Any designer or engineer can use a tool to set up any number of inputs (variables that come in from the game), as well as outputs (how the AI should react to those variables), and save them off and quickly preview how those changes come out in game. That may sound really technical, so here’s a good example.

Input: QB scramble outside tackles 3+ times for 5+ yards
Output 1: Defensive hot route: defensive end to flats
Output 2: Defensive play call: Boost to QB spy plays
Output 3: Defensive hot route: corner blitz on scrambling side

Simple right? At its basic core, it means that we as a team can add some ‘success’ parameters to our tool, and give the defense some simple commands that they can try to use to stop them. The cool part is that we basically create these rule sets by collecting data on how we actually play. If someone is burning you with constant passes to the flats, then you call plays with more flat zones. If someone is burning you with dives up the middle, then you pinch your line and crash them. If someone is burning you with corner routes, then maybe you’ll double cover the receiver or drop back more into a cover 3. All of these situations are extremely easy to add, and we can add these types of decisions into the CPU (coaches and defenders) to help them react with whatever is happening to them in the game. When we dictate what ‘success’ actually means (which is often the toughest thing to judge), we can choose that based on total yardage gained, average yards gained, percentage of total plays run, or other factors.

Another really cool part of this system is actually the ability to directly modify attributes under the hood, simulating true on the fly “learning” of a defender. For example, if an offense is running the exact same play over and over again for big gains, we would boost the defense’s play recognition ratings to emulate them learning for their mistakes to have a better chance to react when they see the same look again. Same goes for something like continuous out routes…a defender will get better and better at man coverage if you keep running the same route over and over again, but would drop back down to his original rating if you keep mixing it up. It should also be said that were keeping some integrity by not modifying physical attributes like speed, jumping, or acceleration.

As a ‘Sim’ player, I’m really looking forward to this Adaptive AI.  It frustrates me that I know the play that they are doing but because the AI is so stupid they can’t react to it.  I also think that unless EA stop using animations that make WR jump higher than any other player you are still going to have exploits.

One of the things I’m looking forward to is fatigue and more specifically progressive fatigue.  I think that will do wonders.  If you send a WR deep one play he should be tired and not have the same speed he had on the play before.

We finally have some new Madden NFL 10 news to sink our teeth in after the bitter taste of an April Fool’s joke that left a bad taste in our mouth.  Some people were very angered about what transpired this morning when EA put up a fake blog entry about a fake new feature called QB Vision 3.0.  I’ll get into that whole story in another article but lets take a look at the real news which is Sideline Catching in Madden NFL 10.

To extend an olive branch and show that we’re not totally heartless, I figured I’d touch really quickly on a REAL improvement to gameplay for Madden NFL 10 (via new animation technology and AI) in the area of sideline catches.

If you have played pretty much any version of Madden, this has probably happened to you:

You throw a nice pass to your receiver as he breaks open on an out route towards the sidelines, but your WR plays a catch animation that gets his foot just out of bounds, nullifying your perfect vision as a QB (sorry, bad pun). This is one of the more frustrating occurrences across all skill levels for every Madden player. We knew we had to fix this.

There are three main things that we will do for Madden NFL 10 to improve this area:

1. Added AI to make players dynamically slow down as they approach the sideline (instead of running full speed)

2. Allow early animation branching at the end of certain animations so they learn to better drag their feet

3. Dynamically “steer” the catch animation as he approaches the sideline. This emulates what a real NFL player does as he tries to keep his feet in bounds…he will try to ‘curve’ upfield to maximize his shot at getting his feet down where possible.

Check out the video below – an example from Madden NFL 09 is on the left while the new technology you’ll see in Madden NFL 10 is at work on the right. You can pretend that the out of bounds line is the edge of the grid. In the example, you can see how just a slight bit of “steering” on a catch animation can mean the difference between a pass being incomplete and complete. You’ll also notice how the same animation can branch into a more realistic “toe drag” ending and make the player look much more aware of his surroundings. We can also make players with higher awareness and agility ratings actually “steer” even more upfield, which could hypothetically even keep guys in bounds and able to keep running up field (probably wouldn’t apply in this example though).

So there you go, something that has been overdue for a longtime.  Let me take that off my checklist.

- Shopmaster

This Madden Monday on Inside EA Blog, Ian Cummings talks about Customization. Not the customization where you can put a black glove on the left hand of your Superstar or one black shoes for kickers. Ian talks about customizing your Game Settings, Gameplay, and sliders.

This week we thought it would be a good idea to go deeper into an area that we know is very near and dear to the community – the topic of customization. A typical trait of every game designer is that usually they are in love with their ideas. This is usually always a really good thing (assuming their ideas are good) because if you don’t like an idea that you are designing or working on implementing, often you won’t have the passion to get that “extra something” into the feature to make it special, or tune it 100% correctly, or make it really stand out. As you might expect, this can also be a major downside to a designer, as often times it is easy to get stuck thinking where you know (or think) you are right and you don’t want to change that idea. It is so hard to not be defensive…after all, you put your blood sweat and tears into this feature! You worked til 3 am for a week putting in extra details and tuning it to perfection! How could anyone not feel the same way you do?!?!?

The problem here is evident…not every consumer thinks like every game designer! If said designer is making a game that sells 30,000 copies, maybe everyone can see that vision, but when you’ve got a game like Madden that’s selling that many copies in the first few seconds of release, it is IMPERATIVE that the loyal fans have a means to customize their experience. I know personally for me it was a real eye-opener once I started heavily interacting back and forth with the community. No matter what, there was always someone that hated one of our new features, or someone that preferred the game tuned a different way.

For example (these aren’t real quotes by the way…just fake examples):

“Check out our new helpful button hints under the player” - Us
“How do I turn those button hints off?” – adembroski

“Check out our new awesome touchdown hot spots!” - Us
“Can I turn them off?” - LBzRule

“Check out our new killer pre-game intro!” – Us
“Why can’t I button through it?” – BeZo

Having this kind of interaction with the community spelled it out EXTREMELY clearly – we really needed to focus in this area and make sure that we were allowing numerous customization options, especially the ones that had been requested for so many years by our community. On a side note, knowing that we wanted to spend this week talking about customization, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to give everyone a look behind the scenes of how we actually make the game. Early on in the product year (i.e. July of 2008), the design team writes many (often hundreds) of design documents to detail out what we want to see the following year’s product. These documents often go through SEVERAL iterations as we meet with the engineering and art teams, but overall this one document is the “blueprint” of what the feature will become in the game. So for your viewing pleasure, instead of me actually blabbering on about the detail behind what we’re going to do with our customization this year, I figured I would just paste in the design document that we wrote for our new settings screens.

These are very good additions, additions that I know every hardcore Madden fan wants to hear. Everyone likes to play the game differently and I’m very curious how the game speed is going to be implemented and how it affects the game.

What in the article are you most interested about hearing more about or what you will be customizing when you get the game?

Russ Kiniry is back with a new blog on Inside EA Sports blog and this time he’s talking about a feature that is bound to be a big hit with anyone who played NCAA Football 09.  One of the glaring things with last years game was the way that the AI pursued the ball carrier.  At times the AI would literally be running beside you and let you gain almost another 10-15 yards before he would be at the right angle and by that time it was too late.

You can see the defenders gave up huge play due to the angle they took. The entire team took a bad angle instead of trying to intercept the ball carrier down field. Basically you could gain extra yards (or a touchdown) because defenders would use the sideline and while trying to make a tackle. Let’s look at the same situation in NCAA Football 10:

Before:

NCAA Football 09 Sideline Pursuit Angles from easports on Vimeo.

You can see the defenders gave up huge play due to the angle they took. The entire team took a bad angle instead of trying to intercept the ball carrier down field. Basically you could gain extra yards (or a touchdown) because defenders would use the sideline and while trying to make a tackle. Let’s look at the same situation in NCAA Football 10:

After:

NCAA Football 10 sideline pursuit angles from easports on Vimeo.

So instead of allowing the ball carrier to beat the whole defense to the sideline the defenders took a much better angle to stop a TD. What this means is all the extra yards picked up by just running to the sideline will be greatly reduced. Now if you are still able to get to the outside on a defense there are still yards to be had; but a much more reasonable amount.

Russell also talk about the the twitch pursuit angles.  From the looks of it and having played it first hand I can say that this makes a big difference in the game.  There are not a lot of long runs where you just go straight to the sidelines and twitch your way up the field for a touchdown.

We have been used to Ian Cummings’ blogs every Monday giving us some new information that has been added, tweaked, or deleted from Madden NFL 10. This Monday though I saw a tweet from Ian saying that there was not going to be a new Madden 10 Blog and that he couldn’t compete with Peter Moore’s announcement. Ian is none the wiser as Peter Moore’s blog was all about Madden and included a Screenshot of Madden NFL 10. The picture is worth a thousand of words and I’m going to try to breakdown as much of the picture that we see, and the things that we don’t see.

The Picture

The picture shows “Big” Ben Rothlisburger looking down field for an open WR against the Arizona Cardinals. Now the first thing I noticed was the ref.

The Referee

Ok, since halftime of the Superbowl when Ian wrote a blog saying that what you see in the game will be in Madden NFL 10, I’ve been waiting to see referees on the field. If you go to any Madden wishlist from the Madden Community you will see at the top of the lists, referees on the field. While I personally didn’t care if refs were on the field I really think it plays a great importance on making the game authentic and true to the game.

Here are my questions I have about the refs:

- Will there be refs on the sidelines, behind the linebackers

- Will they show the referees running behind the play on breakaways

- Will there be interaction between the refs and the players, will one get ran over if he gets in the way?

- Will they have the same referee or will Carey and Hochuli switch?

Big Ben

Ok, lets try to turn our focus away from the ref. I know it’s hard but just to the left of him is ‘Big Ben’ with a number of things that are new to the game.

- Hand towels. Whew I’m glad EA added that. The community boards will quiet down for a little bit after seeing that bit of added material.

- Also notice the Super Bowl patch on Ben’s shirt

- One glove. Notice how there is only one glove that ‘Big Ben’ is wearing.

Chain Gang

Ok so the chain gang is finally back in the game. Because we haven’t seen the chain gang in some time I have a number of questions regarding them.

- Will there be the yard marker also with the down. Looks like one all the way to the top left of the picture.

- Will the chain gang drop the markers and jump out the way if Brandon Jacobs gets pushed out of bounds?

- Will you actually see them change the down?

- Will they come on the field and measure if it’s close, can coaches (users) ask for a measurement?

- Will they show the chain gang run down the field after a first down or will they automatically appear in place?

Other

Other things noticed in the pic are the following:

- Custom Super bowl sidelines

- The line forming a pocket

- Gatorade coolers

- Sidelines. Looks not one person was repeated in this shot and we all know how zombie looking they are in previous Maddens. More people on the sidelines.

Are there any other things that I haven’t noticed, let me hear what you found?