EA has announced its planned updates to the franchise mode for Madden NFL 21. The announcement comes on the heels of one of the most serious fan-led campaigns against a video game in recent memory.
Sparke by the lack of ingenuity that Madden 21 offered. Fans expressed their anger online — getting hashtags such as #NFLDropEA and #FixMaddenFranchise trending on multiple platforms. Disappointed fans also bombarded Metacritic with low scores causing the fan rating to be a record low of 0.4 out of 10.
The Updates from the blog include the following
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X-Factor/Superstar Ability Customization: This highly requested feature by the community allows commissioners to assign X-Factors to any player via the edit player feature. Once a player has met the criteria to unlock an X-Factor ability, commissioners will be able to edit their player’s Superstar abilities and Superstar X-Factor ability by selecting from those available within his position group. Users will have control over this functionality in both offline and online Franchises.
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Player Card Career Stats UI: A top community request for several years now, the team is revamping the statistics on the player card to include more context in season stats, like week, opponent, and outcome, while also providing what team the player was on for every year of their career.
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Dev Trait Regression Tuning: The team is doing tuning work to player development traits in Franchise mode to ensure a proper balance of Superstar and X-Factor players when progressing multiple years in a Franchise.
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Playoff Bracket: A visual playoff bracket will be added into the game that reflects the new Wild Card format, allowing users to see the full playoff picture.
EA also clarified that these updates would not require users to begin a new franchise mode to see the updates.
It’s clear from the text fans requested the first two changes. The question is, will they be enough?
Several initial responses to the updates have been they are “too little too late”, but this is just the first of 3 planned sets of changes. Perhaps the next two will offer more and convince fans to give EA and Madden 21 another chance.
