I currently live in Baltimore. I can relate.
Open up Madden NFL 13 and the opening credits will give way to Ray Lewis in all of his motivational glory. He’s sitting in a gloomy, dark locker room looking like he’s ready to decapitate the next unsuspecting wide receiver.
How bad do you want to be remembered?
If his purpose was to excite, it definitely worked, and perhaps more importantly, the inclusion of this scene – something you’d see out of an NFL locker room on any Sunday for about the next four or five months – fits perfectly with this year’s game. Madden NFL 13 no longer has an identity crisis, and while there are still points that feel stale and old, the game knows what it’s there for. In this regard, it delivers.
Gone is the weird music that doesn’t fit the nature of the game, replaced by stuff you’d find on an NFL Films mixtape. Gone is the unnecessary window navigating, replaced by one main hub with all of your options in front of you. Gone is the feeling of seeing the same tackles, the same throwing animations, the same gameplay.
Madden NFL 13 is releasing to the public tonight at midnight, but I was lucky enough to receive a copy last week, and I spent parts of the weekend lighting the computer up with Aaron Rodgers and getting run over myself by Chris Johnson. Was it more fun than years past? Definitely. Did the changes work? Almost all of them. People love to hate on sports games for not changing year to year. But this is sports, this is the NFL. It’s BEEN the same for decades. This Madden may feel similar on the surface to past versions, and to some gamers, that’s a drawback. But when you dig a little deeper, the details stand out.
The presentation is better. Pre and postgame cut scenes differ depending on the importance of the matchup, while CBS’ duo of Phil Simms and Jim Nantz are awesome (plus, they’re in 3D booths which were carefully researched to ensure their proper placement in relation to the field in every stadium in the league). The commentary was pretty bad in last year’s version, but now they’re ad-libbing, rambling, and are much better for the game. They feel more in-the-background rather than in-your-face, which I think is important.
All of the new Nike uniforms are in the game (and the customization options are amazing), the lighting is significantly better, especially in those late afternoon games when the sun begins to set, and even the grass on specific fields feels more real. Replays of sideline catches are now often accompanied by spraying white (if he’s out of bounds) or green (inbounds) grass.
But the largest change this year directly affects the gameplay. It is the Infinity Engine, which is meant to insert physics into the game like never before. Of course, we’ve heard this in the past, but it’s definitely improved a lot this year. On one of my very first plays, I noticed an offensive lineman stumble and nearly fall to the ground after a play was whistled dead. Why? He had stood up in the middle of a small pile and bumped into a defender. I thought that was pretty cool, and it happened all the time because the end-of-play pileups felt much more realistic. Players would be sliding off each other, diving and missing as the ball carrier went down, and even occasionally getting stuck at the very bottom.
Every tackle feels unique because of this (some are truly jaw-dropping), and the action around the ball felt much more organic rather than the canned animations many are used to. People know me as a big NBA 2K player, and the canned animations of the last few versions were really annoying. Madden NFL 13 has almost none of that.
One play in particular stood out to me: a 28-yard touchdown pass I threw with Rodgers to Greg Jennings. It was a deep corner fade with one-on-one coverage with a safety. As the ball drifted towards the back corner, both players put their hands up to catch it, and ended up interlocking each other. Jennings got his hand on the ball first and brought it down even as the defender tried to knock it away. There was no ball suctioning, no weird animations where the players arms go through each other, and Jennings even made sure to get both his feet in (realistically) without doing the typical Michael Jackson moonwalk we’ve seen for so many years in Madden.
As a whole, the passing game feels much more responsive. With Total Control Passing, you can pinpoint where you’re hitting every receiver, and while they’ve had something similar in past versions, it was improved tremendously this year. Along with 20 new QB dropback animations, and a number of other small improvements (receivers actually have to be tracking the ball this year, better pass trajectories, receiver-specific pump fakes, and new throwing animations), passing the ball is as fun as ever.
A perfect example of this would be a matchup I had playing as the Lions against the computer, playing as the Titans. I configured the settings to have this be a Super Bowl matchup, meaning all of the presentation was completely different and dope – it felt like I was actually playing in a bigger game that really meant something. Anyways, I lost in OT because I gave up 215 yards to Johnson and threw four picks with Matthew Stafford. You think that’s a red flag for the passing game? Not at all. I’ll tell you why.
Because of the new Total Control Passing, I felt the urge to constantly try to fit balls in-between cover 2 defenses or loft them just over a trailing defensive linebacker or lead a receiver when there was no place to lead him. Because of that control you now have in the passing game, your liberties are expanded. You can try things you couldn’t before, and whether you turn it over or make a big play is up to you.
Another cool feature that I used with the Lions was the player-specific pump fakes. With this addition, safeties were getting caught all over the place against Calvin Johnson.
Defense as a whole feels more realistic this year with the new Read and React Defensive AI. Defenders must now actually see the ball to make plays on it. The defensive coverages are also much more realistic. Gone are the days where a simple motion of a wideout could tell you whether it’s man or zone. They disguise everything in this game.
Inserting the improved gameplay into something like Connected Careers takes it to another level. I’ve always loved the traditional Franchise mode found in Madden – the drafts, the trades, judging the salary cap, etc. This year, Connected Careers makes it even better. Basically what Madden did was take the Franchise, Season, Superstar and Online modes and mixed them all together to give you more customization options than ever before.
In this mode, you can play a career as a current player, a retired great, a coach, or even as yourself (you can load a headshot in as well), and depending on which you choose, gameplay changes. As a player, you can skip everything that doesn’t directly involve you, and only play when your selected player is on the field. But as a coach, you control everything, from calling the plays to playing the game to making offseason adjustments. This is the typical “franchise” mode, only with some small twists: now you have goals to achieve in order to one day make the Hall of Fame, and can earn XP points throughout on small challenges. This is really where you see the developers’ claim that this’ll be “the first true sports game RPG” come into play.
Overall, there are reportedly over 1,000 small challenges in the game that you can look to beat, which greatly enhances the replay value.
Throughout the season as you progress, they’ll be articles on what’s happening across the league, and even the Twitter accounts of real NFL analysts, which amazingly can dictate what happens across the league (if they’re talking news, trades and draft prospects). Who said no one listens to Skip Bayless?
If you grow tired of being a coach, or tired of being a player? You can simply retire a player or coach, and start over again with someone new without restarting the league.
Playing this mode with your friends online is going to be awesome. Some will elect to be coaches and control everything; others may stick with a specific player. But it’ll work regardless because not every human must actually be present to move from week to week. If you’re going on vacation (in real life), you’ll be able to sim straight through and then pick it back up when you get home.
I think at first, people might be slightly intimidated by this mode. It basically incorporates Season Mode, Franchise, Online and Superstar all into one. But it gives you so many options to dictate how YOU want to play that I think people will grow to love it.
There will be people who complain because Madden NFL 13 is still very similar to what the series has created. To me, that’s fine. The NFL doesn’t drastically change from year to year, but it makes improvements in small areas to correct problems. The new Infinity Engine will add the most to gameplay this year, and in my short time using the game over the past week, I loved every bit of it.
Compared with previous versions, Madden NFL 13 just looks, feels and plays more like the real thing. When it comes down to it, that’s what matters to me.
What are you hoping Madden NFL 13 adds to the game?
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