While Dynasty mode is the longtime fan favorite of NCAA Football (and for full details on that, go here), now EA Sports College Football, individual player story modes have grown a lot over the last 11 years since we got a college football game. That means there’s plenty of intrigue about Road to Glory, and like with Dynasty mode, gameplay, and everything else, we have a lot of information to share for fans excited to create a player and take them through a college career.
Here, we’ll dive in on everything we learned at last week’s EA Sports summit in Orlando (which included a chance to play the game) about Road to Glory, how they’ve tweaked it to make it much more life-like, and how we think that will play out.
The Basics
One of the things they were quick to note is that Road to Glory is a 10-20 hour story mode, meaning it should take 10-20 hours of gameplay to complete. That’s a pretty short amount of time for a career mode, but is part of the uniqueness of a college football game where you play four years (or five, if you redshirt as a freshman, and, no, there is not a COVID year in the video game). As such, they wanted to make it an extremely replayable mode, where you can make different choices and have different outcomes throughout the experience.
The structure will be pretty simple. You will choose from one of five position options: QB, RB, WR, MLB, and CB. You will also pick your archetype, which is position dependent and will determine your skill tree. You cannot max out the complete skill tree (including your mental and physical abilities), because it is no longer a matter of accruing points and putting them everywhere, but instead is all about building up the areas you pre-select.
No longer will you start in high school, instead picking your level as a recruit at the beginning to determine how hard your grind will be to getting playing time — 5-star (79 OVR), 4-star (75 OVR), 3-star (70 OVR), and 2-star (65 OVR). If you choose to be a 2-star, you will have to really spend a lot of time in practice before you get onto the field. If you’re a 5-star, you’ll still have to win a position battle (more on that in a bit) to get a starting spot. From there, you will pick the things that are most important to you among the 14 pitch grades each school has, and you will get offers based on your star-level and what schools align with what you deem most important.
Once you are in school, you will not have a dorm room like the old games, but instead most of the mode will be done out of the main screen, with different scenarios popping up on your phone throughout. You will manage your time each week and have to decide how to balance your schedule between the five areas of focus — Academics, Leadership, Health, Training, and Brand. How you choose to manage your time will determine everything from your eligibility to play (yes, you can go academically ineligible) to whether you get to challenge for a starting job. Going too far in any direction means neglecting another, which has consequences. On the other hand, it’s not simply a matter of balancing everything out, because that too will mean leaving things on the table.
The primary goal of the mode is to make you make decisions that are not clearly black-and-white. As they explained it, the goal was to create ethical gray areas with the various dynamic scenarios that will present themselves throughout the game. Even things that seem like a good choice, may have a negative consequence — and vice-versa. By doing so, they hope to make the story element really matter, rather than cut screens you are just clicking through to get to the game. How will they do that? Well, let’s dive into the five key areas.
Academics
When they announced you would have to maintain your GPA, many people laughed at the idea you’d be taking tests in the game. That is happily (or, I guess for a few, sadly) not the case. Instead, you simply have to allocate some hours to studying, because there will be tests on your schedule and if you are not prepared (as indicated by a progress bar), you could fail and become academically ineligible. If that happens, you’ll have to spend extra time with tutors, which will further set you back elsewhere. All of the elements come with potential boosts to your skill trees, and academics figure to boost your mental abilities on the field as well.
Leadership and Position Battles
Leadership is where you bank coaching trust points, which are how you get on the field. Allocating time here means getting in the film room and doing the necessary football work that’s not on-field drills to show your coach and teammates that you are committed. When you get enough coach trust and catch a teammate ahead of you on the depth chart, you’ll trigger a position battle. The position battles bring back the glorious return of mini-games, and you will have to win a best 2 out of 3 against your teammate in that mini-game in order to earn that spot. If you win, you will gain a big boost of coach trust (we saw +1500 for a starting job), which solidifies you in that spot for at least a few weeks. If you lose, you only lose a bit (-100, per the screen we saw), but your teammate gains a bunch and you will have to wait for another shot and keep piling up points to trigger another.
A key element of this is, your computer teammates are also always earning coaching trust, and if you start to struggle as a starter, they might catch you and force you into a position battle. That means winning the starting job is only the beginning as you have to perform to keep it. As a note, you will not be able to restart a position battle during it. That means if you lose one, you won’t be able to get a do-over immediately, you’ll have to wait until you trigger the next one.
Health
This is where the Wear & Tear system comes into play (read more details about that here). Throughout the season you will accrue wear and tear on different body parts by taking hits, and when you get too much in one spot, you’ll start to lose attribute points for certain skills that are tied to those areas. You’ll need to put some hours into recovery in order to stay healthy throughout the season, or else you risk getting hurt and missing time.
Training
Training is practices and on-field work where you gain XP and can boost your ratings and skill trees. The more time you spend here, the faster you’ll see that overall rating rise. However, that could come at the expense of something else and having a great OVR won’t help if you aren’t able to be on the field for academic reasons, injuries, or a lack of coaching trust.
Brand
The final piece is the NIL portion of Road to Glory, where you can sign brand deals to get fans and boost your following. Now, this might seem like the least important thing and the easy section to put off. However, each brand deal will come with in-game boosts that will help you out, and boosting your following could be important for the portal. The example they gave was having a deal with a cryotherapy business that helps you heal faster, requiring fewer points spent on the health section during the week.
Dynamic Scenarios
Throughout the game you’ll be presented with various options and you’ll have to pick what to do, with consequences that could be both positive and negative at the same time. For example, you might be asked to go do something with teammates instead of study, and might earn some coaching trust in the leadership category, but if it means you are under-prepared for an upcoming test, your GPA might drop and you could be in danger of becoming academically ineligible. These will pop up throughout your career, and the goal is force you into some choices that aren’t obvious, with how you’re balancing the five main areas always needing to be at top of mind.
Game Day
All of the things you do during the week will impact you on the field on game day as well. Your mental and physical attributes will determine some in-game boosts, as will the aforementioned brand deals. Your coaching trust will determine play-calling options, and for QBs whether you can hot route or audible. Your health will also impact play-calling — a banged up QB won’t get options called, etc. — and if you have piled up wear and tear and not done what’s needed to get it down during the week, you’ll be at risk of an injury and have diminished stats.
Redshirting
Like in real life, you can redshirt a year if you play four or fewer games. The game will automatically do that for you, meaning if you simply can’t win that position battle to get on the field or get hurt one year, you’ll get that fifth year. You cannot demand to redshirt and refuse to play, but you could tank practices and games and try to drop out of a position battle to do so if you really wanted.
Transfer Portal
The transfer portal will be available to you every offseason, like in real life, and will work like recruiting did at the beginning when you picked your first team. You’ll get offers from teams that fit your preferences. I really enjoyed that one example they showed was a guy that really cares about academics, so his top school was Vandy. If you do this in a video game, god bless you. The coaching carousel will also be happening in the offseason so your coach might leave, which impacts coach trust with the new guy coming in, and you might choose to follow your old coach to his new school.
Chasing Records and Awards
There will be a robust record-keeping system, so you can go after national, conference, and school records in various categories. The same will go for awards at the conference and national levels, along with All-Conference and All-America teams.
Exporting To Madden
Something that will be exciting to fans that get both College Football and Madden is that you’ll be able to export your Road to Glory player to Superstar mode in Madden. That means you have the opportunity to go from recruit to NFL legend across the two games, and could spend 20 years with your RTG player, instead of just four.
Uproxx was invited on a hosted trip by EA Sports for reporting on this piece. They did not review or approve this story. You can find out more about our policy on press trips/hostings here.
