• ampersandrew@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I suppose I implied but didn’t explicitly state that my expectation is that someone would develop that competent football game. There’s an early access game now, arguably 15 years too late, called Football Simulator that could be that game. If it’s well-made, hopefully it serves that audience. But I don’t think it’s just rhetoric. Madden review scores have been falling in later years, and that’s to be expected when they have a monopoly on the NFL license.

    • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Reviews are extremely lazily done and about game modes. The game modes have seen minimal development since the emergence of ultimate team, and people are justifiably unhappy with that.

      Literally not one major outlet is evaluating the actual simulation of the sport, which very clearly has massive investment from year to year and sees serious improvements to complexity and fidelity in each instance, with stagnation only coming when it hits the wall of what console hardware can do.

      I’ve seen football simulator. It might maybe be competitive on physics with decade ago Madden, but even that’s generous. If you just want a vehicle for franchise mode it might work for you, but if you want to play football it’s just not close. Madden isn’t perfect as a football sim either, because the physics of football are insanely complex, but there’s nothing out there that’s better than “kind of close to a decade ago” technically. You’re much more likely to make something tolerable leaning into the discrepancy and making an arcade-y NFL Street knockoff, and that isn’t there either.

      • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Value for money is a great thing to evaluate in a review, and the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years, hence the lower scores.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          the simulation of the sport has seen an increase in bugs in recent years,

          This is a ridiculous lie. It’s not even in the general vicinity of reality.

          The absolute best mainstream review of Madden in existence is a many times less competent version of that platformer review where the guy couldn’t get through the tutorial. You unconditionally are not qualified to give any opinion in any context if you don’t understand the mechanics and strategy of the sport.

          • ampersandrew@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Fine. I don’t play Madden. But I know with the sources I follow on games news, this is what gets echoed back. Giant Bomb does a quick look for the game, say up front that they don’t expect to get through it without encountering bugs, and then they encounter bugs. The kinds of bugs you’d recognize no matter how into football you are.

            EDIT: Yup, bugs are mentioned in many reviews for the last several years of Madden. Seems to be the reality.