Madden NFL 10: Sim Style Gameplay

From the very beginning of the year, we've tried to make clear our vision for Madden - one of authenticity, realism, & simulation (aka 'sim'). There is no doubt that we all want to turn this game into the most realistic version of Madden in history. This week I wanted to touch on some of the changes we've made (and struggles we've had) while trying to achieve this goal for Madden NFL 10. There are quite a few categories...

-- Inconsistent Animation Speeds --

Over the course of the years, Madden has increased the speed of specific animations (and sets of animations) here and there across many areas. Typically, these are put in place to fix small bugs like times where maybe a handoff won't match up, or a situation where maybe the user doesn't have enough control. However, these small little changes can actually manifest upon themselves and end up causing pretty big issues in the game. VERY early in the cycle (like August) we committed to remove all these arbitrary speed alterations for Madden NFL 10, and truly fix the root issues that they were put in place to handle.

As an example of a speed alteration gone wrong, below is a video showcasing exactly WHY the fullback dive is so effective...see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbwkHympnpI

You'll notice that because the FB doesn't have a proper initial move animation, in order for the handoff to work correctly the QB has to turn around at warp speed. This in turn makes it so the FB is nearly at the line of scrimmage before many players on the defensive side have even gotten out of their stances. The Madden 10 version shows how a simple fix (like a new initial move for the FB) can make this play into much less of an exploit and into a more realistic representation of the play. I can hear the tournament players everywhere cursing my name.

Another great example of how a relatively small speed alteration can blow up into a bigger issue is the speed of the QB dropback. The QB drop was initially sped up because he was getting 'sucked' into sacks too easily if he took a normal dropback speed. This has been discussed often on the forums...though only the QB drop is altered to play faster, with the QB being set up too quickly the timing of the routes cease to have as much importance, the blockers can't correctly form a pocket around you (since the DL are barely out of their stances while the QB is already set), and the passing game now has turned into a very unrealistic representation of the real sport. Well thanks to our new blending technology (more details here, here), and all the time spent tuning the tolerances/distances for sack animations to trigger, we no longer have to worry about speeding the QB up to successfully get a play off. Here's a good comparison video of old vs. new: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jWQolrvt-4

It was an easy enough design decision within our team that all of those arbitrary speed alterations had to go. The good thing with us all getting on the team early and being so far out in front of this...we were able to set everything back to zero and then fix any issues that arose with all the time we had in the cycle. In summary... How Consistent Animation Speeds Affect Gameplay: Visual +15, Exploits -22, Realism +10

-- Pass Speed --

Pass speed was something that was actually quite a bit over the top in previous years...did you know a typical bullet pass exceeded 77 mph in our game?! In Madden NFL 09, not only did every QB throw a similar bullet pass in mph regardless of their rating, but also every QB also threw "mini-punts" instead of touch passes (even on short and intermediate routes) due to the high speed of the ball upon release. Realistically, we can all agree that Brett Favre in his prime probably had the most zip on his passes, and he's been clocked around 65-70 mph (from what I saw on ESPN). So we brought the max mph down to 70 mph (for a 99 Throw Power guy in perfect weather), and also brought the minimum speed down as well so we could scale down the 'curve' of how the ratings affect the pass. Now for Madden NFL 10 you will see much more obvious disparity between throw power ratings, and also you will see much more "touch" on passes on shorter routes instead of record-setting hang time on lobs. How It Affects Gameplay: Disparity between QB's +10, Touch Passes + 22, Realism +10

-- Overall Game Speed --

After all of above changes were made, we all really were enjoying the way the game started to feel. It was much more realistic...and gave off a much less 'frantic' feel (if that makes sense). We had one more big area to tackle though - and that was GLOBAL game speed. While playing Madden NFL 09, often times you may have felt like the result of the play was "scripted"...everything happened so fast that it was often very difficult to have an influence on the outcome of the play.  On running plays, holes closed up immediately.  On passing plays, defensive backs came out of nowhere to deflect a pass. For Madden NFL 10 we knew that we all preferred a slower game - one that felt more 'sim' and more realistic.  But this is often a hotly contested topic. This poll proves that people never can seem to agree on game speed. So what did we do? Well first we decided to decrease the game speed by 5% overall. As subtle as that change to game speed may sound, it has drastically improved the overall control of the game.  It is definitely easier to identify the hole created by the offensive line. Scanning the field as routes develop make it easier to keep passes out of harm's way. But we know that not everyone wants that style, so we also included a GAME SPEED SLIDER. Finally right? How Game Speed Changes (+ a Slider) Affects Gameplay: Control +7, Realism +10, Customization +7

-- Ratings Changes --

After Donny re-rated every player in the speed rating, and we had tuned our speed curves to truly make our game showcase the differences between the players, we were feeling pretty damn good. Being that speed was our biggest concern though, we wanted to check our sanity and tested some different player ratings and how fast each player (in a specific rating range) ran 40 yards in our game. These results will probably surprise you...they sure did us

D'oh! Looks like we went a little too far! I think we can all agree that we won't be seeing too many folks running a 7.8 second 40 yard dash (video game developers might have those times, but not NFL athletes). This immediately brings to light the very real clash that can exist between fun and realism in sports games. We thought we were dead on - we thought the game felt great, was fun to play, and was really showcasing the differences between players. But when you look at the numbers, it is obvious that doing something that you feel makes the game more fun to play can differ quite greatly from a full realistic simulation. So what do we do? Well, first, we can't break our mantra...again, we're all for realism and authenticity in Madden NFL 10. But also we realize that we're making a game for millions of people, most of which are focused on a fun yet competitive experience, and many of them could probably care less about realistic 40 times. So what's our solution? Read on...

Within minutes of seeing these results, we knew right away that we needed to be able to tune the "speed difference" independently, and tune it per skill level. So our engineers built a nice system for us where we can compress this range however much we see fit, and also set the defaults for each skill level as well. You will see below that a good way to make Pro and Rookie difficulties a little easier is to spreads the ranges of speeds out, while on All-Pro / All-Madden we want to emulate real life as much as possible. We want you to boot up and say hello to Sundays in the NFL.

NOTE: To be ultra clear, this is NOT the scale we use to determine the speed rating of a player! This showcases how fast a player runs 40 yards currently in our game based on the rating that he is given. Donny determines the actual speed ratings of the players based on many different factors...not just the 40 time of a player.

We also realized that you, the loyal Madden gamer, may not agree with these numbers. Many may believe that speeds should always be a constant, and difficulty should be handled in other ways (I sort of straddle that line myself). But to address everyone's concerns, we just went ahead and exposed our tuning values into a "speed differential" slider into gameplay settings. If you want to play on Pro mode but want all of the players to have more realistic speeds, you can do so. If you want to play on All-Madden but want the really fast players to truly feel faster than everyone else, you can do that as well. That way hopefully everyone can be happy. :) How Realistic Player Speeds Affect Gameplay: Overall Gameplay + 10

Madden NFL 10 - Improvements to WR/DB interaction

As most folks already know, as a design team we've been very active on the forums recently (starting about a month or so before the Madden NFL 09 release). Within minutes of talking with the community it's easy to tell that one of the most common areas requested for improvement is DB/WR play. Obviously, we're listening to you, and here are just some of the other improvements and changes that you can expect to see in Madden NFL 10 come August.

Defensive Assignments / Matchups

For any that aren't totally familiar with this feature, in a nutshell it allows you to assign a defender to ALWAYS shadow a specific receiver around the field. So if someone is moving Randy Moss all over the place and you can't keep track of him, then you can assign your best defender to always keep him covered. I am not really going to dwell on this feature too much as it did exist in the PS2/Xbox days, but I did want to mention that we finally have it back (and it sure feels good to have back). Also of note - this is a Madden only feature.

Route Running and Man Coverage

We've really spent quite a bit of time on the 'game within the game' of WR/DB interaction. There are two improvements that I'd like to expand on first (as I feel they are the most important), and both are animation related.

First, we replaced nearly every single receiver route animation in the game, with the goal of more accurately recreating real life acceleration and momentum. We are also utilizing the route running rating much more now when selecting these animations. We totally re-tuned which cut moves play (and how 'open' the WR gets) based on an elite/agile/non-agile separation in regards to that rating.

We did basically the exact same thing for defensive reactions while in man coverage. This has allowed us to really re-work our man coverage AI to use animations as the true determination of how open the receiver gets. Before, there would typically be a time delay placed on the defender's reaction time based on his (and the receiver's) ratings. Now, we can specifically pick different animations to determine how fast he reacts, or whether he gets faked out or not. This creates a much more believable and realistic simulation of momentum.

Second, we took a page from the FIFA team and added in the concept of 'jostling'. Personally I am extremely stoked to have this in the game because I've written a design for it for 5+ years in a row...unfortunately we just never had the technology to accomplish it. The 'jostling' concept is a set of looping 2-man animations that can play for the WR and DB as they run downfield. The main reason that I am so big on these animations is that it really helps alleviate a balance problem that has existed in Madden for years. I'm talking about the fact that traditionally you can send a player with a 99 speed rating (regardless of his other ratings like route running, catching, etc) on a streak and easily get behind a defender in man coverage. In real life, regardless of the difference in speed, a good defensive back can use his body to keep the receiver in check... a fly route is rarely an untouched foot-race sprint to the endzone.

Adding these animations also allowed us the ability to call more realistic pass interference penalties. We've added a lot of variety that ranges from minor hand-fighting to severe push-offs and holds, so now we can make sure that pass interference gets called in a much more accurate manner. We're using the man coverage rating of the defender to determine how well he keeps the WR in check and how often he gets penalized.

Here are some other changes that have been made so far for route running:

Added support for slip & fall receiver cut moves in bad weather (chances of slipping come from route running ratings) 

-Re-factored all double moves to work correctly, including defensive cut moves that are companions to the WR cuts (chances of defender biting come from man coverage rating, play recognition rating, as well as boosts for correctly timed pump fakes)

-Added all new start play WR animations with more realistic acceleration (should be visible in the videos above)

­­­­­-Added "pop" animations where say a LB will hit a WR as he comes across the middle through his zone

Press / Release

Another area that we thought needed definite improvements was in the battle between receivers and DB's at the line. Below is a list of all the fixes we've made so far:

-Deleted all previous chuck animations, re-added all newly captured ones from scratch

-Extended animation time drastically on chucks. Longer times not only mean smoother looking animations, but also more realistic reactions from WR's (i.e. they can't catch the ball while they are being chucked so you can't fire the ball over to them immediately and expect them to catch it as they aren't looking for the ball)

-Removed all animation compression on chucks to increase visual fidelity. Found and fixed an issue where the players wouldn't align properly during the chuck animation which used to cause some weird clipping through each other Fixed "suction" bug where press animations could start from like 5 yards away.

-Fixed a bug with zone / man chuck animations...in 09 the chucks for DB's in zone coverage looked just like chucks in man coverage.

-Re-factored the logic for win/loss on chucks based on the route the receiver wants to run. For example, if the WR wants to run inside (i.e. a post), and he "wins" the press, then he won't just pick an animation that beats the press, he'll pick one of many press beating animations that actually break inside. Likewise for defensive players...they'll push the player inside if they "win" the press in like a Cover 2 situation.

-Made it so chucks can now start from stand

Lastly, we've started to use Procedural Awareness (so far just as a purely visual thing). We recently got head tracking in pre-play for WR's so they now look in towards the ball at the snap. This has been long overdue. We also enabled Procedural Awareness head tracking for DB's. In man coverage they will directly 'track' the eyes of the WR, and in zone coverage they will track the QB's eyes, with the ability to also randomly swap targets based on proximity of guys entering their zone.

That's it for this week! We hope these updates and improvements are starting to really show everyone our vision for Madden NFL 10 - one of a true football simulation. For those that would like to know, the NCAA team took all of these improvements (except for the Defensive Matchups - that's Madden only) for NCAA Football 10. To read this original blog post and make comments, visit the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.