Hey Madden Nation, my name is Larry Richart, and I am one of the designers on the gameplay team working on Madden NFL 10 this year. Just to give you a little background on me, I have been at Tiburon for around 9 years, and this will be my 6th year working on gameplay and the Madden playbooks. Before joining the EA Sports team, I attended the University of Florida and played quarterback for the Gators. In fact, many of the QB animations you have seen in the game over the years from handoffs to passes have been from me getting in the motion capture suit up at our Vancouver studio.
Here’s a good photo of me running for my life against Citadel in 1998.
We had one overarching goal to reach when it came to playbooks this year: “our teams MUST play like their real life counterparts do on Sundays”. With that in mind, we have focused on creating several unique formations and plays that are team and playbook specific. Anthony White (another designer / playbook guru) and I have spent countless hours watching game film on every team in the NFL to try and find some of these unique plays and formations. But we also knew that it wasn’t enough to just add some correct plays and formations into the playbooks, we also really had to change up the way the teams called these plays as well. In future blogs, we’re going to touch on the technology we built and tuning we did to hit that goal, as well as more detail on the formations and plays we have added to make the most authentic version of Madden NFL in history.
But before we go too deep on what we’ve added so far, we felt that we needed to go ahead and let everyone get a sneak peek at the formation that everyone has been asking about. The Wildcat! Yes, folks, the Wildcat will be in Madden NFL 10 in full force, including many new animations that were specifically motion captured to support it. Today we will show the Wildcat in action, specifically the Jet Sweep, Power, and Counter plays.
Throughout the season we have witnessed many different teams use variations of the Wildcat, but no one used it more effectively and extensively as the Miami Dolphins. In the Dolphins version of this offense, they placed running back Ronnie Brown at the “Quarterback” position. They then lined up running back Ricky Williams at slot receiver, and often times brought him in motion to either receive or fake a handoff from Brown. The Dolphins also use an unbalanced line by moving the left tackle over to the right side of the formation and lining him up next to the right tackle. The Tight End moves down to replace the left tackle and is still an eligible receiver because he is on the end of the line and uncovered (You’ll see a good video example of this below) by another receiver.
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The Wildcat had its coming out party in a week 3 matchup between the Dolphins and the New England Patriots with Ronnie Brown putting up a remarkable five touchdowns. What was even more remarkable was that four of those touchdowns came out of the Wildcat formation. The first play we are going to breakdown is the “Power” play. On this play, the slot receiver will come in motion from the left and fake the Jet Sweep, and Brown will follow his pulling guard through a hole on the right.
To view a video from the Dolphins-Patriots game and other videos detailing these formations, go to the Inside EA SPORTS Blog. There you may also make comments. Until next time…
- Larry Richart
Designer, Madden NFL 10
