ur copy of Madden NFL 06 for the Xbox 360 finally arrives, and we take a spin with next generation football.  We've got quite a few widescreen movies for your enjoyment.  After a number of games we chat with Xbox 360 Madden NFL 06 Senior Producer Jeremy Strauser about the leap to next generation, some of the changes to the franchise, and what it's like to scrap everything and start from scratch. 

Game Informer:  How long has the next-gen version of Madden for Xbox 360 been in development?

Jeremy Strauser:  Well, the main team has been working on it for about 12 months.  But a smaller team is probably closer to 18 months and even a subset of that has been even longer than that, probably around two years.  Obviously in its early stages we didn’t have any of the hardware, we were just working on theoreticals, designs, practical targets, and things of that nature.

GI:  Were you happy when you got the actual development kits, even though we know they got out late to developers?

Strauser:  It depends on which development kit you’re talking about.  (laughs)  Ultimately, we were very happy with the hardware and the capabilities of the final kits.  Actually, the way that Microsoft handled development in terms of getting us updates was really, really good.  Having been through a transition before and with a new hardware launch – like PS2 – Microsoft really had their act together and they were great partners through out this process.

GI:  Was utilizing the hard drive some thing you could have done?   Or did EA - as part of a corporate wide structure - decide not to do that, as far as improving loading times, and other features intrinsic to having the hard drive?

Strauser:  You know, features-wise we probably couldn’t have done that because at the time that we needed to make the feature-level decisions, we didn’t even know that there was going to even be a hard drive.  The stuff that goes public on the Xbox 360 really doesn’t hit us that much earlier.  It hits us a day or two earlier.  If you recall when they announced the specs, including the hard drive, that’s when we learned for sure that there would be a hard drive.   I guess to answer the question, would we shy away from using the hard drive for a feature now that we know it's there?  No.  Not everybody will have it, so it’s something we’ll have to take into consideration, but we wouldn’t shy away from it, no.

GI:  Looking back to the NFL draft as we camped out to see the trailer for next generation football game, what we’re seeing now isn’t exactly what we saw in the trailer.  It was a trailer and we’re taking that into consideration, but back then we were told by Electronic Arts that the final product would look better than what we saw in that trailer.  Now, with that said, the game does look really good, but what do you say to the people who believe the visuals aren’t on par with the visuals that you promised?

Strauser:  It was a visual target.  I think importantly, we hit the target on many, many fronts.  I think on lighting, motion, player faces, on skin – if you go back to the skin that we had on that target video and look at the skin that ends up in game – we blew it away in game.  Look at the player faces – we blew it away in game.  You look at lighting, animation, how things happen in the game in terms of weather and the field, all that stuff.  We didn’t get to the Gatorade bucket on the sideline, we didn’t get to the full-on Jumbo Tron, in-your-face replay stuff.  There were probably places that we fell short, but overall we feel that we met or exceeded the visual target we set in a vast majority of the elements that we put out there.

GI:  For this Xbox 360 version of Madden, you obviously had some decisions to make as far as  the feature set.  There’s some great things that are in there, as far as precision passing, and vision.  There’s going to be things not in there that people wish would be in there from the current gen.  How did you go about deciding which elements you wanted to keep versus elements you weren’t going to bring forward?

Strauser:  The first thing was we actually worked our way out from the main game.  We knew we needed a main game engine to start with.  Things like vision, precision, hit stick, those types of things were build into the design of the game engine and the control scheme.  When we start talking about the secondary features, things like Franchise Mode, SuperStar Mode, or Create-A-Player – how we made those decisions, we looked at what was the most important to the game players.  Both in terms of what we’ve been reading, whether it’s the message boards, the feedback we get from Madden Mail, and also actual research our marketing and research groups did and how people use the game.  I would have loved to have every feature brought across, but nothing ported for free.  It was a brand new engine in every sense of the word.  It was a new game engine, a new A.I. engine, everything had to be redone completely, so we only had a limited amount of time so we had to do what we did.

Franchise for us was the biggest thing that we had to get in, so we’re quite proud that we have the full 30-year franchise with the full-blown feature set that it has in the game.  Just like we did with Madden on the last generation, we didn’t start with everything that the previous generation had then, either.  So we’re going to continue to add to this over the years and five, six years down the road like the current gen you’re going to see a tremendous wealth of features in the game.

GI:  Two things that you added to the game we’re really excited about, one you added a different kind of play calling, and two, you changed the kicking meter.

Strauser:  Both of those things were core parts of the game engine, and we wanted to do play calling the right way the first time.   We didn’t want to do play calling five different times over the course of this product life.  So we really drew up what we felt was the ultimate way to call plays.  We have the standard formations, the Madden advice, the coach advice, the breakdown of the play, the last 5-play tracker, and the key player stuff.  We wanted to put all the options out there and let people choose whatever works for them, and ironically we thought people would pick one and go with it, but we’re finding people use 3-4 different styles depending on the situation in the game.

The kick meter I think we could even do better, but what we wanted to do was make it less about a golf meter-style kick meter and put it on the field.  It was about making accuracy count.

GI:  Can users expect next year's version of the game to see SuperStar Mode to come back.  Will we see Mini-Camp?  Those sorts of features…

Strauser:  I’m not ready to tell you what we’re putting in Madden ’07 at this point.  But obviously there are lots of great features that were in the current generation Madden that we’re going to consider.  You know, maybe there’s a feature that we haven’t unveiled at all yet.  Maybe we’re working on something like that. 

GI:  In the Xbox 360 version of Madden the Vision Passing is almost optional to the point of being non-existent, since it’s not something that you can turn on always from the beginning of the play.  It leaves it to the player to take the responsibility for themselves.  Is this sort of a reflection that people didn’t really like Vision Passing in current gen?

Strauser:  Yeah, I think it’s the reflection that Vision Passing – while there’s plenty of people that liked it a lot – we realized that there were people that had trouble using it or didn’t care for it, so we wanted it to be an easy thing for people to get to and access.  We didn’t want to hide it in a settings menu or anything like that.  We’ve made it very quick and easy for you to hit the stick or press the left trigger and use it if you like it.  We’re finding the people who liked Vision in the current gen are liking it in the next gen.  We’re finding that people who were against it in current gen were pretty happy with the implementation.

GI:  We’ve been playing current generation Madden on Pro difficult and still found some challenge to that.  With this version we're playing on Pro and we're smoking the computer.  Is Pro easier in this version?

Strauser:  Yes, it is.  It was intentially tuned for Pro to be a little bit less hard, lets put it that way.  I would say that if you have experience with the game you should be playing on All Pro at a minimum.

GI:  Can you explain some of the changes you’ve done to the control scheme with the Xbox 360 version?

Strauser:  We definitely designed the controls with the controller in mind.  As soon as we were able to get our hands on it, and through its various iterations, the control scheme was refined.  Something like the sprint on the right trigger for example, it feels a lot more natural than holding your thumb down – it frees up your thumb for the jukes and the spins.  It was an intentional redesign of the control scheme based on the controller itself.

GI:  How about the change in the presentation.  John Madden and Al Michaels have seemingly taken a step back – I don’t even know if Al is in the game.  Why the decision to go this route?  And who’s the new play-by-play commentator?

Strauser:  Al Michaels is not in the game.  We wanted to make it more about what you hear as a player and what you hear in the stadium and on the field, and that type of on-the-field presentation.  We started working on that, and how the different people present football, whether it be broadcast, or NFL Films, what have you, and we started more of the NFL Films style.  What we found they did was they used the local radio announcer on top of their highlights quite often, to set up the situation and give some excitement.  So we experimented with doing something like that and that’s what we ended up with.  We really like the emotion that the home town radio announcer brings to it.  It’s a voice actor who’s your home town radio announcer.  So basically, he’s always rooting for your team.  If it’s a two player game he’s rooting for the home team.  He’s not there all the time and he’s only there to add some key information and emotion.  You will also hear the in-stadium announcer, who’s actually the stadium announcer for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Gene Deckerhoff.  You hear on-field NFL Films audio from real players, including the real quarterback calls.  So when you play with Duante Culpepper or McNabb or Manning or anyone like that, you’ll get the real calls when you do audibles and hot routes and things of that nature.  The way that we work from the audio perspective and presentation is we want it to be on field, giving you the sense that you’re playing, not watching a TV broadcast. 

GI:  With the picture-in-picture for the hot routes, audibles, or during the playmaker at the line of scrimmage, does the quarterback give the same signals for each audible or each hot route at the line of scrimmage?  In other words, if I wanted to switch my running back to running right instead of left via a playmaker hot route, can my opponent pick off the signal in the picture-in-picture and understand now this player will be going right?

Strauser:  I don’t think so because he’d have to know which way it was going to begin with.  He doesn’t tap a particular side based on the call.  Same thing with the hot routes, there’s a batch of them and it picks from that.

GI:   Are there going to be any changes from the online features in the Xbox 360 version versus the current generation?

Strauser:  The big thing for online for the Xbox 360 is the full game is online aware.  Once you log in you’re online at all times, so you can get messaging and invites if you’re playing in Franchise Mode or doing roster changes or things like that.  We didn’t have that in current generation, this game was not able be online until you went into the online area.  So if I’m sitting here playing an exhibition game and you hop online and you’re on my friends list, I get a little notification that you’ve come online, and you can send me an invitation and I can hop out.  So that’s by far the biggest change.

The other thing is that we're totally supporting Xbox Live from the ground up.  We support all of their matchmaking functionality in addition to what makes EA Sports online kind of unique, which is the lobbies, rankings, and leaderboards.  So we're fully integrated into Xbox Live, always online, and still supporting all the EA Sports-type functions.

GI:  When we jumped online we noticed that the ticker wasn’t in the game.  Is that gone?

Strauser:  I don’t think we have the real life data hooked up to Xbox 360.

GI:  Do you know going forward whether you can add the sorts of things that EA wants to add to online that are outside what Microsoft has built in with the accomplishment and Xbox Live elements?  As a developer can you add those in if you want, like the ticker for the future?

Strauser:  Oh absolutely.  That’s one of the great things, and a big part of EA that we worked through with Xbox 1.  They we're able to build in support for that type of thing for the Xbox 360 because they knew publishers would want to do their own thing.  They didn’t want it to be a homogenous experience online, so they built that in to allow for a certain level of customization.  At the root of it, it’s still our interface and our screens that we control.

GI:  Was it tricky starting over? I mean obviously it’s got to be interesting going into work and saying, “Hey guys, you know all that cool stuff we did in current generation, we’re going to scrap it all and start over! Let’s get to work.”  Does everyone freak out?  Is it exciting?  How is that from a developer’s point of view?

Strauser:  It’s kind of funny, it’s almost the opposite.  They almost all want to scrap everything when they get the next-gen opportunity, so to speak.  Everybody’s eyes get really wide, “Oh we can fix this, this, this, and this!”  We’re never content with anything we ship here, so even though the current gen has been very well received, and it’s been done very well, I think everybody here is critical of it.  We’re very critical of the next-gen game as well.  The first couple of months we wanted to do everything, and we quickly realized we can’t do everything.  We had like 10 years worth of features speced out at one point.  We couldn’t do 10 years worth of work in a year.  We want to keep what works, great playbooks – it’s the same playbook data – great player ratings, and we re-factored some of the AI stuff that we were happy with.  But, it was daunting.  I’m not going to lie to you.  It was a hard project to build a new engine from the ground up. It was just as hard as developing a new engine on the last generation, and in many ways harder because it’s a much higher fidelity.

-Matthew Kato, Billy Berghammer