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Catching Up With Madden 15
The annual Madden game comes out in the pre-season when hope is always high. Your team is 0-0, so unless you truly live in a black hole of sports despair (and I know what that's like), the dream hasn't been spoiled yet. Naturally, everyone plays the new Madden when it's fresh, but people also fall off and play other games as more titles come out for the holiday season and perhaps people get tired of playing Madden. In this online age, however, games are always changing with updates, etc. With that in mind, here are a few reasons to pick up and play the game again.*
UPDATES
Developer EA Tiburon has been updating the rosters each week to reflect roster movement around the league and changes in players' form – whether that's Giants' receiver Odell Beckham Jr. getting a 99 spectacular catch rating (up over 14 points from when the game shipped) or players being downgraded in accordance with their real-life decline.
The game has also received some updates aimed at fixing bugs – including resolving a bad one at launch where players' online games in Connected Franchise against each other weren't registering – as well as improving uniforms with patches and other changes, and general tuning.
One of the big additions was the updating of over 150 player faces via a free 500+MB download. As you can see below, the difference is noticeable.
The faces of over 150 players were updated via a free download.
ULTIMATE TEAM
This mode has really taken off in all of EA Sports' titles, and the one in this year's Madden is great due to a streamlined interface. The mode has also been kept fresh due to a variety of solo challenges for coins you can undertake if you don't want to play versus other players online. Beat the Team of the Week for a coin payout or try your hand at the Coin Up Wild Cards and the chance to snag a bunch of coins for the mode depending on what happens in the real-life games that week. The mode has also introduced a steady stream of NFL legend cards – from Bo Jackson to Randall Cunningham and Mean Joe Greene.
SLIDERS
Madden NFL 15 is by no means a perfect experience, but some of its foibles can be mitigated via gameplay slider settings. While you're free to slyly turn down the CPU's ability to catch the ball, for instance, many players set their own slider settings to try and make the game feel more realistic. These custom settings are shared amongst the community via files you can download in the game's Community Files section (under the Share tab), complete with comments from the creator, the number of times the file has been downloaded, and its number of likes/dislikes. Of course, ultimately you never know what you're going to get, so you'll have to try different files until the game feels right to you. You can also download other users' playbooks and custom rosters (including player attribute changes) here.
For instance, I'm not great at running the ball, and feel like too often my back gets stuck on my blockers or defenders shed their blocks too easy on All-Pro difficulty. At the same time, playing on Pro difficulty is too easy. Thus, sliders can come in handy to customize my experience so I get a little help in this area, but not too much.
For more on the game, take a look at my review of the PS4/Xbox One versions.
*This story was competed using the PS4 version of Madden NFL 15, and the updates and information here largely pertain to the versions on the new-gen systems.
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