Madden NFL 23’s mission: Shed the canned tackles that have long dragged it down

polygon.com:

Shameful as it is to admit, I didn’t notice until Aaron McHardy pointed it out to me. In all my glamour shots of my created Madden NFL running back, only one player is tackling him. All the others are, conspicuously, pulling up and staying out of the play.

That changes in Madden NFL 23, said McHardy, a senior producer over the core gameplay team. EA Sports’ football flagship is selling a raft of gameplay revisions — passing, running, and defending the ball — that McHardy says will pry Madden’s gameplay from its current moorings, where players feel stuck in animations served up by a dice roll.

“It allows players to really drive to the end of the whistle,” McHardy said, in a conference room at Electronic Arts’ new Orlando studio last week.

“We got a lot of comments from our players that they felt our game was too animation-based,” McHardy told the group, which comprised social media and YouTube influencers as well as games writers and critics. “I’m sure a lot of you in the room have used [that term]. The outcome of the play feels like it’s almost predetermined. That’s something we wanted to invest in changing this year.”

Even a decade after Madden NFL designers introduced real-time physics to the game, and two years after they implemented the real-life player tracking data that the NFL has been gathering and analyzing since 2015, Madden NFL 22still served up a frustrating game of down-at-first-contact. To be fair, run-blocking improvements starting in Madden NFL 21 greatly helped players avoid the premature end to a well-called, well-designed play. But a linebacker’s forearm shiver would still take the controller out of your hands, as surely as a wrap-up tackle behind the line of scrimmage.

Counterintuitively, EA Tiburon’s