| 30 July 2010
EA Sports says it will add the original pre-snap features back in the game via a patch later this year. They were taken out because of the new Strategy Pad, which has received not a lot of public positive response.
Creative director Ian Cummings said he hopes the download will be available by the first week of the NFL season, which would be sometime around Sept. 12.
The download date mean players competing in the D.C. Madden Challenge -- the first tournament in the series -- will have a month to adjust back to the original style, although there are several competitions to take place as the game is nationally released Aug. 10.
In a blog entry posted earlier this afternoon, Cummings said adding the Strategy Pad was a necessary change, and the stats showed it.
A gamer on defense would often hit A (360) or X (PS3) to button through play call or pre-play, and in doing so, would get locked into the "hot route" state. Seeing that you are reading this blog, you probably are pretty experienced with Madden, and you're saying "well, that never happened to me". I'm with you...it didn't happen to me either. Well take this into account...did you know that over 2 BILLION defensive hot route context states were entered in Madden NFL 10? That's an average of more than 5 million per day. We discovered that of this number, more than 50% never called an actual hot route. So on more than 1 BILLION occasions, a gamer accidentally went into a pre-play contextual state that they didn't mean to. As a game designer, you just can't choose to ignore that..it's staggering. To be clear, it's not that we wanted to make pre-play controls easy enough for a caveman to use them, it's that we wanted to fix a system that punished gamers for just accidentally hitting the primary button on the controller.
What turned out to be the vocal minority came out in droves -- however much that might be -- and expressed their dissatisfaction over the change in the system on various forums and social networks.
Earlier in the week, on The Madden Voice radio show, senior producer Phil Frazier said the old-style, pre-snap adjustments were made for the hardcore player, but it was tough to ignore the millions of others that play and have trouble with the system.
"We've watched people with the game (past Maddens), and we've experienced the fact that you can get locked in that menu and run into a situation where you can't get out," Frazier said. "You do a line move, but you can't snap the ball because you're still in the line menu.
"There was so much functionality built into the pre-play adjustments, a lot of that was for the tournament crowd. There's a lot of people upset because they have to re-learn the system. All the functionality is still there, nothing has changed."
