EA is releasing a major Madden NFL 22 title update today, addressing many of the issues that have bedeviled the community over the past month. The update marks the release of the long-awaited scouting update, which comprehensively overhauls one of franchise mode’s key systems. The lengthy patch notes touch on almost every part of the game, from player likenesses to progression issues in Face of the Franchise.
The mood around this year’s release has once again been fairly negative, with Madden 22’s Metacritic score sitting around 68 and user reviews being much lower. I opined in my own review that it was a “grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution,” and that fans hoping for a large leap forward on PS5 and Xbox Series X were apt to be disappointed.
In an effort to better understand where Madden 22 stands a little more than a month after launch, I caught up with executive producer Seann Graddy, who generally denies that Madden 22’s issues are as serious as they are made out to be on Reddit and other venues.
“Certainly there are bugs that a fair amount of players will see, and we'll react to those as quickly as we can, but there's also bugs that get exposed that very few of our players see,” Graddy says. “We will still treat them with a high importance and react as fast as we can, but they're not impacting the millions of players that are playing our game. So I have to say that because, again, I just think the world we live in with social media makes it feel like any one-off bug that's out there is happening to everybody.”
Throughout the interview, Graddy also discusses how EA’s Madden team handles internal testing; its goals for the much-criticized Face of the Franchise mode, and the roadmap for the rest of Madden 22 and beyond. You can find the full interview below.
IGN: So we're about a month out from the release of Madden and it's been a pretty tough launch. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your perspective on what has happened over the past month or so?
Seann Graddy: Well I'd say we're actually excited with the engagement we've seen in the game, that a lot of players are playing in all the modes that they love — including the new ones that we've added the last couple of years in The Yard and Superstar KO. We've certainly been listening to a lot of feedback from the beta into the EA Play week that we launched. We had a title update at the launch of the game that had some improvements [...] Obviously coverage has been a hot topic this year. We've made a big change at the launch of the game and then another one in September.
So I think the game has been improving since launch and I’m excited about our next title update, which will add some new ways to engage. Obviously you've heard about the scouting, the most requested new addition to franchise [mode], and a new way to play The Yard with a new ranked mode, along with some improvements across the entirety of the game. Quality of life improvements, I would say.
When it launched, [Madden 22] was quite buggy even by the most generous standards. I'm curious what led to Madden having these issues at launch?
Well, I debate a little bit “quite buggy.” There were certainly bugs, and I can tell you I'm frustrated and the team is frustrated [...] I'm playing in an online franchise with seven other team members as well. There was a bug that we hit related to the head-to-head games early on in the season that has since been addressed, but that’s frustrating as a consumer for me as well. So anything that gets out there is frustrating for us, and I think we've done a good job listening to players and reacting as fast as we can to the most painful issues. The reason why I say that I debate a little bit of the bugginess is that on social media — in Twitter and Reddit — you can post the bug once or twice from a couple of viewers and it feels like it's happening for everyone; it looks like it's happening across the board.
Certainly there are bugs that a fair amount of players will see, and we'll react to those as quickly as we can, but there's also bugs that get exposed that very few of our players see. We will still treat them with a high importance and react as fast as we can, but they're not impacting the millions of players that are playing our game. So I have to say that because, again, I just think the world we live in with social media makes it feel like any one-off bug that's out there is happening to everybody.
That said, we've taken a very measured approach to our title updates this year. We obviously had one at launch, we had another bigger one in September, and then we've got the one coming up here on October 12th. In each of those we're improving the overall quality of the game with feedback from the fans. So I think we're getting into a really good state that feels comfortable from a gameplay perspective, and we'll continue to listen to the players from here on out.
I think that from the viewpoint of a lot of people, myself included, defensive coverage in particular was quite broken at launch. You already said that you pushed an update almost immediately to try and start addressing some of that. I'm just curious how the game can launch with that serious of a problem with defense, a fundamental issue with the game.
I think, again, I have to challenge that it’s completely broken because “broken” sounds like you can't call any defense and play the game at all, and that's just not the reality.
The data within our game would say that the amount of passing yards on average per game was about the same year-over-year. The number of interceptions in the game was actually slightly up year-over-year. What we find is that our most competitive players know how to really dive deep into the playbooks — dive deep into preplay adjustments — and figure out matchups that can exploit a coverage. In some cases it is a problem with an assignment on specific zone coverages, and those are the types of things that we look to address as fast as possible.
Like I said, we did probably the most important one right at worldwide launch back in August, and we continue to tune other ones. But for the vast majority of our players, it's not broken. Most of them don't hit that or feel that. And again, it doesn't make it any less important for the really deep competitive players, and we look to it to improve that. But, again, what we would say is that the way the game plays out overall, there are other defensive coverages that are available. There's other ways to adjust to one specific defensive assignment on some specific zone coverages.
So the scouting update is coming out [October 12]. I think that update is pretty anticipated by a lot of franchise people, especially me. It looks neat, so I’m curious what led to its delay.
Well, I think this is a good thing. We were pretty non-specific when we said it was coming. We said we were shooting for September, and as we were getting closer to the finish line for the title update we felt like we needed some more time to get it right, polished… get some more of the bugs out of it, and that's the right call. We can't have it both ways where we push really hard to get everything out, and it's like, “Oh, there's a couple of bugs here that frustrate me,” or, you know, give us more time to get it right; get it in the hands of players when it makes sense. So we're going to ultimately be a few days past September when this comes out, but we feel better about what we're releasing when it does go live.
I know that you all said the team had made adjustments during the pandemic and work-from-home. Obviously that was really challenging for Madden 21. That gave me some hope that the game would be in a stronger state when it launched with Madden 22, but the perception I'm getting is that the pandemic is still posing significant challenges for your team.
Well work-from-home is definitely different than working in the office together, and we continue to learn even pushing two years in [...] At the end of the day what you see as a gamer and a reviewer and a journalist is the game. Behind the scenes there's a ton of things that go into how we build the game, play the game, test the game… all the processes that nobody ever sees that we do. And we're constantly evolving and evaluating those. We did it coming off Madden 21, we're doing it coming off Madden 22. And we think that there are things that will always give us a better chance to make the game better at launch and through the continuous dev life cycle, as we've done the last couple of years.