The New Draft Champions Mode
Featured at EA’s E3 presser this year, Madden NFL 16’s new Draft Champions Mode wants to emulate the excitement of yearly fantasy football drafts, emphasizing the drama and deliberation that goes into each pick.
How exactly does EA Sports manage to pull this off in Madden? The experience will at first be solitary. Drafts will be randomized each time you start one up. You’ll be given a basic barebones team to start, but then will have 15 rounds to enhance your team by getting a choice of three players across varying positions. Round to round, the positions and quality of players will differ. Because it’s randomized in this way, no two drafts will be the same.
After completing your draft, you can take your team into a tournament either against the AI or head to head against human opponents. New modes in Madden are usually perfected in their second or third year, but Draft Champions Mode definitely has some promise.
Overhauled Ball Catching
New this year are three different ways to catch the ball. Previously, it was just a matter of timing Y/Triangle button with the catch or just leaving it up to the AI. What you’ll be doing now instead is pressing buttons as the pass is released. What kind of catch your receiver will try to make is determined by what you press.
First up is the Run After Catch, a risky type of catch that has players quickly making the catch in stride with the intent to pick up as many yards as possible. If you watch football, think of those plays where the receiver is looking for where to run before they even catch the ball.
Aggressive catches are for when you want to go up and grab the ball, making sure to rip it away from the defender. These types of catches are best used on risky deep plays. Try to leave these up to the elite WRs with strong, spectacular catch ratings.
The last new type of catch is the Possession Catch. As the name implies, this catch emphasizes possession over anything else. It’s a low risk, low reward type of catch. You probably won’t get a big play out when you use it, but you’ll give yourself the best chance of making sure the catch is successful.
Broadcasting That Rivals the Real Thing
Recognizing that Madden NFL 16 is a video game and doesn’t need to play by the same rules that real life cameraman and broadcasters do, EA Sports decided to up the presentation this year. Cameras can get up close and personal to players during touchdowns. Also, Wirecams can provide sweeping angles across the field, or right near the QB as the ball is snapped. Overall, Madden fans should expect better camera angles that give you an up-close look on what’s going on.
That’s not all, either! In addition, fans can expect more realistic crowds that wear clothes appropriate to their stadium and weather. Commentators will be able to break down scoring drives more precisely and Madden players can see updates on major milestones as they play without distraction from the game.
Fine-Tuned QB Mechanics
Much of the action in the NFL and Madden is centered on the quarterback. EA Sports this year decided to invest time into making the QB experience as authentic as possible. They now have hundreds of different hand-off mechanics depending on which play is called. This year, “rolling out” of the pocket has been reworked. Nestled in-between staying in the pocket and outright scrambling, rolling out provides QBs mobility without sacrificing as much accuracy as a scrambling throw on the run would.
Also, an improvement to AI QBs has apparently been several years in the making and now is ready to be unleashed in Madden NFL 16. Each QB has a set of behaviors that will determine the way they play (essentially playing to their strengths). Playing against Tom Brady should and will feel a lot different than playing against someone like RGIII or Cam Newton.
Speaking of passing the ball, Madden NFL 16 features a new feedback system for passing. In-game feedback will let you know if you were making a pass under too much pressure or off your back foot to give you an idea of why your play/pass turned out the way that it did. A welcomed feedback for players trying to learn how to play the game right, instead of scrambling around like a crazy person all of the time.
New Plays (Shot Plays)
The Madden NFL 16 team worked with Tom Moore of the Arizona Cardinals to create new and more authentic plays. Most notable is that an entirely new type of play, Shot Plays, are now in the playbook.
According to EA Sports, Shot Plays are “primarily play-action based and usually keeps backs and tight ends in to block, while receivers go deep.” Fans can expect 600 new plays (including 100 Shot Plays).
This is just the the bigger stuff, as one would expect from an annual sports franchise, there are tons of smaller less noticeable tweaks to make the game feel more authentic. Making dramatic additions is tough when you have to put out a product every year, but hopefully Draft Champions along with the other smaller new features satisfies NFL fans this year.
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