Madden 20 - It's Showtime!

I mean, with Mahomes on the cover, I'm all in on the game, even if it stinks to high heaven. I'm all in on being a Mahomes fanboy.

Apparently there is a new commitment to franchise play this year.

Game Informer: Madden NFL 20 Makes A Recommitment To Franchise Mode

To be honest, I really don't care. I stopped playing franchise modes years ago. They are all mostly bad. I went bak to playing sports games the way I did for most of my life, playing one off games, either solo or head to head. Madden is just a strategy game based on football, and it is fun. It's not a sim. And, really, it's never ever been a sim.

If you look at it as more of an arcade football game, honestly, it's fantastic. MUT provides a simple way to play with your favorite players while building teams around certain strengths. The fact is, even this week I am still plugging away at my MUT team, which I just pushed to an 88 OVR. Still get wiped out by most online guys, though.

And this game, while trying to be more realistic, seems to kind of do the opposite with their new superstar abilities.

Here's how it works: There are around 140 Superstar abilities in the game (Ed. – text originally listed 70, but this was an error). Some players have none, some have multiple abilities. These abilities are shaped by real-life players' skills and in-game player archetypes. Thus, you aren't going to see a slower, bruising running back get abilities related to more nimble backs.

Here are just a few examples:

-The Slot Machine ability gives the receiver better separation at the line and catching ability versus contact for short routes from the slot position. Vikings receiver Adam Thielen has this ability.
-Pocket QBs like Tom Brady with the Protected ability get more time in the pocket from their offensive linemen engaged in blocks during dropback passes.
-Rams' defensive tackle Aaron Donald has The Fearmonger ability. This lets him apply pressure to QBs even when Donald is engaged in a block.
-Some are dependent on the time and the game and situation. For example, Brady's Clutch ability not only reduces the requirement for him to get in the zone (more on that below), but also makes it impossible for him to be knocked out of the zone halfway through the fourth quarter in a close game.

Most of these abilities have counter-abilities across the line of scrimmage, so that there are no automatic victories on the field, but you obviously want to pay extra attention to these players. To this end, players with superstar abilities will always be marked so everyone knows.

What caused me to start the thread now was seeing Mahomes abilities in a pic on Twitter.

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6KVmdRWwAEloCk?format=png&name=900x900)

I'll be playing. I'll probably double dip and play it on the PC and the Xbone.

Now that the Browns may be fun to play, I might pick it up this year (PS4))

Haven't played in years, but I'll follow to hear if it's any good.

The community had fixed franchise mode on PC Madden about 10 years ago, but well done you, EA, for starting work on it now.

Mahomes looks to be the second coming of Blitz. Dude is an arcade game.

Mahones should have a negative ability tied to his Head Coach though..

Only in the playoffs, Guru.

garion333 wrote:

Only in the playoffs, Guru.

Fair point..

No impressions? Ive seen some various videos regarding glitches and issues but haven't played the early access yet. If the reports are true that Lamar Jackson is Mike Vick 2.0 in the game I won't ever play an online opponent using Baltimore, that's an exercise in frustration. Videos of the unsackable QB and the football stuck to the head of WRs are pretty funny.

Justin Tucker is a beast too, at running, passing, etc. Glitchfest!

I'm enjoying the game. It's probably the most blatant arcade version of Madden yet. You think Lamar Jackson is overpowered? Mahomes has perfect accuracy, as long as he is running and throwing across his body. And if his Bazooka is activated, that accurate pass might be for 85 yards. Oh, and one of special abilities is extra speed and agility when behind the line of scrimmage.

But the super powers make for an interesting dynamic. If a guy gets activated, he can take over a game. But there are ways to deactivate him, forcing the defense to put more thought into limiting that player, which feels like a fair way to play the game, strategically. Also, like when playing the Giants last night, Saquon Barkley went down to an injury, which provided a ton of extra relief for stopping the run. It's a pretty fun way to play the game.

Franchise is still boring and mostly dumb, so I'm still mostly playing MUT. Adding Solo Battles last year, which returns this year, means you can play a lot of MUT games without having to go online and play. You get 12 games a week to build up your rating and net a lot of rewards of Gold and Packs. Those are in a edition to all the Solo Challenges that do the same, but are mostly situational and not full games.

I have not played any online games yet. I want to mess around in the trainer and figure out the RPOs that arer in the game now. They seem to have aded a lot of the new style of plays that we've seen in the last couple of years, including those touch passes where Mahomes flips or shuffles the ball to a reviewer that is sprinting in motion, whether goes outside to Hill or inside to Kelce.

You can play sim style and get a decent game, but this feels like it is meant to be played more like NFL Blitz. The defense definitely hits harder, and forces more fumbles this season.

Right now the 87 OVR Mahomes is over 200K, and I'm still sitting on about 20K in Gold. Picking up Mahomes is my first priority, and then I will build around him.

That's too bad. Never was a Blitz fan.

Got some time in with the game last night. Overall it seemed pretty good. Touch passing seemed to work well. I think my go to team is going to be Jayhawkers Chiefs. The Jaguars and Eagles are nice as well, head nod to the Rams and Saints. That being said Mahomes and Kelce combo as well as that consistent Dline and Linebacking Corps is too much to resist. It's going to be another year of the offense because the defense AI is once again brain dead in zone coverage at times. The Chiefs are just so solid everywhere and at least so far have been a joy to play.

The main issue I’m having is with really spotty server issues in MUT. Twice, so far, I’ve selected a Solo Battle, an offline game, only to have the game lose connection before we even get to the pre-game screen.

The problem is, it gives me a DNF and zero points for that game. With the last batch of four teams, I netted 29K coins in the two games. With four more games to go, it looks like I might come up a bit short of a tier, which would cost me 9k coins and 10 trophies.

I’m not sure how I will handle trophies this year. Last year I quick sold them all, at 1500 coins a pop. But they do seem to finding better ways to use them. Getting Madden as a HC is about 1K trophies. That would be 1.5 million coins.

If you don’t buy packs, you really need those coins for the Auction House. Gonna have to run some numbers and come up with a strategy to maximize my rewards.

Jayhawker wrote:

The main issue I’m having is with really spotty server issues in MUT. Twice, so far, I’ve selected a Solo Battle, an offline game, only to have the game lose connection before we even get to the pre-game screen.

The problem is, it gives me a DNF and zero points for that game. With the last batch of four teams, I netted 29K coins in the two games. With four more games to go, it looks like I might come up a bit short of a tier, which would cost me 9k coins and 10 trophies.

I’m not sure how I will handle trophies this year. Last year I quick sold them all, at 1500 coins a pop. But they do seem to finding better ways to use them. Getting Madden as a HC is about 1K trophies. That would be 1.5 million coins.

If you don’t buy packs, you really need those coins for the Auction House. Gonna have to run some numbers and come up with a strategy to maximize my rewards.

Id be interested in your math. I only dabble in MUT but I think I may get more involved this year.

My math is complicated by not being very good. Once I was able to build an 88 OVR team, I could win the Solo Battles on All-Madden about half the time. And I win less and less online every year, as more and more of the better players migrate to MUT.

After nine Solo Battle games, as you get one bonus game a week against a premium team, I only have about 87K points. I got nearly 15K points in two of the games of the last four, but zero for the other two. If I had gotten similar scores, I would be on the verge of Star. As it is, I will struggle to get to 150K points only next four games. I may have to play at least one of them on All-Madden and try to grind out a win, just to get to All-Star.

Solo Battles is free, so the rewards are all profit, regardless of how you do. what I am curious about is how much Trophies can be quicksand for this year, and if I want to save them early to use them to build my team up.

Every week in Madden 20 Ultimate Team, you can undertake Solo Battles. These matches are against AI teams, that are put together by players from around the Madden community.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there are four brand new AI teams to take on in Solo Battles. With your own MUT team, you can head into a match with any of these four AI teams, with the hope of earning as many 'Battle Score' points as possible. It's these Battle Score points that are going to dictate the reward you earn every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, before a refresh takes place and there are new teams to take on.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/1hCWIgF.png)IMAGE(https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/usgamer/madden-20-mut-solo-battle-difficulty.jpg/EG11/resize/640x-1/quality/70)IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/7OyRnHD.png)

I'll probably play a little MUT tonight and at least setup my initial team. Any suggestions?

SpyNavy wrote:

I'll probably play a little MUT tonight and at least setup my initial team. Any suggestions?

In the beginning, sell any players you don’t plan to use for training points. Also, when you apply training points to upgrade players, you only get half of them back when you untrained them, so don’t waste too much on guys you don’t need.

You can add a chemistry to a guy for about 20 points. But for one of Chris Jone’s special abilities, it ranges from 350 to 800 points. X-Factors are probably more. So figure out who you want long term so you don’t waste points.

For you, you might just avoid upgrading anyone early on. Save up training points until better versions of cards come later. You will want a ton of training points at some point, and they are not all that plentiful.

With the Ultimate edition, after selling off most of the players in the bonus packs, I had a couple thousand points. But with 44 players, that go pretty quick.

That’s where some of the math will come in. You can also auction those players for coins or add them to sets that reward you with higher rated players. But I have not found that you can sell an elite player for more than the coins you can earn by selling bronze, silver, and gold players.

I decided this year to just quick sell them for training. For low level guys, that might be 6-8 points. For some higher rated guys, it could be as much as 1200 points, or more.

The trick is in balancing your need for coins to acquire players and training points to upgrade them.

Thanks that's good gouge.

Joe Staley apparently is a 93 overall if you move him to TE.

I gave this a quick look when it came out, but, decided to take some more time with this new mode last night, and I really, really, liked it. First things first, it's a totally free mode that does not use any micro transactions. It does make MUT cards prizes but the mode is fun whether you get prizes or not. Second, this is as arcade as it looks, but it does contain some fun strategic attributes.

IMAGE(https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GpNR3NZcqvRB99oqio-QrAGM44c=/0x0:3772x2122/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3772x2122):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19158443/WM_M20_KO_TEAM_SELECT_BYHpng_1.jpg)

You pick one of those eight teams for your base. Each has strengths and weaknesses. In this pic, the Backyard Heroes have a terrible rush defense, a poor rush offense, a good pass defense, and a great pass offense. Every team is different. In addition, teams have play books that a re limited or filled with lots of plays based on their styles of play. Take a team like The shutdowns, whose have great defense against both the pass and run, but terrible offense. The defensive playbook has every formation and a lots of plays to choose from, but offensively, it's pretty mediocre.

I played with The Magicians the most last night, because Mahomes. He's the coach, so the playbook if full of RPOs. But after playing several different teams, I decided to start checking out the other teams, and the mode really started to come alive. You start see how folks play and what teams are popular, and so you start seeing how some teams would give you an edge.

after picking your base team, you then get a three round draft of adding X-Factor players to boost your team. From whatI can tell, you randomly get 2 offensive or defensive guys, and then just one on the other side of the ball. I tended to grab FS's for defense, and then either a MLB or DL for up front. On offense, I was kind of all overtype place. Sometime it felt better to strengthen the opposite of your team. I played a match with the Shutdowns, and I had Mahomes and Hopkins. Great defense, and big platys on offense.

After the quick draft it matches you with an opponent. The loading screen shows you their team name, so you know what their style is, and it shows the three X-Factors they have, so you know who to defend and attack.

The gameplay is super simple. It's basically NFL overtime, but without punts and FGs. You get one drive each from the 25, most points wins. You have to go for two when you score. so if ou give up 6, then if you score and get the conversion, you win. If it is a tie, then it is settled by Tug of War, where the ball is placed at midfield and each team alternates one play at a time for three plays. The goal is to move the ball as far into your opponents territory as you can, or score to end it. You get one play and gain ten yards tithe 40, then the other tema gets a play and maybe picks up 15 to to other 45. That's it. That's the game. When sending good game messages to opponents by looking them up via recent players after the game, I noticed it was about 7 minute matches.

Actually, that's not all. In the second game you get to add another random X-Factor, and you face another team that won their first game and also has 4 X-Factors. Some times, instead of four choices, you get seven, three of which are your opponents players. not sure what triggers that.

The goal is simple, with four games. Each round adds an X-Factor, so by the championship game, each team has six X-factors. Each addition of X-Factors adds layers of strategy to the game, as you balance attacking weaknesses with avoiding X-Factors.

Istarted out losing every damn game. I think I lost 10 straight or something. But it is quick and fun, and you start to pick up on strategies. After trying a lot of the other teams, I went back to the Magicians and suddenly ran off a three game winning streak, only to get clobbered in the final. I gave up a TDand conversion and then threw and INT on my second play. Game over.

It's not a mode with $60, so don't go buying just for this. But man, when I 14, I sure as hell would have spent for more than $60 of quarters playing this game. It's addictive and fun.

Oh, and this was just 1v1 version. you can also squad up and play 2v2 and 3v3. Get friends in a party and try to run a series of games. I've yet to play any Squad games in this or MUT, so I can't tell you what that is like. I know EA wants to figure out how to make Madden an online team sport like you see in basketball and hockey games. I'm not sure they are eve going to make that mode as fun as 3v3 or 5v5 in basketball and hockey, but this is part of them trying to figure it out.

Hopefully they lift from Live Battles in NBA Live, and allow you to customize your court and uniforms, and maybe expand the rules sets.