Franchise mode is back again in Madden 23, and though the games themselves throughout a season may look and play a little better on the field, you’d be forgiven if you thought the mode was exactly the same as it was last year. To give credit where it’s due, Madden 22 staggered a few franchise updates throughout its game cycle that included a new scouting system and in-season scenarios, with the last one being released back in March. The thinking at EA must have been that these previous additions and some fine tuning of its existing framework (like improved free agency) would be enough to satisfy Madden 23 franchise players. But the more the developers continue to tweak and massage some of the same general layout and presentation that has existed for roughly a decade now, the more it becomes increasingly clear that they’re continuing to build upon a foundation that’s fundamentally flawed.
Aside from a host of bugs and glitches that are affecting online franchises right now and their ability to save progression and keep members from being locked out, there are larger issues holding Madden 23 franchise mode back even when it is functioning properly. Let’s go over some of the basic components that form Madden 23‘s franchise mode to better understand which aspects have become the most problematic and how they lead to a lack of realism and immersion when playing through seasons.
Rather than simply picking things apart, I’ll also try to present some solutions and ideas that could hopefully help get Madden‘s franchise mode back on a track where it could one day hopefully rival the gold standard of NBA 2K‘s MyLeague.
Madden 23 Franchise Mode Issues
Progression
The way that progression works for players hasn’t fundamentally changed in Madden for some time, continuing to be a static affair that works counterintuitively to how it does in real life. All players will strictly be divided into one of four development traits that helps determine how much XP they will earn in training or following games: normal, star, superstar, or superstar X-Factor. Placing everyone into these rigid boxes ignores the way that players can develop at drastically different rates and how some might become elite quickly while others will eventually get there. It doesn’t help that their ability to make the leap from one type of development trait to another is tied to a player’s performance on the field, whether over the course of one game or a full season. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating that this kind of reward incorrectly assumes that players can get better in the NFL by virtue of having one good game rather than through the reality of honing their raw skills on the practice field every day.
In order to represent the entire spectrum of different rates at which players will progress, the expectation would be that Madden could implement — alongside all of a player’s existing attributes that are already being assessed from 0 to 100 — another one labelled Development that has the same parameters. While they’re at it, perhaps they could also introduce one more with a label like Potential that can either raise or lower a player’s Development attribute over time. By also eliminating many of the opportunities to boost a player’s ability to get better faster with a good in-game performance, this should have you seeing way more dynamic shifts in development that are based on sheer chance rather than someone’s ability to force feed a receiver enough to rack up a required number of yards or touchdowns.
Scenarios
As discussed above with players receiving a bump to their development traits based on their on-field performance, these kinds of breakout scenarios tend to form the backbone of how a season in franchise mode unfolds, and they don’t resemble reality in most cases. It’s not all that exciting the first time you’re faced with a scenario that sees you either blaming the QB or the offensive line after a game where your team happened to yield a lot of sacks, and it’s obviously a little less exciting each subsequent time that you see the same scenario again (especially when they happen in back-to-back weeks). The bland cinematics of your coach at a podium during a press conference or in the locker room with a player do little to alleviate the tedium and repetitiveness of tired scenarios that basically always amount to making a choice between two options or being assigned some kind of statistical threshold in your next game to get a reward.
In general, Madden‘s franchise mode will need to move away from one based largely on rewards that force you to constantly succeed on the field if you want to have your players improving at a rate that keeps pace with the rest of the league. This would mean embracing the randomness that can happen during any team’s NFL season where backups can step up to become superstars, or top players can vanish from the league in a flash for any number of reasons that Madden might prefer to label “personal issues.”
To accomplish this and avoid any scenarios becoming too stale, Madden should consider concentrating on quantity here. In other words, produce hundreds of smaller issues that a team could face in any given week to keep us on our toes. These could range from stomach bugs affecting certain players to someone falling asleep in meetings to a positional group having a bad week at practice that can’t help but inevitably carry over into the game.
Scouting
Madden 22 may have just introduced a new scouting system during its game cycle, but it still keeps you at arm’s length from the process and doesn’t let you make important decisions or learn enough about the available rookies. To improve on the old system that mostly involved unlocking three skill grades on rookies, you now hire, fire, and assign scouts to different parts of the country and have them focus on specific positions. At various points, you can choose specific players that you want to get an even closer look at if you want to have a better idea of their worth. Throughout the season though, you’re often left with the feeling that you’re being shown information about the players entering the draft without really needing to take the reins and do all that much. While it’s perhaps an improvement in both realism and strategy on the old limited system, there’s still plenty of room for having the stories of the players become a bigger part of deciding who you want to add to your organization.
A good way to keep you as involved as possible in evaluating the upcoming talent would be to have you communicating more with your scouts throughout the season. Perhaps from time to time they could give you a list of players and ask your opinion about which of them they should travel to see in person that particular week. Alongside the mock drafts released periodically that outline who each team is expected to take in the first round, it’d be helpful to see who your own team beat reporter is anticipating you’ll take with each of your picks — or at least which positions you might target.
Overall, there’s a lack of personality from rookies in the draft that could be remedied by having more stats, headlines, and concerns from anonymous sources (that could act at times as red herrings) about potential weaknesses or injuries. I’ve seen the underrated Kevin Costner flawed gem Draft Day enough to appreciate that if nobody happened to attend one of the top prospect’s birthday parties, that’s something I need to know before I consider drafting him.
Staff Skill Tree
The staffing skill tree was touted as a new addition to Madden‘s franchise mode just a couple of years ago, but it’s safe to say that the bloom has already come off the rose when it comes to this feature. Accumulating staff points through completing gameday goals and then applying these points to either your head coach, coordinators, or player personnel people is neither fun nor innovative. The way that you can unlock branches on the skill tree to provide XP gains for specific position groups or lure free agents to sign with your team doesn’t really have much of a real life corollary either for those seeking a simulation. It can wreak havoc too within online franchises where anyone who comes into the league late will be forced to accept being at a competitive disadvantage when others who have already made significant progress on their skill tress will be racking up XP at a greater rate.
There’s no doubt that Madden needs a way to properly represent the influence that coaches can have upon a team. It would be nice though to see specific coaches have strengths and weaknesses that they will bring to the team, and perhaps more of a coach’s carousel in the offseason where teams can make offers to specific coaches just as with players in free agency.
Around The League
It’s almost unfathomable to think that some of the very first Madden games released back in the ’90s were able to include quick cutaways to highlights from other games so as to keep you better involved in what was happening in your franchise, and yet Madden 23 doesn’t have anything similar. Instead, the only way that someone can learn about what’s happening in the rest of the NFL is by perusing the scores and news headlines being offered as a poor substitute for any video content. When you view the box score of a close game between a couple top teams late in the season, you’re going to naturally wonder how the final moments of how that game played out. Given how much other progress has been made in the development of the series in the 30+ years it’s been around, one would expect that this aspect would have also moved forward to the point where we could have a quick series of highlights showcasing every game from that week.
