Coming off our review of Madden 24, I’m mostly in agreement with what Kevin wrote about for the strengths and negatives in this year’s game. He put franchise mode in the weakness category, and it would be very hard to dispute that regardless of how much you love this year’s game. In his critique, he used the word “tired” to describe the weekly grind of franchise mode, and that’s what I want to talk about here. When I say Madden 24 franchise mode’s got no juice, tired is a good stand in for what I’m getting at there. What is this franchise mode trying to be?
No Path Chosen
In my eyes, you have two directions you can go with a franchise mode if you want to stand out. You can go the Football Manager route and go hardcore into the weeds of coaching and really nailing the GM aspects of the mode. Madden would not crack the top tier in this category among its peers.
The other direction you can go is make it more story-driven and presentation-rich where you more are part of the league and its happenings. In a sense, this is where online franchise mode creates that component to an extent if you’re playing with a bunch of friends (and your cloud save doesn’t break). You build up these stories and rivalries with each other, you go harder for their free agents, and you all battle it out for particular players in the draft. Madden would not crack the top tier in the presentation category among its peers but online franchise is still an invaluable aspect of any franchise mode.
There was a story posted on Dexerto last week where they called out that Reddit users were making fun of the buggy news tracker in franchise mode. There was a point where this news tracker was a relative bright spot in the game, and if you go back far enough, the newspapers and all that were an additive component of the Tony Bruno Show and all the extra goodies that went into franchise mode back in the early 2000s. Now, it’s a punchline. But, to be clear, a better news tracker that wasn’t buggy wouldn’t solve this franchise mode’s problems either. The problem is Madden’s franchise mode has no clear direction that I can see.
The NFL Has Got All The Juice
On our site and forums, I think we talk about the technical more than the presentation. The NFL is an incredibly complex league with a confusing salary cap, huge rosters, oodles of coaches, and a multifaceted offseason. It is the most rich sport for a video game franchise mode behind probably just college football due to the roster turnover and recruiting being more intriguing than salary cap drudgery (at least for me). Soccer would be third on my list if I was giving a top 3.
However, it’s also the most rich “presentation” league out there. It’s only 17 games per season and the roster turnover is immense. Among video games, no other sport (again, besides college football) has so few games per season to worry about where then so much of your team will change year to year.
Point being, you can go either direction and make an awesome franchise mode because the NFL itself is deeply interesting. Whether you like the NFL or not, I think you can objectively look at it and see how it translates to a franchise mode better than something like the NBA does where the league ultimately comes down to where the top 10 players are, the season is 82 games in length, and the rosters themselves are much smaller and don’t change as much.
The NFL is choose your own adventure, but you have to choose.
Give Us The Juice
The big changes the last couple years have been mini-game additions, scouting changes, increased trade sizes, and some other cursory elements like that. I think I would put those in the bucket of “technical” improvements. Those would be the Football Manager changes more than anything. Questions from the press are also a relatively new tweak, and those would go more in the “presentation” bucket. Still, these are not needle movers in the grand scheme of things. A ton of those changes together would be, but we don’t get tons of changes all at once. Madden hasn’t gotten its “Eras Mode” level-up moment, and it also hasn’t gotten that level up elsewhere in the mode with a million small changes in one cycle.
In short, we need to feel like we’re a part of a living world. The NFL is the perfect sport for this. Again, one game a week, only 17 games, and clear goals each year as teams always fall into the same couple of buckets in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish. Going back to the idea of being a “tired” mode, this is what needs to change. One of the top complaints on OS is about how lifeless franchise mode feels. That falls on the lack of presentation both in and out of games, which is also why I would focus on giving us the juice first before focusing too hard on the technical side of things.
The on-field gameplay is getting better (rapidly even in some places), and in-game presentation improvements would help both franchise mode and all other modes. Better commentary, more interesting in-game storylines, more replays, a better pregame, more stat overlays, and so it goes. These would obviously have more depth in franchise mode, but a lot of the “story” of a game translates to even one-off games. For example, let’s say you are using the Colts and have Anthony Richardson. There are clear storylines here. Does he start in Week 1? Does he have a bad start? Does he struggle with interceptions a ton in his opening season? Do you have to bench him because he’s struggling? Is he shocking everyone by being so good already as a rookie? Is the team winning or losing with him?
And it doesn’t even have to be specific to Anthony Richardson to make sense. Draft position writes itself, and what kind of team you are does as well. The Colts would be a rebuilding team with a top draft pick spent on a QB. This translates to Year 1 or Year 20. And if a rookie QB struggles during a game, that writes itself both in and out of franchise mode as well.
Beyond the double dipping that works across all modes, what we want in franchise mode that goes beyond that is discussing things from “around the league” during our games. We want to hear more about those other 1 o’clock games, whether that’s in the form of more discussion about those games or even having live look-ins (which EA has done before in its college football game). When we’re out of game, the same goes for giving us more from around the league. Whether it’s a show in some form or just more depth to things like knowing about the chaos happening on other teams, the world has to be breathing. Doing postgame interviews or mini-games to train your own players becomes vastly more tolerable and interesting if we can look beyond our own walls and watch/read about interesting things going on with our divisional rivals.
Again, why is online franchise mode with friends way more fun than offline franchise mode by yourself? You’re competing with each other, discussing how you’re going to snipe their free agent or you’re looking forward to that Week 12 matchup, It’s the same reason recruiting is always fun in college football but becomes even more fun when you steal a five-star recruit from your buddy. There is real motivation there and there’s a story that’s building.
There are so many different avenues you could go down to make presentation more rich for franchise mode, and it doesn’t feel like EA has tried to nail any one component. Instead, it’s been little sprinkles here and there. Stop doing that. Try to actually nail something. Pick out the draft, or free agency, or week-to-week storylines, and actually build something that’s cool for one of those elements. This does not all have to improve in one year, but you should have a blueprint or something you can point to in order to say “hey, we’re best in class at this thing right here.”
But Don’t We Want It All?
I’m not trying to ignore the technical side in this article, but my point would be that bugs become more acceptable if the mode itself is interesting. NBA 2K has some gnarly bugs year to year, and we hate them and discuss them, but ultimately a lot of the time they’re given more slack because they’re trying to give us something interesting. There’s a depth and uniqueness with their franchise mode that allows it to have more “get out of jail free” cards than Madden.
I could talk about the draft class issue that’s currently making body types of new players not fit their position (QBs looking like tackles, etc.), homefield advantage not being able to be turned off, the slow and terrible menus, and so on. In a perfect world, we obviously want a flawless Madden franchise mode.
The same goes for wanting more depth out of the technical side of the mode. We don’t want teams to have oodles of cap space or have too many good players as free agents when the years progress. We want all the technical elements of the salary cap and to be able to trade draft picks for years and years down the line. All that stuff is gravy and if that’s the focus they want to go with instead, fair enough. However, I think the payoff and the notoriety comes from nailing the splashier and shinier elements of the mode.
After all, when we talk about old franchise modes in games, it’s the NFL 2K5 week-to-week show, it’s Selection Sunday in College Hoops 2K, it’s the Tony Bruno Show. These are our memories, and it’s time we created some new ones.
