Crave Online: Madden is such a well oiled machine, what do you do in a new edition?
Daniel Castorani: That is the question to answer every year and I think this year we had a great opportunity to do something new and that was to try to bring the game to more people and focus on accessibility, focus on making the game easier for people to play and at the same time add more depth for our hardcore users. We think we're going to make everybody happy this year regardless of your experience level.
Crave Online: I thought I was the only one because I suck.
Daniel Castorani: You're far from the only one, man. Our game is extremely complex in a lot of ways. It has been. If you don't know a lot about football, it can be very overwhelming and we really wanted to take a step back this year and say hey, how can we get dads and people who have younger kids, how can we get them to also have a fun experience. So that was our goal.
Crave Online: So what have you done for me?
Daniel Castorani: We've done a lot for you. First of all, we've created a new way to basically identify yourself called Game Style. What that is, is we have Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced and Hardcore. So you can set your Game Style to Beginner and you're going to get the game presented to you like somebody who doesn't really know all the ins and outs but still wants to play and have fun. So it's not dumbed down Madden. It's us changing the presentation and making it easier for you. A great example is you're not an NFL coach. 85 plays to go through and pick probably overwhelms the heck out of you. So if you're a beginner, we give you one play. We show you a diagram of it and we say, "Hey, this is the play for you to pick. Go in game and do it." That's one major thing. Another major thing is we've added the virtual trainer which is if you see it, it's very much outside the realm of real football. It's a holographic environment, holographic players and it's essentially your sandbox to learn the moves, to get better at the game and just exposure to controls. You're not doing it in the pressure of a game where you feel like you're going to lose or you have to score or anything like that. What we do is we actually assess you and we start you off at a difficulty level and that difficulty is dynamic. As you play we adapt it to you. We've got a lot in there for you this year.
Crave Online: That does sound like it will help me a lot. Although still, I have problems on the field, by the time I figure out what button will throw to which player, I'm tackled.
Daniel Castorani: Which hopefully the virtual trainer will be perfect for you because we start you off very easy and it really is hey, familiarize yourself with the buttons and how to hit it and that kind of stuff. We've really tried to start very basic but we didn't want to just start basic and give you something dumbed down. We wanted to give you something that could give you a base for stepping you up to learn more.
Crave Online: So in two player, can a Beginner play against a Hardcore style?
Daniel Castorani: At the beginning of the year, we didn't even think this was going to be a really cool feature, but at the end of the year, now we've seen what arguably might be the coolest feature is now for the first time, we have handicapping. So a hardcore player can play against a newbie and the newbie can play on Beginner, the hardcore can play on Hardcore and the AI will adjust. Believe it or not, the games will be very competitive. So now, no matter what your skill level, you can have a fun game of Madden with two people.
Crave Online: Could the Hardcore player pick Beginner and still kick ass?
Daniel Castorani: Oh yeah, the Hardcore player with Beginner mode would be borderline unfair. But our Hardcore guys probably aren't going to want to jump in Beginner anyway because they like that complexity. They like that depth.
Crave Online: How have you developed the Hardcore game for them?
Daniel Castorani: So, we had a great opportunity, when we first announced we were doing accessibility, our core, our guys on the forum said, "Oh man, you guys are going to dumb down our Madden." Really, it's the complete opposite. What we've done by having a mode just for the Hardcore, a way that you describe yourself, is we've been able to get the game tuned for them, a bunch of their requests in, a bunch of stuff for them in. So really we've actually added, by having a Hardcore mode and a way to identify yourself as a hardcore user, we've been able to put in the things they want without that affecting the Beginners or the Intermediates. So we've actually added more Hardcore content than we ever have before.
Crave Online: What are some of those things?
Daniel Castorani: It's really small tuning things. It's things like not being able to strafe on offense because that's been an exploit for years. It's things like just the AI being harder in certain ways. There's a list of things that we're going to continue to update these things via patches and stuff like that because it's cool now where you can just hear what the community says and just put that right in the game.
Crave Online: What's in between Beginner and Hardcore?
Daniel Castorani: So we have Intermediate which is cool. We don't just give you a play. We give you options but the options we give you are "Run to the left, run to the right, pass deep, pass short." So it still puts the decision making in your hands but it's not calling plays "Over Storm Braid 22" or anything like that where you don't really know what's going on. It's easier to digest. Then we also have Advanced which is our traditional Madden experience. We really feel like we have all our bases covered this year.
Crave Online: What are the carryover elements that will be in every Madden?
Daniel Castorani: It's funny, it's like every year we add new features. You get these certain features that's like, "Man, how the heck did we play this game without this feature?" I think the one major one to highlight this year, there's a lot of them, but the one major one to highlight would be our new animation system. Always before in really any video game, an animation triggers and you're getting tackled. So I'm running with the ball, a tackle animation triggers and I'm going down. Control is lost once the animation triggers. That's just the crux of video games and animation system. We've added a new system this year where we can branch and break you out of animations and put you into new animations. So now in Madden '09, I'm getting tackled, I'm mashing on the spin button or I'm mashing on the stiff arm button and I'm actually seeing my guy visually try to break out of the tackle. So for the first time ever, the play is not over until the guy is down. Trying to go back to '08, you find yourself hitting these buttons and being like, "Oh man, I need this feature." So I think that's going to be the one that's going to be a staple forever.
Crave Online: Does John Madden still give you notes?
Daniel Castorani: Oh yeah, sure. John is still involved and actually, if you check out the game, you'll see he's back. He's back in a really cool way, holographic. He guides you through the Madden test. He's your host for the game. He's still involved, man. The game is his baby, his name's attached to it and he's really the symbol of football today. He always wants his game to be top quality.
Crave Online: Which of the players turn out to be really big game geeks?
Daniel Castorani: Oh, there are so many players who are big game geeks. The list goes on and on. The biggest thing we get is they always want their ratings higher, right? So they always say we have them too slow or they can't throw as far as they can throw in real life. We've had people actually challenge guys on our development team, "Hey, you think I'm that slow? I'll outrun you right now." It's just cool to see how passionate these guys are about how they are in the game, because when they play, they usually use their teams and they want to be the best that they can be.
Crave Online: Are there any special online capabilities in 09?
Daniel Castorani: Oh yeah, we have a really cool online mode. We always have but this year we're adding something new which is online leagues, which is the ability to play with up to 31 other people in a league. So now it's not you and me just play a game and it's done. It's a league. There are trades, there's a schedule, there are playoffs, we crown a champion. So now you can finally get that whole thing that you had with your buddies in the neighborhood. Now basically everywhere is your neighborhood.
Crave Online: Is the engine pretty consistent year to year?
Daniel Castorani: The base engine is consistent but we add so much to it year to year that you probably wouldn't recognize it four or five years down the road. We did a humongous overhaul of the animations this year, changed the way we did it. That's a major change of the engine. Animations are huge. That's a big part of the game, the way you experience it, so doing things like adding a new animation system, adding a new catching system, adding stuff like that to the current engine makes the game feel completely different from year to year.
