EA has laid out the plans for a future Madden 21 update which will focus on the oft-ignored Franchise mode, even as the announcement was quickly ratioed on Twitter.
The Madden franchise mode will receive several improvements later in 2020, with EA aiming for mid-November for their implementation. Included in the plans is the ability to customize player X-Factor and Superstar roles. Currently, there's no way for players to change or assign X-Factors to any players, so they're determined according to players' pre-assigned roles by the Madden team, or, in later years, assigned with RNG for fake players added to the game for drafts.
That's not all the game will change. Here's the rest of the update from the Tiburon team:
Player Card Career Stats UI: A top community request for several years now, the team is revamping the statistics on the player card to include more context in season stats, like week, opponent, and outcome, while also providing what team the player was on for every year of their career.
Dev Trait Regression Tuning: The team is doing tuning work to player development traits in Franchise mode to ensure a proper balance of Superstar and X-Factor players when progressing multiple years in a Franchise.
Playoff Bracket: A visual playoff bracket will be added into the game that reflects the new Wild Card format, allowing users to see the full playoff picture.
The developers seem to be taking the abundance of criticism in stride as they seek to get the game more appreciated by fans and critics. Despite the low review scores - it has just a 64 on OpenCritic - the game is outselling last year's record-setting entry. This likely speaks to the fervor for sports fans have had in a year with hardly any live sports.
Baseball, hockey, soccer, and basketball have all recently come back with varying degrees of success, and football will make its first attempt to play on in a pandemic-stricken world next Thursday, September 10, when the season kicks off with the defending champion Chiefs hosting the Texans.
