Finally finished my 7th season with Madden 19. Beat Jon Gruden who is now the HC of the Baltimore Ravens, he took Derek Carr with him and signed Julio Jones. We won 30-22 and I had won 2 SB's, 3 NFC Championships since taking over the Cardinals in 2018. What a fantastic game Madden 19 is.TCrouch wrote:After a dozen full games or so (and I mean FULL games....15 minute quarters, 10 second runoff, still takes less than an hour now), I absolutely love what they did with the player control. Instead of doing pirouettes trying to get my user-controlled LB into the proper location while playing defense, I feel like I can absolutely LOCK DOWN my area of the field (or, while running the ball, hit the precise lane I want or juke a charging safety at the last second, but I'm going to focus on defense in this post).
I'll try to keep this semi-short (not likely), but backstory: for years, I felt I could play LB or Safety and do whatever I wanted. The control was flawless, where I could bait both human and CPU QBs into doing things I wanted them to see, and then make them pay for it. Somewhere (a few Maddens ago), that went away, and I couldn't user for crap anymore. I couldn't come to grips with the animation style or what. I'd know what I'd want to do, but I couldn't get there or I'd overrun plays trying to shift between a burst and strafe. It got to be where I'd rather just play games doing offense only, because defense wasn't much fun for me. It felt like whatever I did, even if I made a perfect play call, I'd manage to screw it up with my user. And I couldn't win on the DL, either, so I was just a passive bystander on D. This year, that is completely gone, restoring my faith in my ability to play defense.
While it's not QUITE at that "early years" level since the QB throwing trajectories are fixed, I feel in complete control of my player all the time. No more weird ice-skating small movement "circle" trying to turn and run. He'll plant a foot and cut the direction I need him to cut.
This means I can man the middle, keep an eye on the RB in the flat, and the instant the QB turns his feet and cocks his arm, I'm breaking at the RB like a missile. It leads to a ton of -2 yard gains/No gain/1 or 2 yard gain plays. When there are short completions, I can easily make the tackle by squaring up and using A to drop them. I don't think I've missed more than a handful of open field tackles in all of those games combined, and my user-controlled LBs routinely get anywhere from 12 to 20 total tackles per game. Finally, I have tackling machines that are up for "Best LB" rewards, and XP gains for development.
Pass rushers actually do some work, and you can really confuse younger QBs by calling all of those weird zone blitzes you'd never do in previous versions of Madden (everybody except the LE rushing, and that LE dropping back into a hook zone? That's a nightmare before, but really seems to confuse lower-AWR QBs in Madden 20).
All in all, I've had an absolute BLAST playing both sides of the ball so far this year. I played 8 or 9 games in Exhibition before starting on my franchise, and only finished the preseason games in their totality. I'll start the regular season tonight, but so far I'm WAY more into this version of Madden than I have been for the past 4 or 5 versions.
Figured it's a good time to retire the game and start a new journey as the HC of the Buffalo Bills once Madden 20 has a patch under its belt and a couple roster updates.