Quick Look: Madden NFL 21

omg I can't stop laughing at the screen grab to start watching this.

"It's football, They are still doing football" - Alex 2020

Video games have began!

And why does everyone look like Mass Effect 1 characters where the textures hasn't been loaded in.

Madden Lockdown 2020

Do you think EA has a plan for when/if we get to 2025, considering they already named a game Madden 25?

There needs to be an industry wide ban on the phrases "you got this" and "I got this" and "we got this" because holy shit I GET IT, YOU HAVE THIS

When Madden 25 came out we weren't really in the thick of it with games being named identically to past versions, but now, they're just gonna call it Madden 25 and pretend nothing happened.

Or... they call it Madden 35 and keep kicking this can down the hill

High school Virtual Alex doesn't deserve that kind of haterade directed his way.

"Cat, dog, penguin."

"Person, woman, man, camera, TV."

@heatdrive88: EXACTLY WHERE MY MIND WENT.

I laughed for at least a minute @ "Don't you dare talk to me about my heart."

If EA had the Aliens' license this would have been a great potential crossover. Tommy's chest explodes revealing a baby Xenomorph.

@pontoon_yacht said:

Oh good, a new episode of Monster Factory is out.

Rockstar needs to write the next Madden story. Take cues from the show "Ballers" on HBO. I want a REAL NFL story. The story should INCREASE once you get drafted. Lol

I really don't understand why game developers and their publishers can't make a good story for their story mode having game. It is obvious they put work into this mode, what they have doesn't happen without effort. But, JESUS, not every story has to be a person vs person rivalry or have twisted melodrama all the time.

LOOK AT ALL THE CHOICES WE HAVE FOR CONFLICT IN STORIES!!!

Person vs. Person
Conflict that pits one person against another is about as classic as a story can get.

Person vs. Self
In this type of conflict, a character finds him or herself battling between two competing desires or selves, typically one good and one evil.

Person vs. Fate/God(s)
In such stories conflict occurs when a character is trapped by an inevitable destiny; freedom and free will often seem impossible in these stories.

Person vs. Nature
In this type of conflict, humankind comes up against nature, battling for survival against its inexorable and apathetic force.

Person vs. Society
An individual or a group fighting (sometimes successfully, sometimes not-so-successfully) against injustices within their society.

Person vs. the Unknown
The protagonist battles against an entity that isn't entirely known or comprehensible, whether it is extraterrestrial, metaphysical.

Person vs. Technology/Systems
In the face of increasing busicracy, guiding your fame, and technology that rates or coaches you, a person might struggle, right? So fighting to overcome unemotional and unsympathetic machinery...or socila structures or organizations (NFL), a team's PR mechanism (fame), physical ability technology...AI that controls your training, etc.

There is so much more meaningful and interesting stories to tell that have conflict where the conflict doesn't need to be shitty people around you; bad teammates, or dead best friend's ghosts.

Hey Alex my guess why Jackson wasn't in is because you're playing a preseason game and since starters typically don't play as much the game may not have put him in

What a season. What a season.

Is the coach Jerry from the Walking Dead?

I'm sure "The Yard" mode may be based on some real thing but seeing a 6v6 mode in a Madden game strikes me funny because just last night I watched the "High Score" series on Netflix and how for the original Madden on the Genesis, they wanted to see if it was ok to do 7v7 since it would be easier to program and manage 22 players on the field and John Madden replied "If it isn't 11 on 11 football, then it isn't real football."

@alex Griffin got subbed in because you're playing a preseason game.

I ignored this video at first because I thought it was Mass Alex.

(The reason I'm ignoring new Mass Alex videos is because I'm behind.)

"It's my heart, man"

Yous guys could’ve used EAAccess and did Caravella V Navarro bowl I’d give yous guys $3 of the $5 for the month

I certainly sympathize with the somewhat stale nature of the game three years into Frostbite. I didn't expect too much, given we're at the end of the generation and EA is still paying off their code debt from the mid-gen move to Frostbite. Also given that it will be cross-gen, and they can't shard the online universe into different code-bases like they did in 2013.

That all said, I cannot for the life of me understand why Ultimate Team, the most popular and universally played mode in the entire game (see the achievement percentages) gets barely a passing mention, but almost the whole of the quicklook is devoted to content that almost no one touches. Granted, it is in the box, and it should be "looked" at, but for ultimate team to not be present in a madden quick look almost feels like journalistic malpractice.

Ultimate Team is not Alex's cup of tea, and I respect that-but this seems like a gaping blindspot in an otherwise thorough quicklook. It also seems like an opportunity to bring in a guest or friend of the site (a la Danny with PES & FIFA) to go into greater depth in an area of the game that Alex is less interested in, but that could provide for a more complete and dare I say more varied look at the game (I feel like the Madden quicklook has been the same video for four years now).

Finally, and this is stepping way up to the 35,000 foot level-I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the blatantly dismissive tone video game journalism takes towards sports games. If this industry is going to put its money where its mouth is on taking concrete steps towards diversity and inclusion, it needs to get over this glaring indifference towards sports titles and appreciate that these games are massive vectors for black and brown kids into video games. For one, sports are (for the most part) incredibly representative-you'll never see a petition begging EA to include more black football players to play as in Madden. I recall the night I picked up my Xbox One, the Microsoft Store in the mall was holding a Madden tournament. I saw more black teenagers and college kids at one un-official Madden tournament than I think I've ever seen at a PAX. Some of these kids will never pick up a copy of Nier, but some might-and I think the journalism side of the industry would do well to recognize this reality.

As ever, an opportunity for growth.

Cheers.

If Vinny and Alex quicklook Bloodbowl 3, you can have your match there.

Is it me or are the graphics kind of poor?

@ryanaclarke: just cuz they didnt show a thing you like is not journalistic malpractice. a bit of a stretch there imo

@dragonmall: i suppose that’s one incredibly small minded way to interpret the totality of what I wrote, but go on!

@ryanaclarke: I second what you're getting at here. It is so blatantly obvious that Alex and Vinny aren't the target demo for these games. I don't think that validates that they are totally missing what makes these some of the most popular releases every year, but that is the case with a lot of games, like Minecraft for a long time for example. I guess I don't expect that from them though but it is notable.

Glad @alex noticed this story mode's screenwriter is Garth Marenghi.

Too bad you guys didn't use the PS4 Share Play to do the versus mode. But Sports QLs are always fun <3

@ryanaclarke: Maybe if the games were better they would talk about them more. You said yourself that it's stale. Why would they talk excitedly about a stale game just because it's popular and brings different people in? If the games actually made sweeping changes that made them more fun to play then they would be given more attention. The most recent Call of Duty is a great example of this. People have been saying "It's another Call of Duty" for a while now until the latest one which finally seemed to hit the right marks. So they talk about it constantly, because it's actually good.

@alex I second what @warihay mentioned. Judging from the game status bar at the bottom of the screen, it seems all these games are treated as preseason games.

@dan_citi Wouldn't Play Share relinquish control over the game to the other user and you'd still have only be able to control the game with 1 player? Maybe I'm misinterpreting this feature, but I didn't think it would let 2 people play simultaneously.

The training music sounds like it came from the stealth section in a forgotten early PS2 platformer

@ryanaclarke: It's a quick look. I can point to tons of games where GB should've and could've shown a certain feature. I doubt the GB crew are diehard Madden fans that are sinking tons of hours into Ultimate Team at this very second. They just didn't show a thing you wanted to be shown. I get it. But calling that journalism malpractice is reeeeaching.

@vinny In answer to your query, I'm way into a 'realistic' NFL Street mode, so seeing this in the game is pretty appealing. Haven't picked up a Madden in years as the gameplay feels stilted and outdated to me every time I pick it up, but I think in principle the backyard setting is cool. Looks like it could do with beefing up, but I'm interested to see whether it's iterated on in successive editions.

EDIT: Also there's a moment when Alex saying he's playing on the 'One X' and I go, 'isn't that the name of the new console?' and then I couldn't remember the name of the new XBox and had to look it up.

Hey, Vinny isn't 0 for anything! He won last year's Navarro-Caravella Bowl!

Tye Sheridan is an old choice for the rival quarterback. He doesn't fit the high school jock archetype. Unless he has been cleared by his doctor to play. Most states require student athletes to take a sports physical before participating in school-sanctioned activities.

It's been a mantra in football for a long time. Guys wanting to be tough by playing through injuries and managing their pain. In the last couple of years, players are retiring from the game younger because they know it's not worth it. Especially with head trauma.

@hhap said:

From https://www.playstation.com/en-us/explore/ps4/share-play/:

Settle your rivalries with Share Play by going head-to-head in local multiplayer games ...

There's no way you're talking about this QB's heart!

Can you make Gretsky's head bleed in this one

@pontoon_yacht said:

Jeff asked a developer this question, their answer was basically: That's gonna be someone else's problem

What the fuck did they do to John Harbaugh? lol

These are some 360 level textures.

Every single time I see that screen grab I think it's a new episode of Mass Alex.