the New Madden Good / Bad?

by Joe Dodson


If you aren't literate in all things football, calling plays in a
Madden football game is a little like reading hieroglyphics. There are
arrows, X's, and O's, but if you aren't a coach yourself or a hardcore
football fan, they're all just questions marks.

And that's a real problem. While the Madden series annually leads the
pack with strong sales, it's also notorious for being somewhat
impenetrable to casual players. The folks at EA tried to address that
last year with the downloadable Madden
NFL Arcade, but it proved too pricey for its shallow gameplay and
earned only mediocre reviews.

Maybe
then you can join football Mensa.



Fortunately, a new feature in the upcoming Madden NFL 11
may finally have the answer. It's called Gameflow, and it hopes to make
this year's Madden the most accessible version of the venerable football
franchise yet.

Gameflow is basically a virtual offensive or defensive coordinator
that both calls plays and walks you through them. Not only will you get
on-field diagrams, you'll also receive verbal instructions from your
coordinator. This way, Madden NFL 11 will actually teach you to play the
game as you go, rather than forcing you to spend hours in the Tutorial.


As Madden Creative Director Ian Cummings recently told
Gamespot, Gameflow was the fruit of a telemetric study of online
Madden matches.

"Hundreds of millions of games of Madden were played this year alone,
and we can find out that there are a lot of key nuggets in there," he
said.

Two of those nuggets were that each game of Madden was taking too
long, and that players were only using a fraction of their playbooks.

"There's 350 plays that we've put in every team's playbook pretty
much, and they're only calling 15 of them and so, we gotta step back and
say 'Wow, that's a major problem,'" Cummings told Gamespot.

Gameflow is intended to address both of these issues. Since the
feature will call all your plays for you, you won't waste time staring
slack-jawed at an endless list of shotgun formations and special teams
options. Instead, the game will simply pick a good option for your
current situation. From there, Gameflow will actually introduce you to
the called play and explain how it works. Once you've run the play, you
can then rate it from one to five stars. Based on that rating, Gameflow
will either call the play more or less in the future.


It calls it a NEW FEATURE so I am praying this will be a feature you can turn on and off at our own will. If not you will never be able to pick your plays a AI will do it for you. It seems like the government is making decisions on what plays we can do now to.

Ok I watched this video on Gametrailers you are able to take the new feature off if you like but some people that suck like smack can still us it.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/game-flow-madden-nfl/64889

Panzer it'a feature for noobs that can't read a playbook you can turn it on or off anytime during the game, from what I hear you could use it stricly for 2 min offenses if youy really wanted to lol.With that said I doubt it's something they'll let you use online more of franchise thing probably. I really don't care about anything other than online franchise upgrades and pease, pretty please they need to add team play 5 on 5 or 4 on 4 please lol.

It actually sounds like you can fully customize that game flow to specific situations that the coach will tell you to run the plays you customize in. It really to me sounds like a glorified ask madden. Have to wait and see but yes it does right now sound like a noob feature. I am more concerned about the controls using the sticks for most things in the game.

I agree OC if its all on the stick it might be a faster reaction to move your thumb. But it might not be the move you wanted to do compared to buttons always being a sure thing, unless you press the wrong one lol

every year madden plays the same, just minor upgrades. never anything major. i think they still use the same engine from madden 07 LMAO epic fail.

3 on 3 team play is cool