Madden 19's New Player Ratings Detailed, Devs Pick the One They Expect to Matter Most This Year
Madden's player ratings are getting even more complicated.
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Madden's player ratings have been a tangled web ever since I started playing seriously back in 2010. Awareness... Impact Blocking... It's hard to know what it all does at any given moment. If you're as confused as I am, well good news—Madden 19 will have even more stats to track!
Madden 19 will introduce several new stats on the offensive side of the ball, says gameplay lead Clint Oldenburg. Some of will feed into the new archetypes being introduced in franchise mode, while others will be used to refine what already exists. They include the following:
- Receiver Route Running: Receivers have traditionally had a Route Running rating that determines how easily they get open against coverage. Madden 19 adds to that with short, medium, and deep route running. Oldenburg says that the team wanted to go really deep and granular with the route running, but ultimately settled on the three concepts for the sake of accessibility. In the future, the team may apply this concept to quarterbacks as well, potentially impacting how well they throw particular route concepts.
- Pass and Run Blocking: Madden 19 builds on the Pass Block/Run Block/Impact Blocking dynamic from previous games with Finesse and Power variants of each. This lines up with Power Moves and Finesse Moves on the defensive side of the line, and will presumably govern how the offensive line interacts with those those types of players.
- Break Sack for QB and Break Tackle for RB: These stats are self-explanatory. Oldenburg explains, "We identified a bunch of areas where we were using existing ratings to determine outcomes with these things, and it just made sense to use a specific rating that lended itself to that, like break tackle." The idea is to lend these stats some more transparency rather than trying to simple guess how the often arcane stats interact with one another.
Madden has long been dominated by deep and confusing stats. Every year videos like the one below are produced in an effort to crack the code and gain a competitive advantage in MUT and franchise mode. On the developer side, some of the code is so old that the team itself doesn't really know how the different stats interact.
"It's interesting because a lot of the ratings have been in the game for a number of years. Sometimes we're using a rating two or three times and we may not know it right away, so we have to go back and figure out where the ratings is being used. Sometimes we'll ignorantly nerf a rating unintentionally because we're designing something new," Oldenburg says.
The Madden team's solution is to have a developer in charge of auditing the stats and figuring out what interacts with what. Oldenburg says that the team has "definitely made some progress" on that front, and feels that it will be very valuable.
So what stat will be especially valuable in Madden 19? Oldenburg thinks for a moment, "I think Agility is gonna be more important because that's going to have a direct impact on how your player moves. Part of the Real Player Motion story is different run cycles for different players. They're gonna feel different on the sticks and look different on the screen then if you use a small, shifty running back, for example."
Madden 19 is overhauling its momentum-based systems this year, with animation being a key focal point, which is why physical stats are so important this year. New, more granular roles like slot receiver and flanker are also being introduced. This makes getting the player ratings right more important than ever.
Whatever happens, you can look forward to NFL players being cranky about their ratings. It's an annual rite of passage.
Lots of Madden 19 news is coming out now, and we've managed to get a lot of insight from Oldenburg on topics ranging from Run-Pass Option to the gameplay as a whole. We also have a guide to everything we know so far about Madden 19.