Last night, inspired by Jon Bois and his endlessly entertaining Breaking Madden series, I sought out to perform an experiment within Madden 15 (I have developed commitment issues with slapping down full price for new iterations of NFL games based on the last 3 being fairly disappointing, so I lack Madden 16). Based on an embarrassing performance last week by the Kansas City Chiefs, where they became the only team in NFL history to kick seven field goals in a game and lose, I wanted to take the idea to a new level.
Kansas City committed very hard to the field goal in Week 4. Even in situations where they had a 40% chance or better to convert on 4th and short, they opted to boot the ball through the uprights. Doing so doomed them, as they could never get the lead back. As punishment, I have taken away their offensive playbook, and left them with just a single card, detailing the formation and instructions of how to kick a field goal. They’re going to try and take this newly developed playbook and win a World Championship.
Kansas City committed very hard to the field goal in Week 4. Even in situations where they had a 40% chance or better to convert on 4th and short, they opted to boot the ball through the uprights. Doing so doomed them, as they could never get the lead back. As punishment, I have taken away their offensive playbook, and left them with just a single card, detailing the formation and instructions of how to kick a field goal. They’re going to try and take this newly developed playbook and win a World Championship.
THE SET UP
1. Make Kansas City kicker Cairo Santos a God among kickers.
This involved me bumping Kicking Power, Kicking Accuracy, Strength, Awareness, Agility, Stamina, Consistency, and Confidence all to 99 and flipping the Clutch trigger.
2. Turn Kansas City’s offensive line into an impenetrable wall.
As you probably guessed, this meant every stat even remotely important to an offensive lineman tasked with not letting a ball get touched got bumped up to 99 here as well. Originally I was going to make mountain men and have them join the team, but I got kind of lazy, so we’re going with the same line in place at the end of the 2015 season, sans any injuries.
3. Change how football is played in Kansas City.
Kansas City can only kick field goals on offense. Nothing else. Defense will be completely played through SuperSim. So if the defense steps up and scores points, it’ll all be based on Madden’s mathematics. Offensively, the goal is an empty statline with exception of Cairo Santos.
4. Put the game conditions in favor of our experiment.
This means global Kicking Accuracy and Power goes up to 100. This shouldn’t affect any of our opponents, since SuperSim is a tricky thing that doesn’t really seem to consider sliders, weather, or consistent stats and just kind of does what it wants.
THE GAME
So there we go. We’re playing on Pro difficulty with full 15 minute quarters. I simulate all defensive plays and also all punt/kickoff returns. Once offense is up, I kick the ball. Wind and weather will do what they do.
My initial concern with this is if the experiment was even feasible. I mean, of course it isn’t in real life, but Madden normally allows some crazy things to happen once you mess with sliders and stats enough. As it turns out, I found out just how viable it was when I kicked a 97-yard field goal on my 3rd possession (took me a bit to get used to lining everything up).
At the end of the 1st quarter, the score was Tennessee Titans 34, Kansas City 27. So the downside to missing a field goal after a touchback is it gives the other team the ball on my 20. Not great stuff. Titans QB Zach Mettenberger’s stats looked positively insane not long into the game.
The 2nd quarter was a different beast. With the wind having now turned around and blowing at me, 97 yards was simply out of man-god Cairo Santos’ range. This meant on over 50% of the possessions of the 2nd quarter I’d miss the field goal and Tennessee would score in some fashion. I entered the 2nd half down 87 to 54.
The 3rd quarter was all about making up ground. I hit the dirt running and started evening things up quickly. Defense even managed to help out with a nice pick 6. At the end of the 3rd, the score was Tennessee 103, Kansas City 94.
But then, in the 4th, the wheels fell of the wagon, when with 5 minutes and some change left to go, Madden locked up following a successful Kansas City field goal. Which, this happens with games every now and then, so it’s something you have to deal with. I restarted the game, loaded the auto save, this time missed the field goal (the wind had inexplicably changed intensity and direction after the load, because surely weather isn’t an important condition to maintain when resuming a game), and the game locked up again. Two more attempts, two more lock ups. Madden had been broken on my first ever experiment.
So, based on the conditions behind the lockup, my best guess is I tripped some internal counter and the game didn’t want to process any more field goal attempts. So, I need to work around that. For one, I could actually do the kick/punt returns to try and get better field position, that way it’s not consistently a touchback. For another, I could reduce the game time down to 10 minutes to try and reduce the number of opportunity. Another options is… wait. What the fuck am I doing?
THE BREAKDOWN
Let’s recap, a video game released in 2014 for the Xbox One based around the most popular sport in the United States that has been around since the early 90’s through multiple iterations and is part of the most successful video game franchises of all time has broken because I kicked the dang ball too many times???
If Madden NFL was made by a small independent studio with a handful of employees, I could understand this. But it’s one of the biggest money-making franchises out there. It’s been getting annual releases for almost as long as I’ve been alive. When the game breaks in stress-tests the nature of replacing one team with tiny incapable people and putting them up against 7-foot tall 400 pound abominations of nature, I can understand why something inside might break. But that’s not what happened. What I did is akin to taking the Madden Dream Team (which in many iterations of the game existed as a combination of the greatest players of all time) and just kicking the ball over and over again. I didn’t change anyone’s physical stature, and I didn’t change anything on the opposing team. I only modified 12 players.
When you test a video game, it’s not uncommon to take a single feature of a game and test it over and over and over and over in every scenario to make sure it works. Surely, kicking endless field goals is a simple thing to test. And it’s not like I broke the scoreboard, the game crashed even when I missed the posts completely.
When Madden removed the fully canned animations and went with a true physics engine, one of the understandable risks of doing so was that bizarre bugs would occur. And sure enough they have. Players skidding across the ground, flying in the opposite direction they were hit, the ball doing whatever the hell it feels like, and those are accepted things when you cram physics into a game in less than a year. This is the third year of the engine, so by now it’s been tested both internally and by a massive player base, so you’d expect most of the issues to be ironed out, and you certainly wouldn’t expect the game to lock up because of a stat going too high.
I can’t really stress how unacceptable this is. I work with software for a living and have done my fair share of scripting and coding. To have a video game developed in 2013/2014 that consistently fails because of a number going too high simply isn’t acceptable. And what I get even less is how experiments like these occur with no crashes, but too many field goal attempts causes consistent failures. I know in real football not every stat is equal, but c'mon.
EA, fix your game. As the proud holders of a monopoly on this license, you kind of owe it to fans of the sport of football to produce a game that has had actual beta testing done to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. If I run into a 5’0” 160-pound quarter back at full speed with a 7’0” 400-pound linebacker and he spins around in a circle six times and doesn’t properly get up next play, fine, I did something you may have honestly never expected. But numbers should never break a sports game.
So there we go. We’re playing on Pro difficulty with full 15 minute quarters. I simulate all defensive plays and also all punt/kickoff returns. Once offense is up, I kick the ball. Wind and weather will do what they do.
My initial concern with this is if the experiment was even feasible. I mean, of course it isn’t in real life, but Madden normally allows some crazy things to happen once you mess with sliders and stats enough. As it turns out, I found out just how viable it was when I kicked a 97-yard field goal on my 3rd possession (took me a bit to get used to lining everything up).
At the end of the 1st quarter, the score was Tennessee Titans 34, Kansas City 27. So the downside to missing a field goal after a touchback is it gives the other team the ball on my 20. Not great stuff. Titans QB Zach Mettenberger’s stats looked positively insane not long into the game.
The 2nd quarter was a different beast. With the wind having now turned around and blowing at me, 97 yards was simply out of man-god Cairo Santos’ range. This meant on over 50% of the possessions of the 2nd quarter I’d miss the field goal and Tennessee would score in some fashion. I entered the 2nd half down 87 to 54.
The 3rd quarter was all about making up ground. I hit the dirt running and started evening things up quickly. Defense even managed to help out with a nice pick 6. At the end of the 3rd, the score was Tennessee 103, Kansas City 94.
But then, in the 4th, the wheels fell of the wagon, when with 5 minutes and some change left to go, Madden locked up following a successful Kansas City field goal. Which, this happens with games every now and then, so it’s something you have to deal with. I restarted the game, loaded the auto save, this time missed the field goal (the wind had inexplicably changed intensity and direction after the load, because surely weather isn’t an important condition to maintain when resuming a game), and the game locked up again. Two more attempts, two more lock ups. Madden had been broken on my first ever experiment.
So, based on the conditions behind the lockup, my best guess is I tripped some internal counter and the game didn’t want to process any more field goal attempts. So, I need to work around that. For one, I could actually do the kick/punt returns to try and get better field position, that way it’s not consistently a touchback. For another, I could reduce the game time down to 10 minutes to try and reduce the number of opportunity. Another options is… wait. What the fuck am I doing?
THE BREAKDOWN
Let’s recap, a video game released in 2014 for the Xbox One based around the most popular sport in the United States that has been around since the early 90’s through multiple iterations and is part of the most successful video game franchises of all time has broken because I kicked the dang ball too many times???
If Madden NFL was made by a small independent studio with a handful of employees, I could understand this. But it’s one of the biggest money-making franchises out there. It’s been getting annual releases for almost as long as I’ve been alive. When the game breaks in stress-tests the nature of replacing one team with tiny incapable people and putting them up against 7-foot tall 400 pound abominations of nature, I can understand why something inside might break. But that’s not what happened. What I did is akin to taking the Madden Dream Team (which in many iterations of the game existed as a combination of the greatest players of all time) and just kicking the ball over and over again. I didn’t change anyone’s physical stature, and I didn’t change anything on the opposing team. I only modified 12 players.
When you test a video game, it’s not uncommon to take a single feature of a game and test it over and over and over and over in every scenario to make sure it works. Surely, kicking endless field goals is a simple thing to test. And it’s not like I broke the scoreboard, the game crashed even when I missed the posts completely.
When Madden removed the fully canned animations and went with a true physics engine, one of the understandable risks of doing so was that bizarre bugs would occur. And sure enough they have. Players skidding across the ground, flying in the opposite direction they were hit, the ball doing whatever the hell it feels like, and those are accepted things when you cram physics into a game in less than a year. This is the third year of the engine, so by now it’s been tested both internally and by a massive player base, so you’d expect most of the issues to be ironed out, and you certainly wouldn’t expect the game to lock up because of a stat going too high.
I can’t really stress how unacceptable this is. I work with software for a living and have done my fair share of scripting and coding. To have a video game developed in 2013/2014 that consistently fails because of a number going too high simply isn’t acceptable. And what I get even less is how experiments like these occur with no crashes, but too many field goal attempts causes consistent failures. I know in real football not every stat is equal, but c'mon.
EA, fix your game. As the proud holders of a monopoly on this license, you kind of owe it to fans of the sport of football to produce a game that has had actual beta testing done to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen. If I run into a 5’0” 160-pound quarter back at full speed with a 7’0” 400-pound linebacker and he spins around in a circle six times and doesn’t properly get up next play, fine, I did something you may have honestly never expected. But numbers should never break a sports game.
