10 Gaming Franchises That Suffer From Extreme Over-Complication
8. Madden Football
It seems Madden Football was playing catchup from the word go on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Considering its lacklustre debut and bevy of strange bugs, odd offensive line A.I. and the strange way in which cool features appear and then vanish (looking at you "Weapons" system and "Madden IQ"), it's tricky for casual players to wrap their hands about Madden Football's laces every year. American Football is complicated though, so Madden should have complexity. The ability to make pre-snap reads and adjustments is a cornerstone of the experience. But outside of the excellent hot-routes system, a lot of adjustments are difficult to parse without fore-knowledge of football tactics, and the game often does a poor job of explaining them - especially on defence. Even if you get the basics, double covering a receiver in Madden requires understanding terms like "Y receiver", "Flank", "Double X", and a ton of other terminology in the play-call menu, or contending with a complicated system of button presses pre-snap that feel a bit like entering a code into Mortal Kombat; hit this button to open up coverages, then another to adjust the depth, then flick the right stick down to adjust the line, and then the ball is snapped and who knows what's going to happen. Couple the gameplay obtusity with major gameplay modes like Ultimate Team and Franchise that do a poor job laying out what specifically you're supposed to do, and it's clear Madden is a complicated mess in many areas. The most recent Franchise mode featured a strange menu system that inundates you with more sub-menus than a sandwich shop. Managing your roster involved tabbing over (and waiting for the subsequent load), finding what you wanted to do, doing it, then clicking over to another menu to progress your player in that menu's submenu, and by the time you're done doing all the tweaks and simulating the pre-season, getting into an actual game feels almost like a chore. Worse, offline Madden Franchises don't save - requiring re-doing all your hard work and re-tweaks in an already-irksome mode if you forget to hit your save button before quitting. Beyond that, Madden doesn't 'feel' right because everything is so complicated and impersonal. It's bogged down by NFL rules that limit its ability to display personality, technological problems that make "Madden Football" and "American Football" very different things when it comes to strategy, and constantly changing features and game modes that drastically alter the way you approach the game year-to-year. Madden is a popular franchise and a good game, no doubt - but it's certainly not because of its approachability.
