Madden press event a Sony exclusive
- Posted June 12th, 2008 at 22:54 EDT by
- 5,247 views
- 22 Comments
EA Sports has spent the last 18 months being scrutinized and criticized for its lack of development support for the PlayStation 3. The biggest bomb dropped for EA Sports fans was the disappointing news that Madden '08 and NCAA '08 were both going to run at a dismal 30 frames per second while their 360 counterparts ran at 60 frames per second. Combine this with the fact that a lot of PS3 users felt EA's servers were unreliable on the PlayStation platform and you come up with a recipe of disaster and a backlash against a company that is known for its Sony support.
Fast-forward a year from that debacle and you see a company that is trying to right a lot of the wrongs they made. Madden and NCAA are both running at a crisp 60 FPS without any technical divergences to the 360 versions. To top this Sony turnaround with the icing on the cake, EA Sports is holding a Sony exclusive press event for the upcoming 20th Anniversary edition of Madden.
At the event, press will get to see the final build of Madden Football 2009 for both the PlayStation 3 format and PlayStation Portable. This change of wind came with the hiring of Peter Moore, a former Microsoft executive who has said on many occasions that he is a strong supporter of the Sony brand console.
As Madden's release draws closer and the lineups for the midnight events begin to form, we'll keep you up to date with everything regarding this largely anticipated title.
Comments
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gamewaffle
- 11:03pm BST - June 12th, 2008
- 1
First, and whre is firmware 2.40!?!? thats all i have to say, i can care less about madden
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AltimusGTR |
AltimusGTR- 11:26pm BST - June 12th, 2008
- 3
This is good but I'll reserve final judgement till I get to play the game myself. That and also we'll see how NCAA 09 goes.
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edward_moffet |
edd- 12:03am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 6
wow never saw that coming especially from peter moore who talked alot of trash regarding the ps3 and sony
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Mattchewie |
Mattchewie- 12:13am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 7
I hate to be off topic but I agree with gamewaffle. In game text and voice, and direct channels will make it more than a worthy competitor for the xboxlive. Back burner things like BD live etc and get these HIGHLY requested features out post haste sony.....jeeezz!
On TOPIC - this is good news. I really think sony needs to work with these 3rd party devs and play some hardball with MS. The PS3 is better hardware just needs the software both in and out!
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stovich |
TasteLikeBurning- 12:55am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 8
"...a company that is known for its Sony support"?
Well, not very much so lately. I agree that this is all just a stunt to bring some some of the Sony-faithful back into the EA fold. And as much as it pains me, I'm even going to forego Mercenaries 2, which sucks because Pandemic is a great studio. I'm finished with EA because they've released nothing but garbage on the PS3 since launch. I gave them props earlier for attempting to get the orange box to us, but that was a last generation game and it still ran terribly compared to the 360 version. Pathetic.
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Alpha2
- 1:27am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 9
Gamewaffle and Mattchewie. WTF? This story has NOTHING to do with XMB or even first part Sony activities, Why try to derail this with b|tchmoan nonsense that isnt even remotely part of the topic at hand, it's stupid and mildly retRrded of you. One bit of remotely good news and you cant help but spout pointless complaints especially when you already know the stuff is comming soon.
You want to complain about something why dont you complain about how Peter Moore still eat babies fresh from the wombs of screaming mothers?
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Rediaen
- 8:52am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 13
EA can do nothing to regain me as a customer / fan. Bottom line is that EA sucks. Their servers are cr@p, their non-sports games are sub-par, and their sports titles are nearly indentical from year to year with an updated roster and some slightly tweaked, unimportant feature update, not to mention they cost full price. Screw EA.
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madeofsteel |
madeofst33l- 9:44am BST - June 13th, 2008
- 15
15th.... So what they are holding a conference for Sony?? How does that make the consumer any more happy or forgivefull after last year?? EA should do something for the PS3 owners who flat out got a real crappy Madden and NCAA port last year.
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thegame97338 |
G_PIG79- 7:37pm BST - June 13th, 2008
- 18
I will check this one out, they should give us a discount for buying last years version, which I traded off 3 days later.
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ThaoNguyen
- 7:43pm BST - June 13th, 2008
- 19
I just looked through every (working) screenshot for Madden NFL 09 and I have to say, graphically, they
are appaulingly substandard (that's bad). I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that they've
made a lot of progress since those screenshots were taken, but if the final product ends up looking like
that, then it tells me that EA Sports has no idea how to do graphics for this generation.
Here are my observations about the current screenshots available for Maddel NFL 09:
1. Horrible grass. The grass in these screenshots has far too low resolution/level of detail and thetextures themselves are far too low quality, possibly a consequence of over-compression. Ordinarily,
that's not a huge deal, but considering this is a football game, it's kind of important. Some of those
screenshots wouldn't look nearly as bad if the grass didn't look so pathetic. This effect would be worst
during replays.
2. Speaking of over-compression, at least in some screenshots, the texture used for the skybox/skysphere
is horribly over-compressed, like they were working with a jpg and kept editing and resaving it as a jpg
with high compression. Fortunately, you don't usually tend to play football games from a bottom-up
perspective, so it probably wouldn't really detract from the overall visual quality much except for
replays. However, it doesn't provide much confidence that the game will deliver very accurate or dynamic
day-lighting/cloud cover, shadowing, etc. The other textures could stand to be quite a bit better as
well.
3. Speaking of lighting and shadows <slidewhistle down>, it just looks pathetic. In some screenshots
there doesn't appear to be any shadowing at all. Overall, the lighting leaves a lot to be desired. On the
plus side (relatively, anyways--normally this would just be expected) they appear to be doing lighting
calculations per-pixel and helmets appear to have environment-mapped reflections, though I have a feeling
those maps are static so i wouldn't count on seeing any players reflected in your helmet during replays,
but I can't tell from these still shots. I saw no sign of ambient occlusion, but that's not uncommon.
Though static ambient occlusion maps have been around for quite some time, realtime dynamic ambient
occlusion approximation is only lately becoming widely used as algorithms and computing power have
improved, gaining a lot of momentum after Crysis showed what ambient occlusion can do for quality
realism. I didn't notice any form of bump/normal mapping being used but I really wasn't paying attention
to that so I certainly could have just missed it. I can say that if it were there, it certainly didn't
catch my eye. The fog is mediocre, but that's not uncommon. As for High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting,
well, I'll say this. I sure can't tell. If they're using it, then they're not using it right. Overall,
the lighting system they used in the current screenshots is lackluster at best. In the screenshots that
do appear to be making use of some level of shadowing, it is quite apparent that only some objects are
capable of casting shadows. For instance, the people on the sideline have no shadows and look as if they
were just pasted into the picture like sprites.
4. Speaking of the people on the sidelines, apparently nobody, not even the cameramen, is the slightest
bit interested in what is going on on the field. It's quite easy to see that everyone just looks across
at the other side of the field no matter what is going on. Some of the screenshots actually look pretty
funny, seeing cameramen lined up along the sidelines deeply involoved in filming the empty space in front
of them while all the action is taking place half-way down the field. Now honestly, sideline/spectator AI
is probably the last thing you need to worry about, particularly when you have much bigger graphical
issues to address. The only reason I bring it up is to make it clear that this is not looking like it
will be one of those "it's all in the details" kind of games. Personally, I wish they would just use
sprites on the sideline if it allowed them to focus on improving some of the other graphical aspects of
the game. Hey, at least then you'd never have to worry about the cameramen not looking at you.
I could go on, but if you've managed to read this far, you probably already get the point. Overall, the
graphics need a whole lot of work. I mean, come on, it's a football game, where is all your development
time going? Be honest, you probably just recycled the same gameplay engine you always use, made a few
tweaks to it and added maybe added a new feature. I don't know, it's just a theory. It's not like you had
a bunch of levels to design, dialogue and cinematics to record. I wouldn't be surprised if you're using
recycled mo-cap and player textures, too, at least from the old digital images. I realize that most of
your development budget on these games is probably consumed by licensing and marketing, but give me a
break. Now, until the game is actually released, I firmly believe that they probably are working on
improving the graphics since the current screenshots, but boy, do they have a long way to go to be
passable as this-generation. Quite frankly, If it weren't for the higher resolution, I would have guessed
these were from a PS2 game, and that's saying a lot.[/rant]
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Denali2 |
NEJI64- 5:05pm BST - June 14th, 2008
- 22
EA lost my money. they need to fix there online servers because i cant stay connected to EA nation for nuttin. i use my wi-'fi to get rid of all the wires and i tried from the wall to my PS3 same thing. but anyway i sign on to EA nation and in 5 mins i get knocked offline. its not my connect cause i can connect to evey other game server with no problem. and i wanna kick a few a## in madden and live
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