EA has been giving us info all week by allowing those who got to play the game a chance to give their thoughts, but EA itself took center stage today by releasing a deep dive gameplay blog and gameplay trailer.
I’m not going to try and tackle every single thing mentioned in the gameplay blog, but I do want to give some of my general impressions after reading through everything this week and watching the trailer today. It’s mostly good vibes and feelings, but I’ll be mixing in the good and the bad here.
Wear And Tear
It will come down to balance as most gameplay mechanics do in sports games, but it’s long overdue that an EA football game — a sport defined by injuries more than any other — tries to figure out a way implement injuries and the give and take going on throughout a game and season.
If your quarterback has thrown the ball 40+ times in a game and has taken some shots, don’t expect him to be at 100% the following week in Dynasty or Road To Glory. Subtle gameplay components such as getting the ball out early, covering the ball, and just getting out of bounds will be as important as ever.
The big “new” thing noticed here is that “wear and tear” matters throughout the season. A heavy workload one week means you’re coming in the following week not at 100 percent. It’s probably going to be hard to notice how much covering the ball or running out of bounds is saving you — you take vitamin C and don’t get sick, but you can’t really measure how much the vitamin C is helping — but even putting things like that into your mind is a big deal.
A lot of the times there are small mechanics in sports games that just never get used because you don’t think they matter at all. Small tactical things like covering the ball go overlooked, but if something like this injury system can get you thinking about that sort of stuff, it’s a win in that way as well.
Disguising Coverages, Finally
It will be a theme throughout this article, but I want to be clear that this longer development period feels like it was finally a chance for a soft reset. I can chalk that up to new faces getting a look at things, an extended period of development, or just everyone believing college football has to feel different. I’m sure it’s not any one thing, but a lot of the gameplay blog was filled with these sorts of impactful but logical changes a lot of us on OS have been asking about for years.
It’s a focus on legacy issues that more hardcore people talk about rather than the casual fan. And, again, I don’t mean to say that as an elitist, it’s more just to say it’s a focus on smaller football things that don’t always get talked about during a TV broadcast.
Disguising a coverage is one of these things. It’s something you can sort of do at times in Madden with fake press coverages or showing blitz when you’re not going to blitz, and the now-removed base align. But here we’ll actually be able to disguise coverages in the ways you should be able to based on your safety looks and such.
Football problems require football solutions. With the removal of base alignment, we wanted to put our time and effort into improving alignment, along with giving players the ability to disguise your coverages. This is the addition to the chess match that our core fans have been asking for.
I’m not going to get into all the issues with base align through the years in terms of certain coverages being sort of broken when you would use it and so on because my hope here is disguising a coverage will be more granular now. This means we’ll have better control and fewer issues with certain coverages just busting all the time because you faked a coverage.
https://www.operationsports.com/ea-sports-college-football-25-gameplay-deep-dive/