Madden NFL 21 will receive major tweaks to its franchise mode following criticism from the game’s community. The football game will get three waves of post-launch updates with the first scheduled for mid-November.
EA Sports plans to bring four major changes to the mode based on community feedback. Top among the fan-requested features, commissioners will get the ability to assign X-Factors to any player and edit their superstar abilities. The team will roll out fixes to assure that Superstars and X-Factor players are more balanced throughout a multi-year franchise.
Player cards will receive a boost, displaying more robust statistics. EA Sports says the feature has been requested by fans “for several years now.” A visual playoff bracket is also in the works, which better illustrates the game’s new wildcard format.
EA Sports says that fans will not need to restart a Franchise to access upcoming changes.
The announcement comes hot off of mounting criticism over this year’s cursed Madden installment. Critically, the game has received some of the lowest scores in the franchise’s modern history, according to Metacritic.
To add insult to injury, Madden NFL 21 was recently the target of a review bomb. The game currently has a 0.3 user score on Metacritic — one of the worst in the site’s history — with 3,607 reviews. Only 22 of the user scores are listed as positive.
Since the game’s launch, fans have been vocal about the franchise’s dip in quality. Users pointed to a host of bugs plaguing the current game and expressed disappointment with the lack of significant updates to modes like Franchise over last year’s edition. The mounting anger led to several Twitter hashtags like #NFLDropEA and #FixFranchise.
Even before the game was officially released, EA Sports went into damage control mode with blog posts and videos, outlining the studio’s plans to deliver on community feedback. The update announcements follow a recent blog post that promised to “reshape” the Franchise mode.
“Our commitment to you is to deliver meaningful change to the game throughout the year. In Madden NFL 21, we’ll expand our dedicated live service team to allow for more focused delivery of Franchise improvements based on your feedback, while continuing to evolve the broader game for our wide cross-section of Madden fans.”
