A Review of Madden 24

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The Madden video game franchise went through a quality decline in recent years. Madden football creator EA sports is in a “make or break” year in 2023. Many Madden fans are already calling on the NFL to once again give the legal rights (license) back to San Diego Studio (formerly 989 Sports). San Diego Studio made the once very popular video game NFL GameDay. At one point, GameDay actually rivaled the Madden franchise and had the potential to overtake the franchise as the leading football game on the market. How close were Madden fans to seeing that?

It doesn’t seem imminent that the NFL will ever give San Diego Studio a chance at the market again any time soon, if at all. However, EA Sports was plagued again by their malfunctioning servers. This upset many Madden fans and they took to Twitter to express their frustration after the original launch of the game back on August 14. This led to emergency server maintenance on August 16 which started at 1:00 A.M. Eastern time and lasted approximately nine or ten hours. It was a bad sign that EA scheduled emergency server maintenance not even 48 hours after the game launched.

Several customers complained most game modes were inaccessible. Even offline franchises, not connected to the servers, appeared to not work entirely. The season games wouldn’t start at all. It was a total nightmare launch that could’ve effectively ended the franchise for good or prompted the NFL to go through consideration of adding San Diego Studio back to the market.

After the server maintenance, things calmed down slowly within a 24-hour period after that. Although there were still some complaints about the servers, the number of complaints declined slowly 24 hours after the maintenance. On Madden’s most popular mode, Ultimate Team, a false server error gave Madden fans frustration. It was later found to be a technical issue in which players simply had to adjust their lineups. EA was unfortunately slow to respond to that complaint the Madden community of players had to help each figure it out.

Another complaint was that most players didn’t get their preorder rewards from the Deluxe Edition. EA eventually fixed the issue though it was a difficult and long process to do so.

Aside from the server issues and slow rolling out of preorder rewards, the game is of much higher quality than in previous years. One fix in this year’s game is better blocking from offensive linemen. This was a huge complaint in previous editions. Excessive roughing the passer calls was also prevalent in the two previous editions. EA sought to address this concern as there are far fewer roughing-the-passer calls. The graphics are way better than year as the game features a “next generation” feel to it. EA wants to give PS4 and Xbox One users a taste of what next-generation consoles are like. In an obvious attempt to boost PS5 and Xbox Series X and S sales, EA made the graphics smaller yet sharper. It’s very clever and might help boost sales of next-generation consoles. Running the ball also seems easier. There is very little to nothing to complain about with the gameplay this year.