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VSN Discusses Madden 25 Connected Franchise with EA’s Josh Looman
Earlier this afternoon, I had the chance to sit down over lunch with EA’s Lead Designer for Connected Franchise, Josh Looman. We spoke a little about his background in the gaming industry and the history of Virtual Sports Network alumni that have either worked for or with EA over the years. The reason for our meeting though was to go over some of the news that has been made available on Connected Franchise for Madden 25. For those that are not aware yet, Connected Careers from Madden 13 is being relabeled as Connected Franchise for Madden 25 and will also include an owner’s mode.
Let’s get to the Q&A-
VSN: Can you tell us more about the expanded controls that we have heard about for league commissioners in Madden 25? Will they be able to have a co-commissioner?
Josh Looman: Not just yet, more information will be released in the coming weeks as the development cycle for Connected Franchise starts to wind down. Commissioners will not be able to appoint a co-commissioner or place owners on auto-pilot via the Connected Franchise site. We are still looking at the commish tool that we will add. It may or may not be restart stats.
VSN: Great, that was very helpful for watching owners that were trying to play the CPU multiple times when their opponent was on auto-pilot.
VSN: We have read that you are looking to increase the number of practices available during a week…will that be available in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: It was going to happen but after speaking with the programmers last night, it doesn’t look like we are going to be able to get multiple practices per week in the game this year.
VSN: What improvements are coming to the EA Connected Franchise website? It was a little sluggish this year and drove a lot of leagues to sites like MaddenDaddy to help stay on top of their teams. The EA NCAA site also seems to have a lot more built into it for online management.
Josh Looman: The site is going to be revamped this year and it will load much faster. There will be a new home page that is easier to navigate as well. Progressing players will be easier. We recognized that it was really sluggish last year and we wanted to make it easier to do things. I think we were expecting to see more people using features like SMS. Unfortunately, it was hard to find and we have addressed that for this year.
VSN: Will we get back the ability to save and upload replays to the EA site? This was a very popular feature for our leagues at VSN for Madden 12.
Josh Looman: That feature was coded specifically for the previous franchise platform and we will have to build it from scratch for Connected Franchise. It’s a possibility in the future but definitely not this year.
VSN: Any thoughts on having the ability to restart a game at a save point if it is disconnected? Maybe saved at the end of each quarter?
Josh Looman: It’s definitely something that we have talked about over the years. There is an interest there and in the future we should have an easier time to build that capability. It would be a great feature to add to the game.
VSN: Will XP goals be scaled to quarter length in Madden 25? It is hard to reach the goals if you are playing shorter length quarters.
Josh Looman: I have talked to people a lot about that one. I’ve spent a lot of time based on feedback from the community guys making sure that things like OLB and CB goals have more realistic goals. The issue that we have seen when we try to do this is that the CPU teams gain XP and progress too quickly. We are looking at ways that we can scale stats for next year but it will still be based on 15 minute quarters this year. I’m paying a lot of attention to things like how many tackles you can physically get as a LB in the game. It’s impossible to get 15 tackles per game controlling the LB.
VSN: Are there any changes planned to hot/cold streaks? It seemed in Madden 13 that one bad game could put you on a cold streak for weeks but one good game couldn’t change it.
Josh Looman: I can definitely tune that. I haven’t done a lot with it yet for this season but we could make some adjustments. The system is pretty simple…if you don’t meet any goals for the week you remain on the cold streak. If you make 2 of 3 the following week, you are on a hot streak and if you just make 1 you stay neutral. I’ll look at it and see what I can do with the logic there for this year.
VSN: Will you be able to edit your playbook in Connected Franchise?
Josh Looman: You can use custom playbooks in Connected Franchise. I didn’t work on that feature specifically but I believe you edit it outside of the mode, edit your custom playbook and then bring it back into the mode with you.
VSN: Can you edit player ratings for single player Connected Franchises in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: The issue with editing player ratings once the mode begins is that it causes a lot of bugs and issues with our goal systems and our player schemes and grades. We tried to get that in this year but it ended up causing a ton of bugs. We do let you allow you to edit position, gear and numbers but allowing owners to edit player ratings after the league is started just caused too many bugs with the current system.
VSN: Will Is Restricted Free Agency be making it back into the game?
Josh Looman: Not this year. To be honest it is not a high priority for me personally. Typically what I do when I am designing stuff is to look at trends around the league or things that are a big deal within the league and try to figure out how to incorporate that into the game. I watch Restricted Free Agency very closely this year and not a single player got signed or even received an offer. If it isn’t being used in the NFL we aren’t spending a lot of time on it for the game. It almost feels like it is a dying part of the league.
VSN: What improvements have been made to the CPU controlled teams managing their rosters? MVP’s being released in the offseason is always a head scratcher.
Josh Looman: Lots of improvements. In the case of the MVP example the team is probably looking at the player regressing if they are an older player and their cap impact. He’s 35 years old, 77 OVR so you are looking at that. If he’s earned enough XP to offset the regression rating then maybe he is still viable. If it is a younger player that has a high enough rating, then he is going to be re-signed. Outside of that, we have spent a lot of time re-tuning logic, free agency logic, older RB’s seeing teams give up on them. We want to see older players moved out of the way to see younger players be able to progress through the seasons.
VSN: Will we be able to edit positions this year? RT to LT, etc
Josh Looman: Yes. We did figure a way to get that in for this year. You will be able to edit positions only in the offseason portion of the season as we determined that no bugs were caused at that time since goals were completed for that season. If you want to change a DE to OLB or DT to DE, you can do it at any stage during the offseason. Once the season kicks off you won’t be able to make any additional edits to that player until the following offseason.
VSN: Improvements to pass trajectories? They were much better in 13 vs. 12 but still an issue with INTs going to DB’s that are 10 yards behind the receiver.
Josh Looman: I am pretty sure that answer is yes but I will have to defer to the guys back in Orlando that work on the gameplay features.
VSN: What about updates on players that are retiring? Not a lot of heads up in Madden 13.
Josh Looman: It’s definitely something that I can add. Mike (Young) and I are trying to come up with little things that we can add on our own that don’t require a lot of coding time. We could write stories speculating on that based on a players age, position and likelihood to retire for the Twitter feeds. One thing that you are going to see is a lot more guys retiring throughout the offseason rather than a large group at the beginning and then just a couple more during the remainder of the offseason. I did some tuning to retirement last week and saw it jump from 15 to 40 in my test seasons. I actually had Drew Brees retire last night, not a huge fan of that so I went in and tweaked it some. Peyton retired after the upcoming season. We tweaked a lot of our comeback logic stuff. Now when somebody like a Peyton Manning retires, they can come back into your league as a free agent the following year.
VSN: Can we have full explanations of what each attribute does and the significance to each position so XP can be allocated appropriately?
Josh Looman: One way that I can help solve that is when you go into look at what packages you can buy, I could provide a little more explanation about why that is important. Things like Speed are self-explanatory but other things like Ball Carrier Vision maybe not. I’ll work with the gameplay team to come up with a sentence that says why you should upgrade this (attribute).
VSN: Coach Contracts for when we just play as Coaches? Will Owners be different in the coach they want depending on their style? How will CPU Owners handle 32 Human Coaches when it comes to firing and hiring someone new?
Josh Looman: We have built new logic in to the coach hiring process. We’ve added scouts and trainers to the game. So if you are an owner, you can hire a head coach, scout or trainer. If you are a coach, your owner will wait until the end of the offseason and make a decision on your contract. Last year if your contract was up, basically that was it. This year the team will actually look at you and make you an offer.
Coach Firing will still be a feature that you can turn off and on but if you are an owner you can be forced to sell the team if you are running it into the red. We are also working on a feature that if you are forced to sell a team, you can’t just rejoin that league as the owner of that team. You will have to take over another team. We don’t want people running a team into the ground as the owner in an online league and then turning around and running them into the ground even more. Everything as a coach and player will be back again this year.
A lot of decisions that we make sadly are the result of people trying to exploit the game. It’s not all about adding cool new things since we have to spend a lot of time coding to block exploits.
One of our favorite new features this year is the ability to relocate a team in owner mode but the community guys really wanted us to have the ability to turn it on or off by league so we put that in as an option to be decided by the commissioners and league members.
VSN: Can draft classes be edited? Are they randomly generated?
Josh Looman: They won’t be randomly generated. All new players. You will be able to go in and edit their names, positions and numbers but you won’t be able to edit ratings.
VSN: So if we sim through 7 or 8 seasons in NCAA 14 and import those classes, we would be able to use those and they wouldn’t be contained in any draft guide?
Josh Looman: You sure can. Here is the thing that I am trying to fix with the draft guides. I am using our story systems from last year that allowed us to pick out specific guys and write storylines on them. I am going to pick 10-20 players per class and randomly change them on the back end without telling anybody. Sometimes they will be a sleeper and sometimes they will be a bust. I want to get to the point where I completely kill draft guides. Anybody that stands out in a draft class, I am going to make it so that half the time they are good and half the time they are bad. I want people to put in work to scout people and make smart decisions instead of going to some website and ruining everybody’s fun.
The nice thing about import draft class is that when you bring those guys into the game, you are never going to get the same ratings twice. You definitely won’t feel like you are getting the same data over and over.
VSN: What updates to in game presentation and audio were made this year?
Josh Looman: I will have to refer you to Mike (Young) for the answers to that question. That is his realm.
VSN: Will coaches be able to change style in Madden 25 without retiring? Some coaching styles got you more XP than others in Madden 13 and it caused owners to change coaches more than they should.
Josh Looman: It will be the same as last year; you won’t be able to change after you start. I’ve also been tuning that feature again from scratch. Mike (Young) and I have been looking at that so that coaches and owners have new back stories this year to help you build your team.
VSN: What are you most excited about in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: Owner mode is great! We are doing some fine tuning on it right now. Our goal going in when we first pitched it was this wasn’t the same owner mode features with some retuning. We wanted to reboot owner mode and we sat down and pitched it we talked about it being an NFL tycoon game. Most of the emphasis is on improving your team, your team’s value, getting to be the most valuable team in the league and making a profit because profit does matter as an owner in the league. We are going to make you spend the money that you earn through ticket sales and concessions on your team. If you pay Tom Brady or Peyton Manning a $40M signing bonus, it is due that day. You have to think about every decision that you are making.
Another thing is teams that change player positions. If a team changes from a 3-4 defense and they have a guy that was a pass rushing defensive end they will move him to OLB now. So they will be in the right positions going forward.
VSN: Thanks for taking time to speak with us today!
Josh Looman: No problem.
Earlier this afternoon, I had the chance to sit down over lunch with EA’s Lead Designer for Connected Franchise, Josh Looman. We spoke a little about his background in the gaming industry and the history of Virtual Sports Network alumni that have either worked for or with EA over the years. The reason for our meeting though was to go over some of the news that has been made available on Connected Franchise for Madden 25. For those that are not aware yet, Connected Careers from Madden 13 is being relabeled as Connected Franchise for Madden 25 and will also include an owner’s mode.
Let’s get to the Q&A-
VSN: Can you tell us more about the expanded controls that we have heard about for league commissioners in Madden 25? Will they be able to have a co-commissioner?
Josh Looman: Not just yet, more information will be released in the coming weeks as the development cycle for Connected Franchise starts to wind down. Commissioners will not be able to appoint a co-commissioner or place owners on auto-pilot via the Connected Franchise site. We are still looking at the commish tool that we will add. It may or may not be restart stats.
VSN: Great, that was very helpful for watching owners that were trying to play the CPU multiple times when their opponent was on auto-pilot.
VSN: We have read that you are looking to increase the number of practices available during a week…will that be available in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: It was going to happen but after speaking with the programmers last night, it doesn’t look like we are going to be able to get multiple practices per week in the game this year.
VSN: What improvements are coming to the EA Connected Franchise website? It was a little sluggish this year and drove a lot of leagues to sites like MaddenDaddy to help stay on top of their teams. The EA NCAA site also seems to have a lot more built into it for online management.
Josh Looman: The site is going to be revamped this year and it will load much faster. There will be a new home page that is easier to navigate as well. Progressing players will be easier. We recognized that it was really sluggish last year and we wanted to make it easier to do things. I think we were expecting to see more people using features like SMS. Unfortunately, it was hard to find and we have addressed that for this year.
VSN: Will we get back the ability to save and upload replays to the EA site? This was a very popular feature for our leagues at VSN for Madden 12.
Josh Looman: That feature was coded specifically for the previous franchise platform and we will have to build it from scratch for Connected Franchise. It’s a possibility in the future but definitely not this year.
VSN: Any thoughts on having the ability to restart a game at a save point if it is disconnected? Maybe saved at the end of each quarter?
Josh Looman: It’s definitely something that we have talked about over the years. There is an interest there and in the future we should have an easier time to build that capability. It would be a great feature to add to the game.
VSN: Will XP goals be scaled to quarter length in Madden 25? It is hard to reach the goals if you are playing shorter length quarters.
Josh Looman: I have talked to people a lot about that one. I’ve spent a lot of time based on feedback from the community guys making sure that things like OLB and CB goals have more realistic goals. The issue that we have seen when we try to do this is that the CPU teams gain XP and progress too quickly. We are looking at ways that we can scale stats for next year but it will still be based on 15 minute quarters this year. I’m paying a lot of attention to things like how many tackles you can physically get as a LB in the game. It’s impossible to get 15 tackles per game controlling the LB.
VSN: Are there any changes planned to hot/cold streaks? It seemed in Madden 13 that one bad game could put you on a cold streak for weeks but one good game couldn’t change it.
Josh Looman: I can definitely tune that. I haven’t done a lot with it yet for this season but we could make some adjustments. The system is pretty simple…if you don’t meet any goals for the week you remain on the cold streak. If you make 2 of 3 the following week, you are on a hot streak and if you just make 1 you stay neutral. I’ll look at it and see what I can do with the logic there for this year.
VSN: Will you be able to edit your playbook in Connected Franchise?
Josh Looman: You can use custom playbooks in Connected Franchise. I didn’t work on that feature specifically but I believe you edit it outside of the mode, edit your custom playbook and then bring it back into the mode with you.
VSN: Can you edit player ratings for single player Connected Franchises in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: The issue with editing player ratings once the mode begins is that it causes a lot of bugs and issues with our goal systems and our player schemes and grades. We tried to get that in this year but it ended up causing a ton of bugs. We do let you allow you to edit position, gear and numbers but allowing owners to edit player ratings after the league is started just caused too many bugs with the current system.
VSN: Will Is Restricted Free Agency be making it back into the game?
Josh Looman: Not this year. To be honest it is not a high priority for me personally. Typically what I do when I am designing stuff is to look at trends around the league or things that are a big deal within the league and try to figure out how to incorporate that into the game. I watch Restricted Free Agency very closely this year and not a single player got signed or even received an offer. If it isn’t being used in the NFL we aren’t spending a lot of time on it for the game. It almost feels like it is a dying part of the league.
VSN: What improvements have been made to the CPU controlled teams managing their rosters? MVP’s being released in the offseason is always a head scratcher.
Josh Looman: Lots of improvements. In the case of the MVP example the team is probably looking at the player regressing if they are an older player and their cap impact. He’s 35 years old, 77 OVR so you are looking at that. If he’s earned enough XP to offset the regression rating then maybe he is still viable. If it is a younger player that has a high enough rating, then he is going to be re-signed. Outside of that, we have spent a lot of time re-tuning logic, free agency logic, older RB’s seeing teams give up on them. We want to see older players moved out of the way to see younger players be able to progress through the seasons.
VSN: Will we be able to edit positions this year? RT to LT, etc
Josh Looman: Yes. We did figure a way to get that in for this year. You will be able to edit positions only in the offseason portion of the season as we determined that no bugs were caused at that time since goals were completed for that season. If you want to change a DE to OLB or DT to DE, you can do it at any stage during the offseason. Once the season kicks off you won’t be able to make any additional edits to that player until the following offseason.
VSN: Improvements to pass trajectories? They were much better in 13 vs. 12 but still an issue with INTs going to DB’s that are 10 yards behind the receiver.
Josh Looman: I am pretty sure that answer is yes but I will have to defer to the guys back in Orlando that work on the gameplay features.
VSN: What about updates on players that are retiring? Not a lot of heads up in Madden 13.
Josh Looman: It’s definitely something that I can add. Mike (Young) and I are trying to come up with little things that we can add on our own that don’t require a lot of coding time. We could write stories speculating on that based on a players age, position and likelihood to retire for the Twitter feeds. One thing that you are going to see is a lot more guys retiring throughout the offseason rather than a large group at the beginning and then just a couple more during the remainder of the offseason. I did some tuning to retirement last week and saw it jump from 15 to 40 in my test seasons. I actually had Drew Brees retire last night, not a huge fan of that so I went in and tweaked it some. Peyton retired after the upcoming season. We tweaked a lot of our comeback logic stuff. Now when somebody like a Peyton Manning retires, they can come back into your league as a free agent the following year.
VSN: Can we have full explanations of what each attribute does and the significance to each position so XP can be allocated appropriately?
Josh Looman: One way that I can help solve that is when you go into look at what packages you can buy, I could provide a little more explanation about why that is important. Things like Speed are self-explanatory but other things like Ball Carrier Vision maybe not. I’ll work with the gameplay team to come up with a sentence that says why you should upgrade this (attribute).
VSN: Coach Contracts for when we just play as Coaches? Will Owners be different in the coach they want depending on their style? How will CPU Owners handle 32 Human Coaches when it comes to firing and hiring someone new?
Josh Looman: We have built new logic in to the coach hiring process. We’ve added scouts and trainers to the game. So if you are an owner, you can hire a head coach, scout or trainer. If you are a coach, your owner will wait until the end of the offseason and make a decision on your contract. Last year if your contract was up, basically that was it. This year the team will actually look at you and make you an offer.
Coach Firing will still be a feature that you can turn off and on but if you are an owner you can be forced to sell the team if you are running it into the red. We are also working on a feature that if you are forced to sell a team, you can’t just rejoin that league as the owner of that team. You will have to take over another team. We don’t want people running a team into the ground as the owner in an online league and then turning around and running them into the ground even more. Everything as a coach and player will be back again this year.
A lot of decisions that we make sadly are the result of people trying to exploit the game. It’s not all about adding cool new things since we have to spend a lot of time coding to block exploits.
One of our favorite new features this year is the ability to relocate a team in owner mode but the community guys really wanted us to have the ability to turn it on or off by league so we put that in as an option to be decided by the commissioners and league members.
VSN: Can draft classes be edited? Are they randomly generated?
Josh Looman: They won’t be randomly generated. All new players. You will be able to go in and edit their names, positions and numbers but you won’t be able to edit ratings.
VSN: So if we sim through 7 or 8 seasons in NCAA 14 and import those classes, we would be able to use those and they wouldn’t be contained in any draft guide?
Josh Looman: You sure can. Here is the thing that I am trying to fix with the draft guides. I am using our story systems from last year that allowed us to pick out specific guys and write storylines on them. I am going to pick 10-20 players per class and randomly change them on the back end without telling anybody. Sometimes they will be a sleeper and sometimes they will be a bust. I want to get to the point where I completely kill draft guides. Anybody that stands out in a draft class, I am going to make it so that half the time they are good and half the time they are bad. I want people to put in work to scout people and make smart decisions instead of going to some website and ruining everybody’s fun.
The nice thing about import draft class is that when you bring those guys into the game, you are never going to get the same ratings twice. You definitely won’t feel like you are getting the same data over and over.
VSN: What updates to in game presentation and audio were made this year?
Josh Looman: I will have to refer you to Mike (Young) for the answers to that question. That is his realm.
VSN: Will coaches be able to change style in Madden 25 without retiring? Some coaching styles got you more XP than others in Madden 13 and it caused owners to change coaches more than they should.
Josh Looman: It will be the same as last year; you won’t be able to change after you start. I’ve also been tuning that feature again from scratch. Mike (Young) and I have been looking at that so that coaches and owners have new back stories this year to help you build your team.
VSN: What are you most excited about in Madden 25?
Josh Looman: Owner mode is great! We are doing some fine tuning on it right now. Our goal going in when we first pitched it was this wasn’t the same owner mode features with some retuning. We wanted to reboot owner mode and we sat down and pitched it we talked about it being an NFL tycoon game. Most of the emphasis is on improving your team, your team’s value, getting to be the most valuable team in the league and making a profit because profit does matter as an owner in the league. We are going to make you spend the money that you earn through ticket sales and concessions on your team. If you pay Tom Brady or Peyton Manning a $40M signing bonus, it is due that day. You have to think about every decision that you are making.
Another thing is teams that change player positions. If a team changes from a 3-4 defense and they have a guy that was a pass rushing defensive end they will move him to OLB now. So they will be in the right positions going forward.
VSN: Thanks for taking time to speak with us today!
Josh Looman: No problem.
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