A New Game is launched Madden 26’s Franchise Update Is Its Biggest In 10+ Years–I’ll Believe It When I See It is launched.
Madden 26’s Franchise Update Is Its Biggest In 10+ Years–I’ll Believe It When I See Itnew features
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This year’s update to Franchise mode is a case of “Fool me once….”
Madden 26’s Franchise Update Is Its Biggest In 10+ Years–I’ll Believe It When I See It new features
The big headline you’re going to hear EA talk about in the lead-up to Madden NFL 26 is how this year’s game boasts “the biggest franchise update in over a decade.” You’ll likely hear some other outlets and content creators repeating this phrase, accepting it as true. You won’t read that here, though. Madden’s Franchise mode has been in a rough place for years now, and last year’s game taught me not to trust what I hear, only what I see for myself.During a hands-off presentation of Madden’s next Franchise update at the EA Orlando campus, the team detailed all the things it’s adding to my favorite mode. Franchise is something I pour hundreds of hours into year after year, but my interest in the mode is sustained thanks to the fantastic and friendly league I’m in. If I needed the mode itself to keep me invested as a solo player, I’d play it far less, if at all. Madden has been improving on the field year after year lately, but Franchise remains a broken, frustrating experience, and I’m not willing to take EA at its word that this year’s update will be so beneficial.Last year, one of the marquee new features coming to Madden 25 was the plethora of new storyline scenarios that could unfold in Franchise mode. Any given week, you might have a team meeting in which you need to gameplan for your opponent, a press conference with a feisty reporter pool, or a sideline chit-chat with a frustrated player. The idea was to infuse the game with true-to-life drama. It’s a fun idea on paper, but it was implemented incredibly, sometimes hilariously poorly.So many of these storylines were badly designed or even outright broken. Just this month, I saw one that promised me a reward of experience points for my rookie edge rusher if he finished the year with eight sacks. He tallied nine and a half and remarkably failed the challenge. Why? Apparently because he didn’t record exactly eight–even though nine and a half is objectively better. This same logic has been witnessed in various challenges by Madden players all over the community, including many of my leaguemates. It seems these challenges are coded incorrectly, only awarding the XP when the challenge is completed precisely as written. Going above and beyond is punished. The error isn’t just annoying, it’s actually stunning, because it seems easy enough to fix, and yet it’s been this way all year.Madden 26 promises an especially ambitious Franchise update, and that’s what I’m afraid of.In another common occurrence, the Franchise mode menus will provide plainly wrong information. One popular storyline tells players that they can bench their rookie quarterback for the year and earn 40,000 XP for their troubles come the offseason. It makes sense in theory, as sometimes (though less often nowadays) rookie QBs will sit on the bench for a season before they’re thrust into the starting role. The XP reward is good enough for roughly 7-10 skill points, a tremendous haul in Madden. But the reward often doesn’t match what the screen promises. Reliably, players receive roughly half of the XP total they were said to have earned. It’s as though the numbers were re-tuned, but the menus never got updated to reflect those changes.Even when they aren’t exactly broken, they’re lacking anything resembling humanity. In team meetings, players all move their heads in unison like creepy film-room robots. In press conferences, reporters often ask inane, unrealistic questions, like questioning me on my defense’s average passing yards per game, which leads to my players getting mad at me if I fail these absurd pop quizzes. As a football fan first and foremost, it annually hurts to see Madden drop the ball on presentation, then switch to NBA 2K a few weeks later and marvel at all the impressive things that series does in the same area and within the same calendar year.In a sideline moment that had me bursting with laughter, one of my players asked me if he should change his primary motivation–a gameified metric that determines his interest in re-signing with my team or testing free agency. I asked him what his motivation was currently. “I don’t want to pay income tax,” he told me, standing as wooden as first-act Pinocchio.That surprising answer already had me doing a spit take, but I told him, yes, change your motivation to caring most about being a team scheme fit. As the coach of the New York Giants, I couldn’t change his income tax situation, but I could provide him with the right team scheme to make him happier. “I don’t trust you enough for that,” he replied. Okay, then why are we standing here, my dude? Why did you even bring it up?The entire encounter felt like it was written by aliens approximating human conversation. Devoid of voice acting, with masses of text consuming much of the screen space, and music that sounds like it comes from a royalty-free library meant for YouTube how-to videos, the moment was a mess on many levels and feels far below what video games are capable of.These storylines are a huge part of the Madden 25 Franchise experience. Your career arc can change drastically based on how you perform on these collectively, as failing them reliably turns your team against you and could eventually lead to your firing. Because so many of these storylines are straight-up broken or, at best, perplexing and strange, many players in my league have elected to ignore them entirely, deeming them not worth the risk, and they’re not the only ones. I’ve merely listed a small handful of the many examples that are outright broken or so ridiculous that they become an addition by subtraction; by skipping them, the game is better for it.Sitting through the Madden 26 Franchise presentation, I couldn’t get the imagery of last year’s version of the same press event out of my head. Developers spoke of these storylines as though they were so exciting, so rewarding. The delta between that pre-launch promise and the janky reality players are still dealing with today is vast and painfully obvious. I’ve considered my phrasing carefully and say this with full confidence from my position as a lifelong Madden player: These woefully unfinished, unhelpful, uninteresting storylines represent one of Madden’s worst features ever.So, yeah, Madden 26’s Franchise update is said to be a big one, but I’ve heard that before. This year’s game promises deeper scouting reports on opponents, but in recent Madden games, those reports would often give confusing advice, like to beware of a team’s backup QB. This year’s game is said to go deeper on playbooks, but past Maddens haven’t allowed me to make pregame formation substitutions if I’m using a custom playbook. There’s a new generative AI-driven Coach Suggestions feature for recommending plays that’s meant to build on the Ask Madden feature of old. However, both the generative AI aspect and the fact that Coach Suggestions have been broken for years–reliably recommending only a small percentage of the full playbook–leave me skeptical about the prospects of this working well.By Madden’s in-season challenge logic, TJ Watt’s record-setting 22.5-sack season would actually be worse than if he recorded only eight.The Madden 26 team talked a lot about new player traits meant to capture real-life signature playing styles, like Caleb Williams’ hop-throw, or Josh Allen’s sideline bullet pass. But these just remind me of the sidearm Patrick Mahomes throw of a few seasons ago, which made for a nice headline for about one day before players started to see the animation appear too often in games; or even of last year’s backward-hurdle by Saquon Barkley, which was quickly added to the game and recently immortalized on the cover of Madden 26, but ultimately doesn’t amount to anything in a gameplay sense. These should be rare, perhaps once-in-a-career occurrences, not frequently spotted Easter eggs.The problems I see with Madden’s Franchise direction come in two distinct flavors: There are good ideas executed poorly, and there are simply bad ideas. While Madden does have some bad ideas–the Team Pass debacle is a recent example, as well as the worsened draft scouting process of a few years ago–many of Madden’s Franchise ideas as of late are good ideas executed poorly. I do want more league drama, but not built around narratives that don’t track in the real world. I do want coaching to matter more, but I don’t expect that generative AI is going to provide this immersion–from what I’ve seen so far, it’s been generic and error-prone. I do want players to play like their real-life counterparts, but that’s not the same thing as the development team animating a particular highlight from the year before, then dropping it into Madden’s complicated and persistent math problem of on-field outcomes without taking that new variable into account.I want to love Madden Franchise mode. If you spend hundreds of hours doing something, hopefully you enjoy doing it. In a sense, I do love it, but that’s because of the community we’ve built around it in my 32-player league. I love Madden Franchise in spite of Madden Franchise. In the past, I’ve joked that a Madden league is a support group for players who habitually play Madden. I want this to be the year Franchise mode fulfills its promises and delivers on what developers say it will do, but hearing the studio talk about the especially ambitious scope of Madden 26’s Franchise update rings like an alarm bell to my ears.