The NFL Network has a 30-minute special on the making of Madden. They ran it several times yesterday and will probably run it more for the next week.
At the very end of the special, they show some clips which hadn't been seen before. Looks cleaner and higher-res than the current gen game. Brief clips of Shaun Alexander of the Seattle Seahawks.
Doesn't have the glossed-out look of the commercial with the Giants and the Eagles.
I'm sure someone will post the clips or at least some screen shots soon.
What gets me is one of the producers saying they intend to use the power of the next-gen partly to accurately model each seat in every stadia and have 3D crowds. Kind of let down by that, as the stadia and crowd are rarely-seen background objects. Of course, there's only so much detail they can display at regular gameplay camera angles because they have to be zoomed out.
Could they be using a lot of the power for all these background objects (they will probably only have them in cut-scenes) at the sacrifice of better physics and AI? There's always been some skepticism about how much EA Sports pushes the technology, compared to other genres of games.
If EA Sports repeats what they did this generation, which is to develop the basic engine for the first release and then tweak every year but not rewrite until the next gen, then they may never exploit all 3 cores/6 threads of the X360 or the SPEs in the Cell.
One of the EA guys said they aspire to have the biggest game out there, not just the biggest sports game. They sure have a huge staff, with one guy dedicated to just capturing details of the stadia, a couple of people who just write scripts for the commentary, etc. But they don't seem to push the technology or at least push the technology in the right direction.
At the very end of the special, they show some clips which hadn't been seen before. Looks cleaner and higher-res than the current gen game. Brief clips of Shaun Alexander of the Seattle Seahawks.
Doesn't have the glossed-out look of the commercial with the Giants and the Eagles.
I'm sure someone will post the clips or at least some screen shots soon.
What gets me is one of the producers saying they intend to use the power of the next-gen partly to accurately model each seat in every stadia and have 3D crowds. Kind of let down by that, as the stadia and crowd are rarely-seen background objects. Of course, there's only so much detail they can display at regular gameplay camera angles because they have to be zoomed out.
Could they be using a lot of the power for all these background objects (they will probably only have them in cut-scenes) at the sacrifice of better physics and AI? There's always been some skepticism about how much EA Sports pushes the technology, compared to other genres of games.
If EA Sports repeats what they did this generation, which is to develop the basic engine for the first release and then tweak every year but not rewrite until the next gen, then they may never exploit all 3 cores/6 threads of the X360 or the SPEs in the Cell.
One of the EA guys said they aspire to have the biggest game out there, not just the biggest sports game. They sure have a huge staff, with one guy dedicated to just capturing details of the stadia, a couple of people who just write scripts for the commentary, etc. But they don't seem to push the technology or at least push the technology in the right direction.
