Madden NFL 11: Catch Tuning

EA Sports has released its first development blog for the upcoming Madden NFL 11. Written by Madden creative director Ian Cummings, the blog focuses on a particular area of concern for NFL and Madden fans alike: catch tuning. Here's Cummings on the myriad problems the passing game creates for game developers:

"As developers, catching has always been one of the hardest and most frustrating areas of our game to tune because of the sheer amount of possibilities. When you start to try to account for all the different angles a pass could be coming in to a receiver along with the difference in his body position, it is always a difficult problem to solve."

Thanks to an internally developed "catch debugging" tool designed to show why and where catch animations can go wrong, Cummings said that the team has a better understanding of why certain things happen in the Madden passing game. This has resulted in a couple of areas of focus for catching in Madden 11:

• Running vs. jumping catches -- Essentially, receivers on speedy routes like streaks and deep posts will try to catch the ball in stride, as opposed to slowing down and jumping up to grab the ball. As Cummings puts it, however, these in-stride animations will only trigger if the receiver has space and no defender in a position to make a play. "We want the Larry Fitzgerald/Calvin Johnson type receivers to really go up and fight for the ball and come down with spectacular catches if there is a crowd of defenders around them," Cummings writes.
• Improved aggressive short routes -- We've all been a victim of the curl routes in previous Maddens. You're looking to make a quick first down with 4-5 yards to eat up, so you call a curl route. Your receiver runs to the first down marker and you throw the ball, only to watch helplessly as the receiver runs toward the ball, makes the catch, and is promptly tackled short of the first down. For Madden 11, players on these types of short routes will be more apt to stand still, wait for the ball to come to him, and backpedal into defenders for additional yardage.
• Improved sideline and end zone awareness for receivers -- As Cummings puts it, "For Madden NFL 11, with the help of the catch debugging tool, we have corrected all of our sideline/back of the end zone catches. You no longer have to be afraid of trying to squeeze that deep out or goal-line fade inbounds, as now the receivers have much more advanced AI to get both feet in."

All these sound like nice improvements, particularly number two, if only because it seems like it will open up the playbook a bit more. In the past, I've avoided curl routes specifically because they rarely seemed to work the way they were intended. Here's hoping these fixes will make curls a viable option and I can call something other than crossing routes on third down.

Look for more on Madden NFL 11 in the coming weeks.