Madden 10 Blog on Ratings Philosophy

The new EA Sports community blog has provided another interesting entry this time from Madden 10 Designer Donny Moore. In it he goes over some significant changes to how player ratings are going to be structured next year. You can read the entire blog posting here.

Every position and every rating has been re-scaled to expand the range of numbers we are dealing with. The Overall Rating for your average NFL player has dropped. Your Joe Average linebacker who was 80 OVR is now dropped down to 70. The players who were before right on the cusp of 90 in a rating category are now down around 85-88…Meaning, there are fewer superstar players out there.

This is pretty big news and a very welcome change from the stagnant way ratings shaped game performance before. We saw the beginning of this in the final roster update of the year. Something that has plagued Madden for years has been the lack of separation between great, good, average, and poor players. You could get by with low rated players in general, especially if they had high speed ratings. It now appears other categories will carry more importance which should produce results more true to life.

I’m not sure if this is a way to make the importance of “team” come across more rather than a collection of individuals though. That is really the next step, to come up with a way that the Cowboys aren’t the best team in Madden just because they have big name talent at skill positions.