Injury System in Madden 10

This week it is the new injury system in Madden 10 that receives the focus of the Inside EA Blog posting. Lead producer Ian Cummings provides an in-depth look at the new system including a couple screenshots and videos. To check out the full posting click here.

In summary:
1.    Injury status / severity is delayed instead of immediate for more suspense and realism
2.    All new animations with trainers and injury carts are shown
3.    You are automatically prompted to let injured players play hurt (when applicable) or sub in the backup
4.    Players playing hurt have their ratings negatively affected (based on the severity of the injury)
5.    Players playing hurt have a (logical) risk of re-injury
6.    Players show that they are hurt with in-game injury animations like limping
7.    Re-injuries happen realistically instead of randomly.

This is a pretty neat system and injects some strategy into an area of the game that had long been overlooked. I asked a question a while back on Twitter relating to online play and he did address it here in that re-injury risk is higher for online and play now. That won’t do much to prevent people from putting those players back in the game if they’ll perform better than the back-ups, but it should at least result in more opportunities where they do have to leave the game for good or their ratings drop significantly. Of course within a potential Online Franchise mode the new injury system could remain balanced and would play a big part in decision making.