The first of three significant Franchise updates for Madden NFL 21

The campaign to #FixMaddenFranchise made a tremendous impact but effects would not be realized immediately. It was always going to take time to upgrade Franchise Mode in Madden NFL 21, and those gains would be somewhat limited, with the more transformational improvements and additions hopefully coming in Madden 22.

The first of three planned updates largely centered on improving Franchise in Madden NFL 21 released today. It includes regression in Dev Traits, career stats for players, and customization for X-Factors. The next patch to do more with Franchise is scheduled to arrive in mid-January and will center on adding new controls for league commissioners.

Dev Trait Regression Tuning

Star, Superstar, and Superstar X-Factors will now have desired counts that are treated as the “correct” amount of each Dev Trait in your Franchise (a new League Setting has been added for each Dev Trait to allow Commissioners to decide the right amount for your league experience, and default values match the roster count of Dev Traits that shipped in Madden NFL 21’s Preseason Roster) in the offseason, new logic will run to decide which players are eligible to regress. If there are more players at a specific Dev Trait than the setting says is desired, eligible players will be regressed in priority order until the target is met (in some cases, there may be slightly more than target after regression if no players were found eligible). If you prefer to play in a league where Dev Traits can’t regress, you can also turn OFF Dev Trait Regression in League Settings.

We also tuned the criteria to receive a Breakout Dev Scenario for all positions to prevent an overabundance of high Dev Traits after multiple years (and make sure we’re increasing the Dev on players who truly deserve it).

There will also be three new QB Breakout Dev Scenarios that can occur throughout your season and a league setting to turn all Breakout Dev Trait Scenarios ON/OFF. When Breakout Scenarios are OFF, users will only progress their dev trait by end of season stat rankings and awards.

Dev Note: This change, like many of the changes being delivered via post launch updates this year, is to maintain authenticity and provide more agency to commissioners to define the experience for their players.

Playoff Bracket

Starting Week 13 of the regular season, there will be a Things To Do item that takes you to the current playoff picture if the season ended that week including the seeding for each team that would be in the playoffs. Once Wild Card week begins, the playoff bracket will also have the scores of all games that have been played, and the box score available by clicking on the matchup. There will also be a way to access this bracket through the “schedule” button, with a new tile labeled “Playoff Picture.”

Player Card Career Stats

One of the top community requests for several years now, we added the week matchup and result of the game to each player’s season stats via their player card. We also added what team a player finished their season with on each year of their career stats via their player card.

X-Factor Customization

Another highly requested community feature, we brought over our functionality from player mode that allows the player to alter the Superstar and Superstar X-Factor abilities on their players inside of Core Franchise as both a coach and an owner. Commissioners will be able to edit the abilities on players that are controlled by other players and the CPU as well. Abilities will continue to follow slot and OVR requirements per archetype, so a player must reach the OVR threshold for an ability in the specified archetype before they are able to apply it. All of this functionality occurs directly on the player card by clicking any of the abilities.

Retirement Improvements

In Re-Sign Players week, there will now be a Things To Do item that takes you directly to the Transactions screen sorted to Retired players to provide a quicker look into who is riding off into the sunset.